The left is right about the Democrats

They’re too focused on donors and not focused enough on working-class voters

Bernie Sanders in 2016. His campaign made room for cultural heterodoxy inside a bigger tent. (Photo by Jewel Samad)

This post got sent out premature on Saturday due to a scheduling snafu, so apologies if you’re reading it for a second time.

If I had to summarize the insurgent left’s critique of the Democratic Party and its leadership, it would go something like this: “Democrats are in trouble because they are excessively influenced by big donors in a way that has left them out of touch with working-class voters’ economic interests.”

I have a lot of disagreements with the left, but to say two things on their behalf:

1. This is completely correct.

2. They also correctly identify the problem as residing not with the furthest-right members of the party, but with the party’s leadership and the mainstream members who support it.

I think that aspiring moderate factional organizers fail quite badly on point two.

Almost every time I talk to self-described moderates — people who think Democrats need to adopt a big tent strategy, move to the center, shift the brand — they sooner or later (usually sooner) start complaining about Bernie Sanders or A.O.C. or Ilhan Omar. But whatever you make of those particular politicians, in a two-party political system, the left-of-center party inevitably has a left-wing faction, and that faction will be too left-wing for the median voter. That’s just life. There is literally no other way for the Democratic Party to be organized.

Democrats’ problem isn’t that leftists are too left-wing; it’s that mainstream Democrats are too left-wing.

Because moderates were in the driver’s seat for so long, many of them still have fundamentally establishmentarian habits of thought. A lot of my current internet feuds date back to the Obama era, when I would defend the administration against leftists who insisted that he was covering up massive financial crimes or demanding that he move to shut down the domestic fossil-fuel industry. And by the same token, people with establishmentarian habits of thought don’t like to uncork stem-winders about donor influence.

But what the leftists are saying about this issue is true: The primary barrier to Democrats centering their agenda around working-class prosperity is that they are paying too much attention to things wealthy donors care about.

What the leftists get wrong, though, are the micro-dynamics of how this comes together.