Conservatives in the Democratic Party are a dead issue... Not going to happen. For all the talk... All the pretty speeches about the big tent? The Democrats view and treat apostacy even worse than the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Look how many they have tried to run out of town, county, State & Country for not voting in lock step.
Public Disagreement is not acceptable. Although some like Manchin who had his own power base could push things. But these days what happens to ANYONE who dares question the perfection of ever-increasing Illegal Immigration? Or even dares to suggest that biology might actually affect athletic ability? It aint pretty...
And God help anyone who points out the absurdity of people making 6-7 figures lecturing people who have never made more than $40K a year on their "Privilege"
And anyone who tries to put the interests of the Working Class above the Brahmin Left? I believe the proper quote is "Burn Them! Burn Them!" Or even suggests the Working Class might have legitimate grievances...
There are and will be no Conservatives in the Democratic Party.... If only because the Party won't allow or tolerate them.
In fairness to Platner he did more than "a stint in the Marines". I think Even kind of under represented what 3 combat tours in a very busy time in Iraq were. I also don't think Platner misrepresented his persona either, he'd probably be a lot of fun to go shooting with at a long distance range. But... His rhetoric sounded like something from the squad, humorous enough, and I certainly agree with his grievances, it was in the remedies that he seemed way out in left field, as do they all.
I got Ms Barker's book (from the library of course) and am glad I stuck it out through all the money raising parts to the end where I was able to make more sense of some things I'd been thinking. Barker points out that the Republicans also are not necessarily aligned with working class priorities either.
What would convince me that a Democratic candidate was someone I could support would be if they could break with voting with the party depending on the issue. To take that kind of a stand a candidate would face fierce opposition in the primaries funded by groups with lots of money and the loss of support of the far left even in the general.
I remember a quip from P.J. O'Rourke about George H.W. Bush wanting a real conservative as a running mate, but Lloyd Bentsen was already taken.
The Democrats are the Party of Angry Women who have zero interest in sharing power a demographic they loathe.
The Democrats are benefiting from Trump Fatigue and may even squeak out the Senate along with the House, but all their energies will quickly go into impeachment.
We remain a closely divided country where each side despises the other.
I don't agree with the assertion that "we remain a closely divided country where each side despises the other." Not one bit.
My lived experience is that most left- and right-leaning people coexist just fine, and that there's plenty of room on both sides to respect differences of opinion.
I'll cheerfully toss the media under the bus here: in true MSM fashion, they all find the most ridiculous caricatures of each side, give them a megaphone, and then hyperventilate accordingly. The NYT is just as bad as Fox News; they just sit on different sides of the same dung heap.
So yes, if you read mainstream media, you'll imagine that we're on the brink of civil war. But in reality, I think there's a large "middle" in this country with plenty of healthy political diversity.
That said: from a marketing perspective, I don't know how Democrats will shake the perception of being the party of angry suburban box-wine-and-Xanax women. Republicans have made that label stick, and the Dems have a lot of work ahead of them to prove themselves otherwise.
I tend to agree with this. I dont see people despising each other in everyday life. Unfortunately both our political and media environments have evolved to elevate the fringes.
You're missing something absolutely fundamental. You are confusing between liberals and progressives, and from the numbers you cite probably lumping them together. There is nothing inopportune about the liberals - who do not want to "defund the police," encourage gender exploration in infants or open the border to all comers. The progressives, meanwhile, are causing tremendous and possibly irreparable harm -- but they are NOT 59% of the party or even half of that. Americans have very much confused the issue by thinking "liberal" means far left, and anyone who tries to deal with this historically or internationally has to engage in awkward translations, not unlike explaining the Electoral College lunacy or why Americans stick to a system in which no one knows how many ounces there are in a gallon nor inches in a mile.
Out of curiosity, when is the last time anyone here ever heard in discussion an example of why the number of inches in a mile or the number of (fluid) ounces in a gallon actually mattered? We do now have a classical liberal party, Liberal Party USA.
And if someone tells you that they immediately know the weight of a liter of water, they're wrong. I didn't specify the temperature or the pressure. Does the temperature matter? Yes above 3.98 centigrade (39 and a bit Fahrenheit) water expands, including sea water, so a liter of water weighs less. And a kilogram of water is larger. That's a fair part of current ocean level rise.
Ruy you are constantly committing thought crime, frustrating the folk who now run the dnc and losing readership.
