Rather than acting like adults who have encountered a disagreement and making adjustments, a progressive columnists accuses his own side of lashing out like children, blaming them for their beliefs, claiming they are “irrational” and “unacceptable.”
It’s become something of a catechism in progressive circles: The Republican Party, particularly under President Donald Trump, has moved far, far to the right in recent years, driven by racism and grievance to create a Christian Nationalist state where minorities aren’t welcome. As early as 2012, long before the Trump Era, Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein, writing for the Brookings Institute, insisted, “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem.” As they saw it, “We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen [Republicans] this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.” By 2020, The Hill published an opinion piece, “Four decades and counting — the GOP’s shift to the right is bigger than the Democrats’ shift left” by Stuart Rothenberg. “ It was late June 1980 when I arrived in Washington after teaching political science for three years at Bucknell University. My job was to write for The Political Report, a little-circulated weekly newsletter that reported on House and Senate races. The nation’s politics were in the process of changing more than I realized. In November, Ronald Reagan would be elected president, Republicans would make significant gains in the House and win control of the Senate for the first time since 1954, and a new crop of conservative candidates were showing their political muscle — sometimes by challenging relatively moderate GOP incumbents — in both the House and Senate…But while both the country and the GOP were moving right, the Republican Party still had room for a substantial contingent of moderates.” Today, however, key Republican leaders “are political extremists who have shown little regard for compromise or the democratic process,” “Republicans have rejected a whole set of norms that have protected the democratic process,” and “Whatever the dangers of the progressive left (and there are some), the lunatic right has shown it is a far greater threat to democracy, national security and national cohesion.”
Perhaps needless to say, Republicans will generally disagree, pointing to policies and speeches from President Bill Clinton, future President Joe Biden, and others where they sound awfully, awfully conservative on major issues such as immigration, crime, and the size and scope of government. It was President Clinton, after all, who proclaimed the era of big government over, and in my opinion at least, it is an open question whether a man generally considered a successful two term President, one who has spoken at every Democrat National Convention since, could win a Democrat primary today or would instead be laughed off or even booed off the stage. Equally needless to say, Democrats and their progressive supporters have generally rejected this argument, preferring to focus on the foibles of their political opponents than challenges in their own party – perhaps until now. Earlier this week, Jonathan Chait, a longtime left-leaning journalist who has written for The American Prospect, The New Republic, New York Magazine, and most recently The Atlantic broke ranks with his fellow Democrats to claim that indeed the party has become too progressive to compete with Republicans. After describing a recent panel of activists attempting to analyze what went wrong in the election last year, he reported on how some wanted to double down on leftist policies despite the stunning loss including “failed political candidate Qasim Rashid [who] spoke with confidence about the way forward for the Democratic Party. The problem, he insisted, was not that Democrats had strayed too far from public opinion but that the party had grown too solicitous of it. ‘Saying the right thing timidly,’ he proclaimed, ‘is less effective than saying the wrong thing loudly.’ Rashid’s argument was anything but timid, and it certainly played well in the Washington, D.C., room where the progressive donor network Way to Win was holding a confab called Persuasion 2025. Yet Rashid meant for this event to be more than just a pep talk among allies. His call for a confident, undiluted progressive platform is ‘how you see people flip red seats to blue,’ he said.”
Mr. Chait continued to outline the purpose of the conference compared to the current state of political affairs. “The purpose of this conference was to reassert the left’s strategy for regaining control of the Democratic Party and, at least in theory, a national governing majority. Yet beneath the bold proclamations, one could detect an undercurrent of defensiveness. After almost a decade of nearly unchallenged supremacy, the progressive movement’s hold on the party is no longer certain. At the end of the Obama era, most Democrats (myself included) saw liberalism’s ascent as nearly inevitable. Accordingly, they saw little cost in getting ahead of where public opinion was obviously headed. When Senator Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton from the economic left in 2016, she replied by outflanking him to the left on social issues while breaking with the Obama administration’s moderate positions on trade (she opposed President Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership) and education (she backed away from his support for charter schools and other reform measures).” After providing some additional details about the 2020 primary, where he described Democrats as trying to keep up with Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, he asserted that future President Joe Biden won because he was the “only well-known candidate who had not abandoned the Obama legacy, occupied the ideological ground where most of the party’s voters remained” as opposed to his Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost four years later because she was a part of the left-ward rush, which “seems to have played a large role in Harris’s doomed presidential campaign.” As we have seen, this alone is a relatively novel explanation for the loss in progressive circles, where it has generally been attributed to the short time frame and poor messaging, but Mr. Chait didn’t stop there. He goes to note what he considered positions that were too far left, including embracing the more radical interpretations of the transgender movement. This Mr. Chait called, “a position so toxic that it inspired the Trump campaign’s most effective ad. This lone commercial, with its potent tagline—’Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you’—moved viewers by an estimated 2.7 points, a shift larger than Trump’s margin of victory in most swing states.”
