In the heat of an argument between progressives, it is not uncommon for the argument to eventually devolve into whether one is truly progressive or not. The blast holes of “neo-liberal corporate shill” are bound to be seen on these internet battlefields. While those arguments are certainly problematic and convincing no one, another common phrase I see is whether one is a good or bad or better or worse democrat. This is really a false dichotomy and misunderstands the purpose of the democratic party.
Often, this will come up in the discussion of primary challenges. Whether or not there should be a more progressive/liberal challenger than the current occupant of the office. Another in the comparison between current elected officials. One good example is comparisons with DailyKos favorite Sen. Joe Manchin. There is, of course, no argument that Sen. Manchin is a conservative democrat. FiveThirtyEight shows that Sen. Manchin has aligned with President Trump’s position 60% of the time, which places him as the most aligned with the President’s position in the Democratic Senate caucus. On the other end of the spectrum, Sen. Gillibrand has only aligned with President Trump 12.2%. Does that make Sen. Gillibrand a better democrat than Sen. Manchin? At first glance, most on this site would probably agree.
However, another way to look at this same metric is to see how much of the time these senators would align with President Trump given the political leanings of their state. FiveThirtyEight produces a Trump Plus-Minus score which they describe as the “Difference between a member’s actual and predicted Trump-support scores.” A positive number would indicate higher than predicted support for a Trump policy and a negative number would indicate lower than predicted support for a Trump policy. In this scenario, Sen. Manchin has a Trump Plus-Minus score of -31.6 and Sen. Gillibrand has a Trump Plus-Minus score of -12.6. If we dive deeper into the current Congress, which albeit is still early, Sen. Manchin has a score of -32.6 while Sen. Gillibrand has a score of +4.5. Does this all of a sudden mean that Sen. Manchin is a better democrat than Sen. Manchin? Of course, no one on here would agree with that assessment.
Because being a “better” or “worse” democrat is really a meaningless argument to have when what we are really discussing here is ideology. Whereas, being a Democrat is like being a member of a club. You either belong or you don’t. Not all members of that club are ideologically aligned and they range the gamut from being conservative to liberal, but that range has no effect on whether you’re a better or worse member of the club. Instead, what affects your standing in that club is how you follow that club's rules (e.g. Joe Lieberman).
This may seem like a pedantic argument because ideology can be easily simplified by party affiliation, but that’s a mistake. It’s also not a benign mistake. It is really truly damaging to party unity and overall cohesion of being a truly inclusive party or diverse individuals and views. Being inclusive doesn’t mean we have to agree, but we shouldn’t attack our basic unification of identity by denigrating each other into camps of better or worse party members. Doing so pushes those people further away from us because they no longer feel apart of the same club. We need to do better to include everyone even if we don't 100% ideologically align, because at the end of the day aligning ideologically 40% of the time is a whole lot better than 0% if the time.