Centrist Liberalism Will Never Work
Tearing apart the tired and archaic ideology of conservative Democrats in the New York Times op-ed section.
The Democratic Party is slowly dying a slow, painful death. By painful, we mean more that it is a pitiful event, even though by their incompetence they’ve caused plenty of pain to us by allowing the far-right to gain power and unleash havoc on our civil rights. As discussed in a previous article, we’ve declared the Democrats dead, at least for the moment, and hopefully for good if the alleged anti-establishment Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have the spine to overthrow them with a new party or in some meaningful way.
The only answer that Democrats have offered the American people in the past year is to move further to the right. The Harris campaign was an embarrassment compared to what people expected, which was a robust progressive agenda to get the country out of this inequality crisis. Harris was trying to offer meager tax credits to a country begging for universal healthcare and job guarantees. Instead of fighting to change the narrative, leaders in the party have deemed it easier to throw immigrants, trans people, and Palestinians under the bus. Meanwhile, the far-right is controlling the Overton Window, and Democrats are letting them.
All of this is an indictment of the party’s centrist wing that holds the seats of power. They have no choice but to move right because admitting they failed means allowing the left to progress the party forward. But centrist Democrats will always fight the left harder than they fight Republicans. This is to be expected. We saw this in 2016 when Hillary blamed Bernie despite him polling better than her against Trump. We saw this in 2020 when the establishment candidates gave up everything to beat Bernie, who was pulling in voters from across the political spectrum, just for Biden to limp over the finish line in November. We saw this in 2024 when centrists got everything they wanted: no primary, a chance to double down on toothless centrist policy, an easy opponent, near-endless campaign funds, and then lost. Despite having no one to blame but themselves, they blamed the left, minorities, and students protesting the genocide in Palestine.
In the larger scope, this represents American capitalism as a whole. Both parties are beholden to corporations, so they must manage the system in their own way. The Democrats historically have been practical about this: give citizens just enough concessions so they won’t rebel. Republicans, in pursuit of greater profit, accept some of that uncertainty, relying on more authoritarian measures to quell any unrest caused by their lack of concessions to the people— two different strategies for upholding the status quo, two sides of the same coin. Since American capitalism and its global hegemony have experienced a steady decline in power since the late 80s, the strategy is now more about managing the decline. There’s only so much a single nation can brutally oppress the globe and dominate global trade before cracks begin to form. Both the party establishments are running out of ideas. This is when we get a far-right anti-establishment figure, Trump, who is willing to pursue even greater profit and power expansion for corporations while accepting the uncertainty of implementing more authoritarianism. The effort will be futile, though; the decline of capitalism is inevitable. America cannot exert unilateral force over even the weakest country anymore, and China is rapidly becoming the most powerful country in trade. It doesn’t have to be this way. This country could model left traditions by embracing labor unions, ruthlessly monopoly busting, taxing the exorbitant wealth of the 1%, and demilitarizing to invest in domestic growth. Instead, Democrats are pandering to the right.
At the epicenter of this rot is the New York Times Opinion section that has consistently laundered right-wing narratives with a pretentious liberal dialect. It is here we find an article that best represents this right-wing pandering titled, “How Four Democrats Who Saved the Party Before Would Do It Again.” It’s a discussion between Al From, William A. Galston, Elaine Kamarck, and Will Marshall, all prominent Democratic figures from the Clinton administration, part of the New Democrat and Third Way faction. The framing of the article is the idea that what the country really needs in this time of rising fascism is an opposition party that acts as a footstool for the people dismantling the government. We will be dissecting this piece as follows.
Patrick Healy, who leads the discussion, is the deputy Opinion section editor for the New York Times. Right off the bat in his introduction, he misanalyses the current political situation as comparable to the 1970s and 80s, when Democrats kept losing elections, then finally winning with Clinton. Healy makes the unsubstantiated claim that, “many Americans saw the party as too liberal, untrustworthy on inflation and spending, and out of touch — culturally and economically — with middle-class and working-class Americans.” This will be a running thread throughout the discussion, and it’s a false premise. Politics then were so narrow and unremarkable simply because there was nothing to debate; there were no crises like there are now. Politics were so boring in 1992 that Ross Perot, an independent who ran a single-issue campaign on balancing the budget, led the Presidential polls for over a month. Such a thing is unheard of today, especially as critical issues like the climate crisis, genocide, and stagnant wages bring our politics close to a boil.