The democrats who agree with you are in a situation similar to the jews in Germany circa 1938-39. They just can’t believe their neighbors would do that.
Dems could easily outflank the Republicans on the two key issues of trade and immigration if it decided to.
For instance, instead of ICE deportations, a biometric Social Security card would be a much more efficient and humane way to enforce our immigration laws.
And instead of Trump's slapdash tariffs, a new piece of legislation targeted exclusively at imports manufactured in low-wage countries: a "wage-price equalization tax."
Unfortunately, for this to happen would require an internal realignment every bit as radical as the one that occurred inside the Republican party. Would need to be a self-financed billionaire candidate, only not as crazy as Trump.
To bleed over into foreign policy, the German government has apparently been grooming aspiring politicians to be part of the DSA coalition. A conservative Democrat would tell them to stop it or else.
The Democrats cannot attract conservatives without abandoning the practice which drove the conservatives away: Phony racism accusations. Read "Nothing Left", by Evan Barker, for abundant examples.
What the country needs is Democrats who understand that to keep the big tent big, sometimes you need to kick the assholes out.
Bill Clinton had his Sistah Souljah moment. Obama publicly distanced himself from Jeremiah Wright. Go all the way back to Truman, and you see that Wallace and Thurmond’s campaigns helped him by peeling off the most disliked elements of the party.
“No enemies to the left” is simply a losing strategy.
Bush’s main attack was Dems were soft on crime. He beat Dukakis over the head with it in 1988.
1992 was pretty close to peak crime in the United States. The LA riots had just happened. Clinton had to establish that he was no Dukakis to blunt Bush’s attack.
It was part of the tapestry, but not the main one. The economy was. And if the progressive/left is now a bigger part of the party, telling them off has a greater risk than it did in 1992 after Clinton was already the presumptive nominee. And her remarks were not going to be backed by anyone.
Regardless of how much of your incredibly long post really reflects reality in the Democratic Party, you’re certainly contributing fodder Republicans will use to our detriment in the next 50 days.
Whether you go with a two party system, both who have disparate factions, or additional parties with differing agendas, those in power will have to govern by building coalitions with imperfect allies and your ally on one issue may be your adversary on the next issue. Politicians, let alone the American voting public, have yet to come to this logical conclusion. Failure to do this assures gridlock, nothing gets done, where we are today. To get there, all sides are going to have to build bridges with each other. While I do not have much respect for him, I sense Fetterman sees that.
And I’m saying that spite is illegitimate, and voting for the guy who fucked up the pandemic and cant handle crisis, and creates them constantly, should have been cause to override that spite.
And, what was the source of that spite? The Democrats refused to deliver what they had promised her and voters like her for many years. In her own words, "The night I filled out my ballot for President in the 2024 election, I couldn't help but think back to the Barack Obama campaign (in which she was a campaign volunteer). It was over fifteen years ago, and so much had changed."
Later in the same chapter, she related what she saw at the Republican convention: "The people around me...were the people everyone ignored--everyone except for him (Trump). He was their lifeline, the single voice to scold both parties for shipping their jobs away, to dare the politicians to secure the border--to scorn the media elites in their bubble, calling them names. Everyday people enjoyed seeing power structures challenged, and Trump did that."
My favorite fictional politician, Willie Stark, said, "Nail 'em up if they don't deliver." The Democrats did not deliver, so the voters nailed them up.
I agree with the latter half of the argument, that more and genuine outreach is needed for the Democrats to regain working class and rural voters to keep competitive in not just the House, but the Senate as well, where a half million Wyoming residents have as much power as 39 million Californians.
The idea that conservative Democrats would have prevented the party from taking unpopular positions is wishful thinking however. As an example former senator Manchin is so conservative he just endorsed Collins, the Republican candidate for senator from Maine, yet he endorsed none of the supposed positions mentioned above and attributed to conservative Democrats.
The simple truth is both parties once overlapped considerably in the middle ground between their respective positions and policies. There were liberal New England Republicans like Collins, now alone in that region, and conservative southern Democrats like former Texas governor Rick Perry (in his early political career) and Phil Gramm. They too are now gone.
As the parties moved away from overlapping political positions, such as pro-life Democrats or pro-choice Republicans, the people who continued to defy their respective party dwindled to the few left. In defense of the Democrats both Golden and Gluesenkamp-Perez remain examples of this rare breed, while I cannot think of any Republicans who vote with the Democrats regularly.
