Something has been bugging me with this year’s primary season. Actually it has been bothering me for a while, and it has just recently become manifest. The Democratic party can no longer claim to be the Liberal or Progressive party… because it has willfully divorced itself from pushing a Liberal agenda.
Even when every national poll shows that Progressive policies are desired by a majority of the people… we have failed to push them. As a result we keep losing ground to the extreme right-wing.
Ben Norton at Salon has distilled my thoughts much more eloquently than I can…
Clinton’s campaign ... this week, accusing Sanders “of trying to convince the next generation of progressives that the Democratic Party is corrupt.”
The notion that Sanders had to try to convince progressives of this in the first place is ludicrous. The warmongering, corporate-funded, pro-privatization Democratic Party leadership has long made it loud and clear that it is thoroughly corrupt and reactionary.
Yet Clinton and her supporters happen to be correct about one thing; they are just right for the wrong reasons.
Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. And this is a good thing.
What the Clinton camp appears to be incapable of understanding is that the Democratic Party is less and less popular among progressive Americans.
Since the rise of the Clintonian “New Democrat” almost three decades ago, the party has moved so far to the right it has little in common with the base it purports to represent.
He continues on, and… I want to be a Democrat… but I cannot and will not support the leadership of the party and their daft march to the Right. Not any more. They have let the Overton Window (hell they have helped push it) to the right… And we of the Progressive movement look around and wonder why we keep getting hit by the people who claim to be our advocates and allies.
Where the hell did my party go?