Democrats move left — but don’t panic

In November, several outright Nazis and white supremacists will appear on Republican ballot lines. Arthur Jones, a founder of a neo-Nazi group called the America First Committee, managed to become the Republican nominee for Congress in the heavily Democratic 3rd District in Illinois. The Republican candidate in California’s 11th District, John Fitzgerald, is running on a platform of Holocaust denial. Russell Walker, a Republican statehouse candidate in North Carolina, has said that Jews descend from Satan and that God is a “white supremacist.”

Corey Stewart, Virginia’s Republican Senate nominee, is a neo-Confederate who pals around with racists, including one of the organizers of the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., last year. The longtime Iowa Republican, Rep. Steve King, has moved from standard-issue nativist crank to full-on white nationalist; he recently retweeted a neo-Nazi and then refused to delete the tweet, saying, “It’s the message, not the messenger.”

Clearly, the time has come for a serious national conversation. And so political insiders across the land are asking: Has the Democratic Party become too extreme?

Everywhere you look lately, centrists are panicking about the emboldened left. Moderates, reported Alex Seitz-Wald of NBC News, “are warning that ignoring them will lead the party to disaster in the midterm elections and the 2020 presidential contest.” Former Sen. Joe Lieberman wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, over Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., “seems likely to hurt Congress, America and the Democratic Party.” James Comey, former director of the FBI, tweeted, “Democrats, please, please don’t lose your minds and rush to the socialist left,” arguing that “America’s great middle wants sensible, balanced, ethical leadership.”

Though Comey’s judgment about things that affect political campaigns is not good, I think he’s sincere in wanting Democrats to win in November. But his worry is misplaced. Partly, this is because Democrats are not, in fact, rushing to the socialist left in great numbers.

“Overall, it’s not really true that the insurgent leftist candidates, like the candidates who are affiliated with the DSA or Bernie Sanders’ group, are doing all that well,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University who specializes in partisan polarization.

People like Comey should be cheered by the energy that Ocasio-Cortez and others like her are creating. In the midterms, passion is likely to matter more than appeals to an ever-shrinking pool of swing voters, who at any rate tend to be idiosyncratic economic populists rather than the judicious centrists of Beltway imagination.

I’m not wholly unsympathetic to people of good faith who want Democrats to win in November, but who fear that the United States is more conservative than left-wing activists like to believe.

Now, however, Hillary Clinton’s defeat has overshadowed McGovern’s as the Democratic Party’s paradigmatic trauma. There are several lessons you can draw from her loss, some of them conflicting — some voters saw her as too corporate, others as too liberal.

The economic demands that animate the left are generally quite popular. Though “Medicare for all” means different things to different people, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll from 2017 found that 62 percent of Americans view it positively. A recent Rasmussen poll found 46 percent of likely voters support a federal jobs guarantee, a more radical proposal that was barely present in U.S. politics a couple of years ago.

Centrists might not think these are good ideas, but they are not wild fantasies; they represent efforts to grapple with the chronic economic insecurity that is the enemy of political stability.

Democrats will not defeat Trump and his increasingly fanatical, revanchist party by promising the restoration of what came before him; the country is desperate for a vision of something better. Whether or not you share that vision, if you truly believe that Trump is a threat to democracy, you should welcome politics that inspire people to come to democracy’s rescue.

Michelle Goldberg, a New York Times op-ed columnist since 2017, is a former columnist at Slate and a frequent commentator on radio and television.