It's simply getting more and more difficult to find voters who tolerate cross aisle positions from their elected representative and senators. I do not find, for example, senator Fetterman's rabid Zionism to be a mark of independence, but rather a betrayal of our nation: I care not what the senator thinks, but any American politician who hoists another nation's flag over our own ought to be taken out and shot in front of a TV crew. I cannot support too wide a tent, and enabling genocide and war crimes with my tax dollars is too far a bridge for me.
Other voters will have their own and likely different red lines but these limits to what can be accepted exist and affect who gets elected. Indeed, not to harp on Zionism, but it is clear that even a 10 to 1 financial advantage isn't enough to keep a liberal out if one remains too supportive of a foreign nation over our own, as the current Michigan senate race demonstrates.
That said there are areas where disagreement can be not just tolerated, but encouraged: gun control for example. I'm a strong 2A supporter, it's as much a part of our constitution and as valuable a right as the 19th Amendment allowing women to vote, and no more subject to interpretation or limitation than any of our rights. Abortion is another example: if a politician is pro-life but fights for what his or her voters support that is a divergence I could tolerate.
A big tent is essential, but so is policing how much tolerance is acceptable for one's base. Biden and Harris lost for numerous reasons, simple and obvious incompetence among them, but enabling war crimes was one of them. Losing Afghanistan against military advice was another, igniting inflation a third, along with insisting on defying retirement even as senility crept in, an ongoing issue among too many current politicians.
Moderation will not rescue incompetence or corruption but too often we're asked to conflate them: former senator Sinema wasn't thrown out because she was conservative, but rather due to a failure to listen to her voters, along with flagrant corruption and openly paid off support of the likes of hedge fund managers over the rest of us.
A politician with their own views and independence is fine. As a voter though I am helping elect someone to get certain policies put into effective use. That's my motivation as a voter. A big tent where things get done, bills passed, oversight maintained, and the essential work of government done on time and well is welcome. Getting stuff done is critical however, and of much greater concern than a wide array of political philosophies for variety's sake alone.
Re: whether conservative Dems would have stopped the party from pursuing unpopular policies, I think Ruy's argument isn't that one or two members would make a difference. Rather, it's that if they constituted a sizable faction in the party -- larger than the party's House majority margin, e.g. -- they would have the ability more strongly curb the far left's influence. Manchin, Golden, MGP, etc. can't do that on their own with the numbers they have.
Many of those you and Ruy call "conservative democrats" are liberal on economic and labor issues. Failing to make this clear makes it appear that you and Ruy believe that the party needs to be conservative on economic and labor issues. Is this the case?
At a macro level, no, that is not our argument. You'll notice that Ruy didn't point to economic issues in his piece. If you want a sense of his perspective on how the Democrats might rebuild a compelling economic worldview, I'd recommend the first piece he wrote for TLV. https://www.welcomestack.org/p/the-long-slow-death-of-social-democracy
Jesus Ruy. Always respected and agreed with your critique of the woke cultural liberals pontificating at the working class. Did you write this one after climbing out of bed with Shumer and Pelosi? The (formerly) democratic party has 2 problems. One is the cultural liberals. The other is the party leaders dependent on billionaire and AIPAC money who helped destroy the social democratic programs and policies which protected the working class and the poor from immiseration and baresubsistance. While funding useless and genocidal wars. Are these the people you want us to support to save ourselves from the cultural liberals. Even Tucker Carlson, who has defended El Sayid (a social democrat, not a socialist or a cultural militant) and recognizes that BOTH party elites are corrupt and incompetent has a more balanced take on the overall situation than you do in this article. Have you given up on social democracy rather than trying to restore it?
Conservatives in the Democratic Party are a dead issue... Not going to happen. For all the talk... All the pretty speeches about the big tent? The Democrats view and treat apostacy even worse than the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Look how many they have tried to run out of town, county, State & Country for not voting in lock step.
Public Disagreement is not acceptable. Although some like Manchin who had his own power base could push things. But these days what happens to ANYONE who dares question the perfection of ever-increasing Illegal Immigration? Or even dares to suggest that biology might actually affect athletic ability? It aint pretty...
And God help anyone who points out the absurdity of people making 6-7 figures lecturing people who have never made more than $40K a year on their "Privilege"
And anyone who tries to put the interests of the Working Class above the Brahmin Left? I believe the proper quote is "Burn Them! Burn Them!" Or even suggests the Working Class might have legitimate grievances...
