Democrats battling each other over path forward
At the Netroots Nation conference in Atlanta last month, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren opened her speech to 3,000 progressives with a spirited attack on ... former Democratic President Bill Clinton.
“The Democratic Party isn’t going back to the days of welfare reform and the crime bill,” she said, referring to a pair of Clinton’s best-known centrist accomplishments. “It is not going to happen.”
A few days earlier, a group of moderate Democrats, including Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack and former Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, announced the formation of NewDemocracy.net, whose first order of business was a thinly veiled shot at ... the progressive followers of Warren and independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“For many working class and rural voters, the (Democratic) party’s message seems freighted with elite condescension for traditional values (especially faith) and lifestyles,” according to the group’s mission statement.
Donald Trump might be president, Republicans might have control of the House and Senate, and decades of hard-won liberal programs and victories may be in danger of being rolled back, but that hasn’t stopped Democrats from fighting with one another.
It’s a dangerous road to
take, said Larry Gerston, a former political science professor at San Jose State University.
“This isn’t just carping or disagreeing with colleagues,” he said. “The seeds are being sown for internecine warfare.”
The continuing intraparty fighting may be baffling, but it shouldn’t be particularly surprising, said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at UC San Diego.
“Democrats are always going to have different platforms and priorities,” he said. “But there’s not much difference between the groups. It’s not like there are Democrats opposed to a strong minimum wage.”
Much of the dispute spins from last year’s rancorous Democratic primary, when Sanders ran a surprisingly strong — but ultimately unsuccessful — challenge to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the choice of the party’s establishment.
For Sanders and his allies, Clinton’s shocking November loss cleared the way for what they argue should be a progressive takeover of the party.
“We are not the gate crashers of today’s Democratic Party,” Warren told the Netroots Nation crowd. “We are not a wing of today’s Democratic Party. We are the heart and soul of today’s Democratic Party.”
But it’s been anything but a quiet changing of the guard for the Democrats, with party leaders angrily resisting the progressives’ efforts.
In California, for example, Sanders supporters swarmed into a speech by Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez at the state party convention in Sacramento last May, shouting down calls for unity from Perez and calling on the party to ban corporate campaign contributions and back a nationwide singlepayer health care system.
“Shut the f— up or go outside,” John Burton, the party’s outgoing state chairman, told the demonstrators.
Sanders supporter Kimberly Ellis of Richmond, whose slogan was “Reshaping what it means to be a Democrat,” lost a tight race for party chair to Eric Bauman, the Democrat’s state vice chairman, but has refused to concede, arguing that the election was rigged.
It’s a similar situation elsewhere in the country. When the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Rep. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, said his group might aid candidates who oppose abortion rights, he was attacked by progressives, women’s rights supporters and plenty of mainstream party officials who argued that it’s impossible to be a loyal Democratic officeholder without being pro-choice.
Arguing that Clinton and the Democrats lost because the party was trying too hard to appeal to voters in the center, progressives are working to push the party left on issues like single-payer health care.
“Any Democrat that doesn’t unequivocally say Medicarefor-all is the way to go? To me, there’s something wrong with them,” Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, a group spun off from the Sanders campaign, said last month. “No more hemming and hawing. No more game playing. Make your stand.”
That type of bold, all-ornothing talk is unnerving to more pragmatic Democrats, especially coming off an election where even typically Democratic states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan joined the sea of Republican red between the blue Democratic outposts on the two coasts.
In today’s politics, one size doesn’t fit all voters, California Gov. Jerry Brown said in a “Meet the Press” interview last month.
“You can’t let these hot button issues ... be the guiding light for a national party that covers a very wide spectrum of belief,” he said. “Running in San Francisco is not like running in Tulare County or Modoc, Calif., much less Mobile, Ala.”
Yet when Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount (Los Angeles County), in June shelved a state Senatepassed bill establishing a statewide single-payer system, he was attacked by Sanders supporters and threatened with recall.
And rookie Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris is taking fire from progressives who argue that her record as California’s attorney general and her support from corporate America aren’t what they want to see in a potential party leader.
Those calls for Democrats to fight Trump with a perfectly progressive candidate are misplaced, Gerston said.
“There’s no room for purity in politics, which is based on compromise,” he said. “It might make you feel good for a minute, but it won’t lead to victory.”
But what looks like division might actually be a good thing for Democrats, argued Simon Rosenberg, founder and president of NDN, a liberal think tank and advocacy group formerly known as the New Democratic Network.
“It’s a sign of health,” he said. “Where parties get into trouble is when they’re stale and these debates don’t happen.”
While it’s always possible for these policy debates to slip into rancor, the Democrats’ desire to oust Trump is enough to keep even squabbling factions on the same path, Rosenberg added.
“Trump will create consensus,” he said. “He’s a common opponent, and the need to blast the Trump presidency will outweigh everything else.”
That can’t happen soon enough for the Democrats, Gerston said.
“Every day that goes by with the Democrats looking inside rather than outside is a great day for the Republicans,” he said.
“We are not the gate crashers of today’s Democratic Party. We are not a wing of today’s Democratic Party. We are the heart and soul of today’s Democratic Party.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaking at the Netroots Nation conference