It’s astonishing that Healy doesn’t acknowledge why Democrats were perceived as ‘too liberal,’ assuming there’s even evidence to back that up. The country was going through a far-right reactionary moment during the Cold War, and the party was ineffective in fighting against these narratives while presenting a better alternative. Losing Democrats Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis hardly presented progressive liberal ideas, even for the time. If anything, it was their lack of progressivism and disconnect with the labor movement that lost them these elections. Notoriously, the Reagan Democrats were working-class people co-opted into supporting harmful right-wing economic policies because Democrats politically abandoned them. Why else would someone vote against their material interests to give more power to corporations with the fringe hope of wealth ‘trickling down’ if there was no rhetorical opposition to that idea from Democrats?
Already, we see how geriatric their political views are, which will become a recurring thread of their discussion. When they talk about the ‘culture issues’ hanging over us, remember that one of those is abortion rights, which is somehow still an issue thanks to the failures of Democrats to codify it into permanent law. If things like abortion and passing the Equal Rights Amendment were the most challenging cultural issues of their time, it’s shameful that the centrists in power with Clinton weren’t able (or willing) to end that debate. It’s really an indictment of centrist politicians that they cower from any confrontation with ‘culture issues,’ which are actually just about human rights.
To be charitable, we can acknowledge that the country was in an unnaturally conservative era in the 80s, but placing the blame squarely on mild liberal policy is totally misplaced. The four of them mischaracterize many of the blatant policy, corruption, and messaging failures at this time as core issues with the party’s policy platform and not simply failures in and of themselves. The three losses were infamously boring campaigns with no sense of aggression or urgency to fight Reagan’s charisma. If anything, what this period needed was a revitalization of the labor movement and an unrelenting assault on the corrupt war mongers in the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations. You don’t win by not playing.
Another thread we will regrettably keep returning to is their disgust for trans rights. These fossilized baby boomers spend a baffling amount of energy blaming this one small group of people for this election loss. The worst part is: the criticism doesn’t even make sense. Kamala Harris quite literally avoided trans issues like the plague. Pretty much nowhere can you find references to trans people in any of her speeches, messaging, or debates. They bizarrely say she was ‘pushed to the extreme’ on this issue, but by who? The Democratic Party never touched this issue, especially this cycle. This entire narrative was fabricated by the disgusting far-right, who go after any minority group they see as vulnerable. Again, it’s an indictment of the Democrats’ spinelessness to not stand up to these dehumanizing attacks. When the ghouls in the Trump campaign see a weakness like this, they lambast and attack a vulnerable group if there’s no opposition, then paint it on the entire party. The crazy thing is— that the right has far worse delusional QAnon freaks and radical evangelicals that could be exploited in the same way, but the Democrats refuse to play hardball. What happens is they’re chasing the culture, instead of fighting it.
Ironically, the five centrists sitting at this table are bemoaning ‘special pleadings’ and having to serve all the parts of your coalition. It’s a shame that America wasn’t parliamentary because imagine how pathetic it would be if the center democratic party were whining, blaming their own failures on the left party for daring to advocate for the rights of a marginalized group. Everyone would see this exactly for what it is. Unfortunately, the legitimate left and right-wing Democrats are forced into this Frankenstein party of billionaire boot lickers and grassroots progressives that demand change. It’s an untenable arrangement that needs to change fast. Either way, it’s laughable that these aging centrists believe they can win this breakup by default when they’d find a safer home with Republicans, where at least then it’d be obvious what side they’re really on.
Kamarck makes absolutely no secret that she is a devout conservative. The first thing she was waiting to bring up— as if she’s proud of it— is Clinton’s “End welfare as we know it” bumper sticker. Yes, welfare: the thing that keeps tens of millions of people out of abject poverty. The thing that every sane and moral society offers to its citizens is to protect them from being homeless between jobs. The thing that keeps us from returning to the time of Hoovervilles. I’m not sure why she’s not a Republican; she’s plainly spouting right-wing propaganda talking points. It’s precisely the “welfare rewards people for staying home” narrative that has soaked deep into the bones of every modern conservative and most people alive during that time. It’s not only a completely false premise but its intentionally decisive to make people feel deep shame for committing the social crime of losing your job or being disabled. It’s a pretentious contempt that politicians like her have for the poor, which has been weaponized into a national political project.
The second half of that sentence gets even more sick. She says, in reference to what a right-wing voter would say, “[welfare] rewards people for having more children when they don’t have any support for the children,” in other words, the racist welfare queen myth. What that refers to is the racist conspiracy popularized by Reagan that single black women were having children to get extra welfare benefits.
