Halfway

The midterm elections for Congress are a little more than a year out, and that means its time for the Democratic Party to start fighting with itself again. Generally speaking, the “Centrist” and “Progressive” subsets of the party have quite a bit of daylight between them. Hence Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s comment that: “Oh God. In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.”

But it’s also true that in many other countries, the ”Centrists” and “Progressives” could be viable political parties on their own. But in the United States, they can’t. Especially not now with the Republican brand having been solidified under President Trump (whether it stays that way is an open question). Were the two broad flavors of Democrat to go their separate ways, both of the splinter parties would be out in the national political wilderness for the foreseeable future. They’d have to cooperate just as much as they do now, if not more so, to avoid complete irrelevance.

This understanding tends to result in the two groups attempting to level the other into compliance, even while they also seem to be putting a certain amount of effort into pretending that the other isn’t there. In my own Congressional district, a Progressive would-be Representative has labelled the incumbent a “Centrist” (which is apparently a slur in Progressive circles) and is mounting a primary challenge, presumably because the incumbent hasn’t been loud enough in being unable to bully the majority Republicans into moving to the Left of their voter base.

Their position statement was interesting enough, but it read like a series of Progressive talking points, rather than workable policy proposals, and so this left me with a question: Who is this person going to be working with to implement any of their ideas? Because while one could make the case that the Democratic Party as a whole should adopt more a Progressive ideology, their current lack of legislative success stems from them being in the minority in Congress. If Progressive ideals were so popular across the United States as a whole, this wouldn’t be the case.

While I understand the Progressive’s frustration with the way things currently are, what I’ve seen so far are Progressive challenges to Democrats in safely Blue districts at the federal level. Which is all fine and good, but it’s going to make for a shrinking minority at the national level. Progressive politicians haven’t exactly been killing it at the state and local levels over the past decade; they haven’t been convincing people that theirs is a better way to govern. People like Representative Ocasio-Cortez may feel that the Democrats have too large an ideological tent, but the problem is that there still aren’t enough people in it to consistently drive national policy.

So if the Democrat-on-Democrat bickering cycle starts up again for the midterms, it’s not going to help. Charges of apostasy aren’t going to be useful; the party needs to find things that unite it across the whole of its spectrum to be successful. Whether its two camps can find enough that they both agree are important to them is the question to watch as the elections come closer.