Regardless, progressives at this conference at least, were unmoved, insisting that no one should “blame progressive organizations for the Democratic Party’s problems,” progressives should not be thrown “under the bus,” and that they needed an “alignment of party and movement forces” around progressive positions. To reach this conclusion, they simultaneously denied any polling or other evidence that far left positions weren’t popular with the electorate, declaring it “pollingism,” and blamed the electorate itself for not conforming to far left perspectives. “We know that humans are in fact irrational creatures,” explained Anat Shenker-Osario. “You cannot feed your opposition’s narrative,” she added while being even more strident on her website, “Conventional wisdom says to meet people where they are. But, on most issues, where they are is unacceptable.” “When people are psychologically insecure, they are incapable of being welcoming to people who are different from them,” activist Erica Payne echoed. “This is about money. Money, money, money, money, money, money, money.” This led Mr. Chait to describe their position as “No compromise with the electorate.” As he put it in closing, “Rapidly transforming the American public’s beliefs is a daunting task—all the more so if you dismiss their current values as unacceptable. The Democratic Party’s pragmatic wing has been pleading to broaden the tent, ideally before the Trump administration stamps out all opposition. The party’s progressives seem determined to reeducate the public rather than compromise for their votes. This is a seductive approach if the goal is ideological purity. It is a problem only if the party hopes to win elections.”
Personally, I would go one step further. While Mr. Chait is correct, there has been a disturbing trend since at least 2016 that actively pits Democrats against broad segments of the electorate. Generally speaking, politicians criticize their opponents rather than their opponent’s voters, but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears to have begun a shift by referring to a cross section of President Trump’s coalition as “deplorable” and President Biden further accelerated it. While voters have been known to support candidates they disagree with on certain issues in a world where no one agrees with everyone on everything, they will usually draw the line at a candidate that actively looks down upon them at best or is actively at war with their values at worst. Whatever you make of President Trump and regardless of whether his policies will prove helpful to his various constituencies, there is no doubt that he actively courted new voters not previously part of the Republican coalition including members of the working class, unions, blacks, and Latinos as part of an effort to expand his totals. Equally without a doubt, he did so by increasing his share of the vote in all major groups over both 2020 and 2016. In a more rational world, progressives would be trying to do the same, especially when many of their positions are entirely new phenomena. Barely ten years ago, few would have agreed with the notion that men can actually become women or vice versa, that the country was founded in 1619, or that the police should be replaced with mental health professionals. Whatever your opinion on these matters, it shouldn’t be surprising that the average person hasn’t immediately accepted such radical departures from the norm and that impacts your ability to win elections outside of deep blue areas. What is surprising is that supposedly smart people don’t realize this and instead plan to go to war with the voters themselves. Rather than acting like adults who have encountered a disagreement and making adjustments, they are lashing out like children, blaming them for their beliefs, claiming they are “irrational” and “unacceptable.” If the reaction to Mr. Chait’s column is any indication, they are lashing out at anyone who says otherwise as well. Eion Higgins, writing for The Intercept, claimed he was “Falling for Trump’s Demagaguery,” exhibiting a “striking…detachment from reality. And it relies on making an appeal to the Democratic Party that’s rooted not in a return to centrist politics, but in an embrace of Trump’s demagogic narrative.” There’s an old expression about catching more flies with honey than vinegar, which certainly applies to politics. It appears progressives have never heard it.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 