i hear this often on the forum. this stipulation that the party is moving left. i just don't see it.
what i see is pretty much what happened in the 1980s, just in the opposite. then, yes, the party was scribing a tighter ideological circle, while the republicans were growing the diameter of its "bit tent" circle.
yes, the democrats have ocasio-cortez. they also have conor lamb. in my own district, progressive brian caforio, the democratic candidate for the house in 2016, was out-primaried by a centrist democrat, who'll face republican pete knight. this is more the norm. so, what one person might call a "fight" for the democratic soul, another person might call the differences at play in a party that, to borrow from the book of matthew, tells its adherents to "go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find."
and the invitees include reagan republicans now getting shown the door of their party. a party described in an article i read this morning as, "hostile to science and fact, rooted in an angry spirit of racial and ethnic nationalism, enamored of foreign strongmen and hostile to american institutions, and so fundamentally estranged from the nation’s founding values that it poses an existential threat to american democracy."
so, no. the democratic party - of which i'm not a member, but to which i'm more closely aligned than i am to the republicans - is not lurching to the left. it's lurching in both directions, to make room for the never trumper republicans and the bernie leftists.
the more salient question is not left or right, but wider or narrower. it wasn't until bill clinton forced the democrats to absorb a centrist bloc that they won the presidency in 1992. my own district is emblematic of this. my own district moved the progressive to the side and chose a centrist as its democratic party champion. ocasio-cortez's district did the opposite. will all sides get along? we'll see. the democrats don't have party-above-all allegiance like today's republicans do. but it's a trump-acolyte-made-up fiction that the democratic party is moving in any one particular direction.
Dan Empfield
aka Slowman
what i see is pretty much what happened in the 1980s, just in the opposite. then, yes, the party was scribing a tighter ideological circle, while the republicans were growing the diameter of its "bit tent" circle.
yes, the democrats have ocasio-cortez. they also have conor lamb. in my own district, progressive brian caforio, the democratic candidate for the house in 2016, was out-primaried by a centrist democrat, who'll face republican pete knight. this is more the norm. so, what one person might call a "fight" for the democratic soul, another person might call the differences at play in a party that, to borrow from the book of matthew, tells its adherents to "go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find."
and the invitees include reagan republicans now getting shown the door of their party. a party described in an article i read this morning as, "hostile to science and fact, rooted in an angry spirit of racial and ethnic nationalism, enamored of foreign strongmen and hostile to american institutions, and so fundamentally estranged from the nation’s founding values that it poses an existential threat to american democracy."
so, no. the democratic party - of which i'm not a member, but to which i'm more closely aligned than i am to the republicans - is not lurching to the left. it's lurching in both directions, to make room for the never trumper republicans and the bernie leftists.
the more salient question is not left or right, but wider or narrower. it wasn't until bill clinton forced the democrats to absorb a centrist bloc that they won the presidency in 1992. my own district is emblematic of this. my own district moved the progressive to the side and chose a centrist as its democratic party champion. ocasio-cortez's district did the opposite. will all sides get along? we'll see. the democrats don't have party-above-all allegiance like today's republicans do. but it's a trump-acolyte-made-up fiction that the democratic party is moving in any one particular direction.
Dan Empfield
aka Slowman