U.S. Representative Ron Kind (D-WI), who is about as close to being the chairman of the Republican Wing of the Democratic Party as anyone can get (he chairs the New Democrat Coalition, a group of corporate Democrats in Congress), is attacking some of the more progressive Democrats in the House for treating progressives like they exist in the Democratic Party and supporting progressive ideals:
The Wisconsin congressman Ron Kind, who chairs the New Democrat Coalition in Congress, even compares some progressives in the House of Representatives to the Tea Party movement among Republicans: a sign that redistricting of once tightly-contested seats has left American politics “way too polarised, way too partisan, and way too much about playing to niche interests”.
As you can tell by the British spelling of “polarised” (American English spelling: “polarized”), this comes from an online article on the website of The Guardian, a British newspaper. While the article was published 10 days ago, I recently came across it thanks to a blog post by Steve Carlson of the Wisconsin-based progressive blog Blogging Blue.
It’s not just Ron Kind who is part of this latest New Dems/DLC/Third Way/corporatist attack on progressives like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Al From, the former head of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a now-closed organization that fought to advance a corporate political agenda within the Democratic Party, complained about Democratic elected officials and candidates for public office actually making an effort to appeal to progressives by railing against income inequality:
Al From, a leading figure of the centre-left who chaired the Democratic Leadership Council during the first Clinton presidency, argues that a focus on inequality, though understandable after the banking crash, risks driving all candidates too far from policies that would promote growth.
“They rev up the base of the party, but if all you are doing is redistributing golden eggs and you’ve got a dead goose, you aren’t going to get very far,” he says. “That’s what I worry about more than anything else.”
He adds: “It’s feel-good politics. It’s very easy to say: ‘When I’m elected we are going to increase social security,’ but we might not be able to pay for social security as it is.”
In short, Al From is using the Republicans’ taking points on economic issues to bash progressives.
This isn’t the 1990’s, when Democrats could get elected en masse by running on the Republicans’ right-wing economic agenda. This is the 21st century, and common-sense ideals like raising the minimum wage to $15/hour, guaranteed paid family and medical leave, raising income taxes on the wealthiest Americans, legalizing marijuana, and other common-sense ideas are now in the political mainstream. Ron Kind and Al From, on the other hand, are so stuck in the 1990’s, they don’t even know it.