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Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) almost certainly has the votes to succeed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), either in her current role or at least as the chamber's Democratic leader depending on how the 2022 midterms go, but that doesn't mean he sees eye to eye with every House Democrat.

While Jeffries considers himself a progressive politician, he told The Atlantic's Edward-Isaac Dovere that "there's a difference between progressive Democrats and hard-left democratic socialists." In Jeffries' opinion those differences are steeped in the fact that, as a Black man, he tends to "tackle issues first and foremost with an understanding that systemic racism has been in the soil of America for over 400 years," while the latter group of progressives "view the defining problem in America as one that is anchored in class."

That just isn't Jeffries' reality, he said, and he has no plans to ever "bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism" regardless of the pressure other lawmakers and activists put on him. Read more about Jeffries' potential future as the face of the Democratic Party at The Atlantic.