Kamarck then says something bizarre where she tries to reframe the whole thing by saying that the term “ending welfare as we know it” doesn’t actually mean ‘to cease’, ‘to abolish’, ‘to annihilate’, but is supposed to mean reform. Sorry if American English has changed in 33 years, but ending something “as we know it” obviously means getting rid of that thing. So, to be clear, Kamarck is celebrating the fact that her Clinton campaign pandered to racists to cut welfare benefits rather than fighting against that narrative and actually making people’s lives better.
Yes, Galston was Walter Mondale’s policy director. The same Walter Mondale who lost 49 of 50 states to Ronald Reagan in 1984, the biggest Presidential election landslide in American history. Though Mondale himself was a very weak, uncompelling person, an infamous part of his loss was the decision to run on raising taxes. The other part of that was a failure to communicate the many social programs proposed, like funding education, job-training, healthcare cost reduction, day care, and child/spousal abuse programs.
First, it’s strange that Galston blames the policy, not the messaging, which was the overwhelming consensus on why they lost so badly. It’s nonsense anyway because the New Deal policies were precisely the reason why Reagan got an economic free ride during his first term. The New Deal policy worked; it wasn’t exhausted, and Galston should know this as someone who worked on this campaign. It’s as if in that moment he became a Reagan Democrat because that’s exactly who became part of the Clinton campaign, forcing more deregulation and more austerity.
For this first issue, Kamarck discusses why reform was difficult in the Clinton campaign. She mentions that welfare ‘reform,’ otherwise known as cuts, was tough and blames a “hypersensitivity” among black Americans to the issue. I could only imagine what it feels like for older black readers seeing these racist narratives being regurgitated decades later. Kamarck’s association of welfare with African Americans indicates she is very aware of this racist right-wing narrative. Instead of acknowledging that it is a false narrative, she doesn’t regret Clinton campaigning on it. It’s clear she loathes the fact that black Americans were rightfully outraged at this association. She even acknowledges that she and the white Democrats of the Clinton administration deliberately chose to ignore this sentiment.
History seems to repeat itself. Instead of fighting back against the racist narrative, Democrats abandon it and allow black Americans to be the scapegoat for the perceived ‘big government.’ Today, Democrats have abandoned people of color again, blaming black men for not voting for Harris, something the numbers don’t support.
It’s wild that old Democrats are still laundering this false ‘big’ versus ‘small’ government framing. The government has consistently grown larger over the years, regardless of the party in charge. It’s simply a rhetorical spear the opposition party uses to promote austerity. Reality would tell us that Reagan and Bush increased federal debts during that time, but despite this, Democrats are still seen as the economically irresponsible party. So why continue this false narrative if it doesn’t work? Kamarck says that ‘big government’ was deep in Democrats’ DNA, so why not reshape that? Due to their failure as an opposition party during this time, much of the older generations still harbor this sentiment. The real burden of proof should be on Republicans to explain why the government should be ‘smaller’ when it was the New Deal that provided this incredible prosperity in the first place. It’s strange to run away from a policy set that materially benefits voters simply because of right-wing austerity propaganda.
What Glaston implies here is really fascinating. The assumption is that he is talking about what he would perceive to be the ‘woke left’ wanting to be the minority in the majority party. But the ironic thing is that centrists fail almost every time. There has never been a center-left blow out election in this country’s history, they only win when its convenient or Republicans disastrously fail. The most successful cross-partisan wins for Democrats were from populist progressive campaigns— Obama’s first term and FDR’s. You could even include Sanders if you consider the polling that showed him polling first among all primary candidates for both general elections. This proved itself again in this recent election, where Harris’ cross-partisan effort failed, predictably. American voters will only accept Democrats when they’re forced to or when they’re actually offered material benefits. Otherwise, they chose right-wing fearmongering.
Not to keep going into the trivialities, but it’s interesting to reflect on how boring these people’s understanding of politics is from when the American empire was at its peak of global power and the biggest worry was vaguely if ‘the government worked.’ I’m not even sure what they mean by ‘worked.’ Do American citizens really give a damn if government ‘works’ or do they care about their material conditions? Seriously, how diluted is it to think citizens care more about the abstract notions of GDP and federal debt than about being able to pay for medical treatment, their retirement, their child’s preschool, and feeding their family?
