Leftists and moderates agree on what Democrats get wrong

But the left should take their own diagnosis seriously

Slow Boring readers know that we have frequently touted Rebecca Cooke, who ran for Congress in a tough district in Wisconsin and fell short, despite significantly outperforming the fundamentals.

She’s running for Congress again in what should be a friendlier political climate, and also hopefully with a fairer Wisconsin congressional map, thanks to Slow Boring-endorsed Susan Crawford’s win in the Supreme Court race. The potential black fly in the chardonnay is that precisely because the race will be more winnable this time, there was a chance that Cooke would face a tougher battle to secure the nomination. But we got some good news on that front late last week as Bernie Sanders endorsed Cooke (without her ditching her Blue Dog affiliation or other moderate credentials), which should help clear the field or at least make it easier to fend off competition on the left.

This is kind of funny if you consider the Two-Minute Hate that was directed by the left at WelcomePAC, where Cooke spoke, a couple of weeks ago.

But it also makes a certain amount of sense. I moderated a panel of three leading Blue Dogs, of whom two — Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez — were Bernie supporters in 2016, as was Cooke. If you read this article from Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker about the disagreements between the Future Forward super PAC and the Biden/Harris campaigns, what you’ll see is that FF was consistently articulating roughly the left’s critique of the campaign: that it was too invested in the democracy issue, too inclined to wield Liz Cheney and other establishment Republicans as surrogates, and insufficiently committed to a populist vibe and a material agenda. But Future Forward is funded by billionaire donors who leftists say they hate, and this critique was deeply informed by the work of David Shor (another Bernie 2016 supporter) and other broadly like-minded people disliked by the left.

And I think there are a few dynamics here worth exploring.

One is that on some level, I think there is genuinely a left/right horseshoe against the party establishment, and it’s great to see things like this Bernie/Cooke collaboration. I also want to clarify that I was not trolling when I made the case for Bernie as the 2020 nominee back in January of 2020. But I do think the Bernie Wing tends to pull a motte-and-bailey, where sometimes they say “we need a broad-based economic populist message and a focus on class issue and material prosperity,” but in practice they want to do hard-left cultural politics and degrowth environmentalism, which is why they hate Shor and Golden and others like them.

But if Bernie is the theory, Cooke is the praxis, and it’s worth taking that seriously.

Democrats’ post-material turn

I think it’s useful to turn the clock all the way back to Bill Clinton.

But forget everything you think you know about him.