What’s it Going to Take?

The Democrats don’t care about you.

The Democrats don’t care about you.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has some thinking to do in the next few weeks. Saturday’s selection of Tom Perez over Keith Ellison for DNC Chair is only the latest humiliation from a party that takes the votes of its base for granted while doing nothing to earn that support. Is this going to be the final straw?

Both the Sanders and Clinton wings of the party approached the Chair vote as a relitigation of the 2016 primary. For the former, the fact that #BernieWouldHaveWon made it apparent that there needed to be some change in leadership. Even the position of DNC Chair, a largely functionary position, would have provided some sense that the liberal wing of the party was being listened to and acknowledged.

But for the Clintonite/Obama wing of the party, the wounds from the primary have taken on a mystical power on par with the wizardry of Russia. Donald Trump’s presidency is the fault of anyone and everyone but Clinton— and Sanders is culprit number two. Thus the liberal wing of the party needs to be beaten back into submission so that the party can continue to appropriate the energy and language of the left while avoiding any concessions.

Matt Bruenig makes this point to put it into perspective and pre-empt the inevitable spin from the establishment. That spin will center the liberal wing of the party as overly entitled white bros with a grudge against the establishment. But as Bruenig writes, that’s not what happened here:

Before this gets turned into another thing where the establishment Democrats posture as the reasonable adults victimized by the assaults of those left-wing baddies, let’s just be very clear about what happened here. It was the establishment wing that decided to recruit and then stand up a candidate in order to fight an internal battle against the left faction of the party. It was the establishment wing that then dumped massive piles of opposition research on one of their own party members. And it was the establishment wing that did all of this in the shadow of Trump, sowing disunity in order to contest a position whose leadership they insist does not really matter.

Let’s remember that loyal soldier Sanders and his team fought hard for Clinton after the primary. Most Sanders supporters ended up holding their noses and voting for the former Secretary of State.

The reasons she lost— the real ones— were her campaign’s arrogance and her personal unpopularity.

So given the insurmountable differences within the party and the inability of the establishment to compromise even a tiny amount with the liberal wing and throw them a meaningless bone, one has to ask the Sanders Democrat: what’s it going to take for you to leave the party?

Or will the liberal wing of the nation’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party move the goalposts once again to accommodate their inability and unwillingness to break with the Democrats?

My money’s on the latter.

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