On his Substack, The Sanity Clause, Klein writes with the clarity of someone who remembers what a winning coalition looks like and the urgency of someone who knows it’s slipping away.
Klein's writing will offend some, but it is both thought-provoking and entertaining. Here’s an excerpt from a piece that especially stuck with me, on how a post-election party in DC reminded him that he’s “still not a Democrat.”
There were lots of old friends, and a few old antagonists, at the party—and, curiously, not much talk of Trump. The election seemed too raw and ginormous to even contemplate. I drank too much. Ahh, Tito’s, you subtle temptress.
I also had lunch with two old friends, fellow New Democrats from the 1990s…and we did talk about what happened and I asked, what do we do now? “The same thing we did 35 years ago, we rebuild the party,” said one. I shuddered.
I’ve been thinking about those post-Dukakis days a lot since the election. And how hard it was, how much flak we—and the Democratic Leadership Council, and the Progressive Policy Institute, and other sources of Sanity—took from the left. I remember attending a DLC meeting where Bill Clinton spoke in 1991. Afterward, I listened to a mainstream newspaper reporter opining about how Clinton could never be nominated because he was “so right-wing.”
…
In the coming months and years, I’ll be rooting for the moderates to recapture the Democratic Party. But not from the inside. I could not be a member of a party that is run by these self-interest-obsessed factions any more than I could join a party that coddles the Proud Boys.
Years ago, Andrew Sullivan and I decided we were members of the same political party—which doesn’t exist. I suspect Sully still has his membership. I sometimes lived with the delusion that the Democrats could be that party. No more.
Read the full thing, link below. With 926 days until the next presidential primary, what can make the Kleins of the world reconsider?
