Listening to the news about the Democratic party can be disheartening at best. This week a story in the New York Times came out discussing how DNC leadership is willing to disenfranchise up to half the party in order to prevent Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination.
They claim that this is in order to solidify a win. They claim that it's the swing voters that they're courting and that those voters would never vote for Sanders. It's policies, they claim, or occasionally they'll claim it's those mid-westerners and their anti-Semitism, usually while engaging in anti-Semetic tropes.
Meanwhile, On the Media put out a story this weekend about the disenfranchized progressive voter, just how many progressives are turned away from voting, or vote for a third party rather than vote for a moderate.
On its face, these two situations don't reconcile. The Democratic Party must want to in, mustn't it? Instead of courting Republicans who might somehow be persuaded to vote for a Democrat (despite Trump's 80% approval rating amongst Republicans) why wouldn't they work to energize the voter base- to register more underprivileged, undercounted, underrepresented people and energize the youth?
Why wouldn't the DNC want to show the country that Trump is wrong in his "Do nothing Democrats" taunt, that the Democratic Party does have a grand vision as a counter to the grand vision of Republicans?
The answer is simpler than it seems... The DNC's fear-mongering about Sanders not being a viable candidate is not for Republicans or the moderates amongst its ranks, but rather they themselves.
We see this reflected not just in political circles, but the corporate "liberal media" where Sanders is consistently painted in a negative light even on self-described liberal news outlets.
The fact is that the critique that many Republicans have had over the hypocrisy of the Democratic party is real. There is a "Limousine Liberal" with a vested interest in the status quo, who decries Trump's "Make America Great Again" slongan, but who pines for the days of the Clinton era, where public programs were cut, but since corporate growth was high, only poor/brown people noticed.
Sanders makes the DNC uncomfortable because he forces the Democratic party to come face to face with the reality that it isn't for poor people, brown people or the youth, but rather to keep things simmering just enough below the surface to keep the lid from popping off.
With Trump in office, the lid has popped off and now the DNC leadership is scrambling to figure out how to keep control of the narrative. They've invented a make-believe voter, a Joe or Jane Republican who watches Fox News but will be persuaded to vote for a "moderate" Democrat.
It's time for the DNC leadership to get honest with itself and the American people. The Democratic coalition is breaking apart at the seams. The party is split between two very different ideas, one where we dream of the 90s and the other where we live in the present and present the people with a comprehensive plan to enact sweeping changes that will save our children, help heal our environment and repair our decaying infrastructure.
I've lived through the 90s and I don't want another Bill Clinton. I want another Franklin Rosevelt.