Johnathan Chait on the party’s ‘No Compromise with the Electorate’ wing
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Jonathan Chait. Taken as a forewarning. He was a supporter of a Trump presidency in 2016, after all. That's just about all anyone needs to know. Still, it's good to get various points of view.
But the subtitle starts out with a banger:
The party’s progressives seem to think the problem is not with their platform but with voters.
I believe the party's progressives think the problem is the old guard Democratic leadership.
His opinion piece manifests a them (progressives) vs. us(centrists) mindset between factions of the democratic party. Not a very useful approach. Demonizing the progressives, or vice versa, is a recipe for fracture.
After almost a decade of nearly unchallenged supremacy, the progressive movement’s hold on the party is no longer certain.
That's a joke, right?
Kamala Harris’s promise to the ACLU that she would support taxpayer-financed gender-transition surgeries for prisoners and detained migrants received little attention—it was just one more edgy, leftist policy commitment in a campaign that consisted of little else, and her floundering candidacy soon dropped out of sight.
Just plain gratuitous, inflammatory rhetoric that is not based on the facts. "Fact-checkers, including PolitiFact and ABC News, confirmed that while Harris did express support for such care in 2019, federal law and court rulings already require medically necessary care for inmates, and the number of these surgeries is very low."
Her defeat forced moderate Democrats to reckon with the ways progressive activists had not just driven the entire field leftward but also pressured Harris to adopt a position so toxic that it inspired the Trump campaign’s most effective ad.
I call BS. It should have forced moderate Democrats to wake up to Biden's lies, to its dead leadership, and its unwillingness or inability to fight against the rightwing propaganda machine.
What unifies these various outfits is that they all blame progressive interest groups for relentlessly pushing Democrats to adopt positions well to the left of what the general public wants.
More BS. Major progressive policies are supported by a majority of Americans. But it's not across the board. It's complex. I wager what motives the groups he's referring to (Searchlight Institute, etc.) is more likely, money.
First, they deny that polls showing any left-wing positions as unpopular convey meaningful information.
Polls don't show that.
There's a lot of misinformation in Chait's piece.
The old guard in the Democratic party are failing big time. They are failing to speak out against the lies perpetrated not only by MAGA, but by centrists in the Democratic party. Progressives are tired of being pushed to the sidelines and told to shut up. We need voices that will bring the factions together, not this mish-mash of us vs. them.
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Yes very few people knew that what Harris was espousing was federal policy at the time, they just knew they were against it and she was enthusiastically for it. Chait’s point about the political efficacy of that ad is quite true and was quite relevant to the result.