There’s a lot to unpack in this short quote. First is the much-needed context of the alternative to the ‘brain dead’ left and right, Marshall is talking about: the Third Way. This group comprised most of the Clinton administration, whose political goals consist of being bagmen for corporations. It’s an entirely inorganic project that filters corporate interests into centrist policy proposals that reach a wide range of both right and left liberals. They have almost no natural constituency; it’s utterly devoid of human authenticity, so their public face becomes whatever popular narrative exists at the time. This is not a vessel for generational change, it’s a club for out of touch corporate lobbyists.
Marshall claims the party needs something ‘fresh’ by which he means ‘national service.’ You would be forgiven not to know what he’s talking about since surely no one living in the twenty-first century would advocate mandatory military service… right? Luckily, he’s talking about AmeriCorps, a small agency that gets people involved with non-profit organizations and offers grants for college. So far, it’s only hired an average of 38,000 people annually, known for sub-minimum wage pay, no benefits, and exhausting work. However, Marshall has not entirely written off the idea of military conscription, as he once critiqued the program for not having a ‘military ethos.’ If this is really what Marshall wants, I couldn’t think of a more disastrous policy proposal for the party whose strongest demographic is younger people. If we look to the Vietnam era, it went over totally fine… besides the 570,000 young men who dodged the draft and 8,750 who were charged for refusing to fight an imperial war for no good reason.
Marshall also advocates for school choice, otherwise known as defunding public schools to subsidize private schools, which already work fine without leeching tax dollars.
Needless to say, these are absolutely the opposite of new ideas. Marshall might be correct in saying they’re imaginative… imaginative in how they disguise corporate right-wing policies as novel.
They go back to welfare reform again. Realize that for these people, welfare was a massive issue during the peak of their careers, and you can feel their elitist disdain for people who claim government assistance. They are incapable of realizing just how much politics and culture have changed since then. We know definitively that welfare programs raise the floor of poverty, support children’s development, and bring people back into the economy from destitution. Fighting against it won for Clinton not because he offered a better alternative but because he was charismatic and catered to the public’s existing dogmatic beliefs. Good leaders create change, not accept the status quo.
It’s bizarre to even cite an earned income tax credit as welfare reform because it isn’t: it’s a concession to soften the crush of austerity. The tax credit was a way to cut taxes for people who shouldn’t have been taxed in the first place. Though the tax system was better then than it is now, Clinton did a pitiful job of reversing the downward trend of taxation against the wealthy and corporations, which had begun under Republicans in the previous years.
Anyone with conviction would see growing inequality and reverse it by cutting taxes to zero for the poor, keeping them as low as possible for the working class, and drastically raising taxes for the rich and corporations who parasitically feed off the workers’ labor.
Marshall also connects to his point about national service, saying that such a policy promotes “the idea that you should serve something larger than yourself.” Why? So that more people can be indoctrinated into a military hierarchy and degraded into pawns for the government’s disposal? I don’t quite have the words to describe how embarrassing this is to hear in the current year. Marshall even goes so far as to say it will solve “the politics of entitlement.” Entitlement of what? Existing in this country without being the government’s slave? Why not support a federal jobs guarantee where one can get a dignified job without having to swear allegiance to the country first?
As mentioned before, they can’t help but bring trans people up again. For some reason, they revere this Trump ad as if they had no control over it. The exact reason it was successful was that it was a weak issue for the whole party, precisely because centrists like these four don’t support trans people. The old Democrat establishment doesn’t care to protect this community, so the far-right exploit it. What is just as disgusting as the right-wing are the Democrats like Kamarck, who advocate abandoning trans people just like they did with welfare. But the comparison is even more strange because people are not a policy set, they’re people. So unlike welfare, which no doubt has human implications of their own, she’s literally saying that trans people are too “strange” and “frightening” to be worth fighting for.
To their credit, early in the Harris campaign, they were at least correctly combating this. Walz began calling the far-right attacks on people “weird,” and it was a jab at the core of conservatism: it is fundamentally weird to be vicious to a group of people for no reason. Unfortunately, the campaign must’ve listened to people like Kamarck and fallen for the reaction the far-right wants.
Kamarck suggests people could be “hurt” by trans rights. If the public legitimately thinks that people and children could be hurt by allowing trans people to exist just like the rest of us, then that indicates Democrats, as the party that is supposed to protect the marginalized, have utterly failed.
