Perhaps not surprisingly, I have some thoughts on this.
On a purely straightforward, taking solely on its face sense… sure? There is a lot of truth to this… but there’s also a lot of problems with this stance.
Something I like to say about Democrats is that we aren’t particularly a majority in a traditional political sense. We are a majority of minority interests. And yes, there is a degree that Democrats must have a very big tent to have the numbers in order to enact anything. Yes, such a coalition is going to have a very broad swath of interests, and more than a handful are going to wind up mutually exclusive of others.
(See also: the Gaza and Israel conflict; even in completely good faith, that is a fault line in which what one side wants frequently requires you to outright dismiss the wants of the other.)
But…
There are some groups that some of our caucus want to bring in that have not been shy about what they want from the Democratic coalition, and frankly, what they want should be an utter dealbreaker, even if it means we don’t have the numbers to win elections.
Case in point, every time a politician says we need to court “the white working class?” Fuck that shit. The “white working class” hasn’t exactly been secret about what they want. Sure, they make mouth noises about how they could accept “Democratic Socialism,” but you better not be giving anything to those “people who don’t deserve it,” ya know… like black people, or trans people, or gay people, or unmarried women, etc.
Or when a politician talks about “courting moderates.” Yeah, we’ve already fucking done that. The right flank of the Democratic Party are people who would be conservatives if it wasn’t for the outright vile bigotry and deplorable vileness of the current GOP. Anybody worth poaching from the center right has already been fucking poached. You’re looking at a rounding error number of voters at this point.
And there’s a degree that I get it. The nature of such a coalition is going to lead to most of us being largely unsatisfied with the end result of all the jockeying and pandering and compromise. The problem is rather than accept that, a critical mass of us would rather embrace conspiracy theories and that a minority of the party has somehow managed to seize the levers and are using it solely for their gain at the expense of everyone else in the coalition.
And it’s not just “one side” that does this, either. There is just as much centrist bellyaching when a “progressive” wins (just listen to some of the whining in the aftermath of this NYC mayoral primary… or how AOC deviously uprooted an establishment Dem by… (checks notes)… actually interacting with constituents of her district and earning their trust ) as there is when leftists insist that “centrist Dems” like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders twice with the nefarious scheme of… (checks notes)… getting millions more primary votes than Bernie Sanders.
A lot of the times when I hear talking heads mumble about “expanding the coalition” what I hear is, “I would rather waste my time looking for some mythical silent majority of secret socialists or secret liberals than try to work with the people already in the tent.”
TKO Creations 