There's a certain kind of argument that still comes up from time to time, one that I think we're all familiar with. It's the one that we continue to handcap ourselves in the current struggle, the one that usually begins either "well, reasonably..." or "we can't lower ourselves to..." And we all know the sort of people I'm talking about.
I call them Vichy Democrats. Or Chamberlains, after the late PM.
The trouble is, we still need these people. We can't enforce ideological conformity; not only is that not what we're about (we are genuinely better than THAT) but it'll kill us in the long run. We just need to educate them.
The problem is that they assume that this is a civil struggle between reasonable people. They assume that even the leading the republicans are, for the most part, playing fair and decent people. They may genuinely think that the liberal wing of the party is more out of touch than the right wing of the republicans, or that there's a liberal bias in the media. They don't want to do anything that might upset anyone.
They're wrong on all counts of course. But we're yelling at them perhaps a little too much when we need to essentially be performing the rectal caputectomy that they so richly need.
And they're making the same mistakes that Chamberlain did - and, like Chamberlain, they'd be fine in a different decade, but not in a struggle this important against this vicious an enemy.