We can tell that Kamarck doesn’t even care to understand trans people; she talks about them like a disease, saying, “There are people out there who are really hurting because they’re born gender dysphoric.” But the hurt is coming from the part of society that refuses to accept them: the part of society Kamarck thinks should be coddled.
There is one part of this that I can mostly get behind: the sentiment that Democrats have lost touch with the working class. It’s even a total understatement to say they’ve ‘lost touch’ because Democrats haven’t actually cared about the working class for decades. They also don’t look at the power dynamic involved, the immense wealth and power stripped from working people over the past fifty years. The party has abandoned unions, something that empowers people and gives them that sense they’re ‘a part of something bigger’ that he mentioned earlier. Average real wages hit their lowest at any point between the 60s and today during the Clinton years and are still not above the peak in 1973. The answer is giving the working class power, which means clawing it back from the corporations and the wealthy that stole it, and reengineering the government that allowed it to happen. This also means abandoning the centrist dinosaurs like these four and embracing the class struggle.
Marshall says we need to ‘address economic aspirations’, which is code for ‘do nothing while making it seem like something changed.’ How do we know this? Because immediately after, he framed concessions to the working class as “throwing government benefits at them.” People wouldn’t need food stamps if their jobs paid them enough to afford to live. That’s the core contradiction that these centrists, who are committed to the predatory system of capitalism, cannot reckon with.
Here’s where the stupidity hits its climax. Al From is a multi-millionaire who used to work in the highest office in the country, if not the world. He is an elite with immense power, making it absurd to place himself on the same level as the average “three-fifths of the country that doesn’t have a college degree.” Watch how he manipulates us: he pits non-college-educated and educated people against each other. In reality, nine in ten parents want their kids to go to college, and surely none want their kids to be burdened with debt. So why would any of them be so against subsidizing higher education? In other words, the people who don’t have a college degree typically want their kids to get one. But From doesn’t care about that, he’s an elitist conservative Democrat.
It’s not only that, but it’s the idea of people “paying for the tuition” of college students, which does an immense amount of rhetorical work in this individualistic country. We know that if all college debt were wiped out tomorrow, there would be an economic boom overnight as people are freed from the weight of their debt. It’s also a fact that college-educated people earn on average $40,500 more per year, meaning that throughout their career, they would more than pay back their education in taxes. The other obvious thing is facilitating a more equal and educated population where people aren’t burdened by growing up poor. It’s not understood well enough that investment in a country’s people pays for itself many times over, and that’s what Democrats need to embrace.
Instead of just allowing people to be free and get the support they need to build their life, From goes back to this weird national service policy that I’m willing to bet most people don’t know exists. It’s the archaic notion that a person should have to do this strange ritual of ‘serving your country’ rather than just getting the education necessary to contribute meaningfully to that country with no strings attached. It’s like he thinks a working-class person is born into slavery and has to earn their freedom before joining society. Of course, From’s kids don’t have to do this; they were lucky enough not to be born poor. This proposal is much like forced conscription in the sense that it is a program only for the poor who need it to escape poverty. This is what the right-wing (which includes From) does; it’s not about getting people out of poverty for the sake of eliminating poverty, it’s about maintaining the borders of class, where at least if someone is going to take from society, they should feel shame.
It comes right down to his following sentence about “free lunch.” It’s an outdated term, but the irony is that the phrase originates from the early 1900s when bars, saloons, and taverns would give out free food to incentivize them to keep spending money on drinks. Applied to this scenario, it would actually make sense if the government gave a ‘free lunch’ in the form of college tuition to incentivize them to get better-paying jobs and give more back in taxes. The term has also meant free school lunches in the past, which is somehow a controversial topic and one that conservatives more often reject. From is using the word pejoratively to describe a policy like free school lunches that supports a person through state spending. Much like we’ve just shown, school lunches also have this same effect, where studies constantly show kids have much better education outcomes when given the dreaded free lunch.
To be a bit charitable, Kamarck at least sees some of the problem, that the Democrats are an elitist party. The inflation issue was overlooked entirely, and it’s not difficult to see why; it doesn’t affect them, and the primary voices in the party are. They’ve systematically pushed out union leaders and regular working-class voices that used to be staples of the party over 75 years ago. It’s no wonder that liberals die for the ‘egg prices’ meme, because they don’t see inflation as a real issue that materially affects the nearly half of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck. Of course, Trump didn’t have any solution to inflation, but Harris having no solution either meant that millions didn’t show up in November.
Here’s the primary thesis: Democrats think that people cannot change, that they can’t influence or change people’s minds, Republicans know they can, and they do, so much so that Trump, in his deranged rhetoric, literally changed American culture to fit his agenda. That’s why Galston says the party needs to follow the public blindly. Galston is a loser. He was a big part of the losing Walter Mondale and Al Gore campaigns. This is a person who is not good at politics.
Initially, the Democratic message was correct in 2024, price gouging undeniably caused massive inflation; the stock market made record profits during the pandemic while prices increased dramatically. Instead of messaging that correctly, the Harris campaign backed off to avoid tarnishing Biden’s legacy. A Republican in a similar situation facing the headwinds of public opinion would find someone to blame and ruthlessly attack. The thing is, for this issue, the Democrats have the culprit built in: greedy monopolistic corporations. What makes it even more unbelievable is that they have the truth on their side too, Republicans never do, that’s why they rely on scapegoats and gaslighting. So now Democrats are backpedaling on an issue that they should be winning by virtue of the facts, and think they have to fight to be to the right of Republicans to win. It’s exactly what Clinton did; instead of fighting to reshape the narrative around welfare, he just moved to the right of Bush.
There it is, From proves my point for me. They think that the party has to listen to what people already believe, even if that belief has been twisted and manipulated by decades of right-wing propaganda and a modern onslaught of far-right indoctrination.
Close to the end of this interview, Kamarck can’t help but rant about trans people. Everything alluded to comes out. Listen to the disdain in “I’ve never heard of pregnant people” because apparently, the extremely specific case of doctors using inclusive language is so unfathomable to her fragile mind. I’d love to ask her for a single example of a Democratic politician policing the use of ‘pregnant people.’ I guess maybe when you spend your time shoulder to shoulder with far-right wingers at the Federalist Society, you embrace a lot of Fox News scare-mongering.
Don’t mistake this as an actual point. This is a person from another era reacting with disdain that they might be bothered with advocating for a new issue, one that takes effort. “If only these trans people just didn’t ask for basic respect, Democrats could win every election” is the sentiment she gives here. To be clear, this is no disrespect to older people; many late into their 70s and 80s are perfectly capable of finding the morally correct stance on the issues of today, but too many like Kamarck refuse to change after their time has passed. The entire party is going through a leadership crisis where the older generation refuses to step aside and accept younger, more in-touch members.
Kamarck goes so far as to say that trans rights is the single most productive interparty fight Democrats should have. Think about what that means, though. Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which banned gay marriage. How can we trust Kamarck’s cultural politics ever again? We can’t. This is the same core issue, just thirty years later. Are we willing to accept a group of people even if it’s not politically convenient?
So if she wants to have a party civil war, I say fine; keep purging the progressives, trans people, minorities, and immigrants out of the party, maybe enough people will leave to start a real working class party.
As a treat, Al From cites Gavin Newsom as someone doing a good job. Yes, the same Gavin Newsom who started a podcast to host far-right racist pundit Charlie Kirk, being extra nice to the guy who proudly believes black people can’t be pilots. Newsom is doing such a good job that he also hosted Steve Bannon, the overt neo-Nazi in the Trump campaign who spearheaded the effort use white nationalism as a policy platform. Don’t be fooled, conservative liberals love it when there is ‘debate’ with these people because they don’t disagree that much. It’s why he likes Democrat Elissa Slotkin, a literal CIA agent and a racist Zionist. These are not ideological non-starters for him; he’s just a racist, and I say that because when you have ten people at the table and one’s a racist, you don’t have nine normal people and a racist, you have ten racists.
This is how a good political party is run: zero tolerance for right-wing apologists. Democrats need to stop accepting centrists just because they aren’t overt with their bigotry and sloppy with their policy prescriptions. This is how the working class died: it was slowly eroded by corporate politicians like these four. Shame on the New York Times for not firing Patrick Healy, who let these freaks spout 90s-era racism openly. We must bury Third Way politics six feet under and ruthlessly pursue a progressive future.
He is not saying that, but he wants the Democrats to divorce from the centrist wing of the Democratic Party. Today's problems require a radical thinking from the past. You are stuck in the past. By the way, incremental reforms are outdated in today's economy. If Republicans don't care about incremental reforms, then why should Democrats care about incremental reforms? You are too comfortable with what works.
Notice how you put "immigrants, trans people and Palestinians" in the same frame, as though they face the same threat. This is exactly the kind of phrasing and neo-liberal identity construction that marks the Democratic discourse that you critique.