There are and will be no Conservatives in the Democratic Party.... If only because the Party won't allow or tolerate them.
In fairness to Platner he did more than "a stint in the Marines". I think Even kind of under represented what 3 combat tours in a very busy time in Iraq were. I also don't think Platner misrepresented his persona either, he'd probably be a lot of fun to go shooting with at a long distance range. But... His rhetoric sounded like something from the squad, humorous enough, and I certainly agree with his grievances, it was in the remedies that he seemed way out in left field, as do they all.
I got Ms Barker's book (from the library of course) and am glad I stuck it out through all the money raising parts to the end where I was able to make more sense of some things I'd been thinking. Barker points out that the Republicans also are not necessarily aligned with working class priorities either.
What would convince me that a Democratic candidate was someone I could support would be if they could break with voting with the party depending on the issue. To take that kind of a stand a candidate would face fierce opposition in the primaries funded by groups with lots of money and the loss of support of the far left even in the general.
Not sure of the remedies. Third party maybe.
I remember a quip from P.J. O'Rourke about George H.W. Bush wanting a real conservative as a running mate, but Lloyd Bentsen was already taken.
The Democrats are the Party of Angry Women who have zero interest in sharing power a demographic they loathe.
The Democrats are benefiting from Trump Fatigue and may even squeak out the Senate along with the House, but all their energies will quickly go into impeachment.
We remain a closely divided country where each side despises the other.
I don't agree with the assertion that "we remain a closely divided country where each side despises the other." Not one bit.
My lived experience is that most left- and right-leaning people coexist just fine, and that there's plenty of room on both sides to respect differences of opinion.
I'll cheerfully toss the media under the bus here: in true MSM fashion, they all find the most ridiculous caricatures of each side, give them a megaphone, and then hyperventilate accordingly. The NYT is just as bad as Fox News; they just sit on different sides of the same dung heap.
So yes, if you read mainstream media, you'll imagine that we're on the brink of civil war. But in reality, I think there's a large "middle" in this country with plenty of healthy political diversity.
That said: from a marketing perspective, I don't know how Democrats will shake the perception of being the party of angry suburban box-wine-and-Xanax women. Republicans have made that label stick, and the Dems have a lot of work ahead of them to prove themselves otherwise.
I tend to agree with this. I dont see people despising each other in everyday life. Unfortunately both our political and media environments have evolved to elevate the fringes.
You're missing something absolutely fundamental. You are confusing between liberals and progressives, and from the numbers you cite probably lumping them together. There is nothing inopportune about the liberals - who do not want to "defund the police," encourage gender exploration in infants or open the border to all comers. The progressives, meanwhile, are causing tremendous and possibly irreparable harm -- but they are NOT 59% of the party or even half of that. Americans have very much confused the issue by thinking "liberal" means far left, and anyone who tries to deal with this historically or internationally has to engage in awkward translations, not unlike explaining the Electoral College lunacy or why Americans stick to a system in which no one knows how many ounces there are in a gallon nor inches in a mile.
Out of curiosity, when is the last time anyone here ever heard in discussion an example of why the number of inches in a mile or the number of (fluid) ounces in a gallon actually mattered? We do now have a classical liberal party, Liberal Party USA.
And if someone tells you that they immediately know the weight of a liter of water, they're wrong. I didn't specify the temperature or the pressure. Does the temperature matter? Yes above 3.98 centigrade (39 and a bit Fahrenheit) water expands, including sea water, so a liter of water weighs less. And a kilogram of water is larger. That's a fair part of current ocean level rise.
Nope. Conservative Clinton DLC Democrats are what got us here.
This might be the best article I've read about partisan politics in 2026. Thank you.
Ruy you are constantly committing thought crime, frustrating the folk who now run the dnc and losing readership.
The democrats who agree with you are in a situation similar to the jews in Germany circa 1938-39. They just can’t believe their neighbors would do that.
Flash. They will if they can.
Dems could easily outflank the Republicans on the two key issues of trade and immigration if it decided to.
For instance, instead of ICE deportations, a biometric Social Security card would be a much more efficient and humane way to enforce our immigration laws.
And instead of Trump's slapdash tariffs, a new piece of legislation targeted exclusively at imports manufactured in low-wage countries: a "wage-price equalization tax."
Unfortunately, for this to happen would require an internal realignment every bit as radical as the one that occurred inside the Republican party. Would need to be a self-financed billionaire candidate, only not as crazy as Trump.
A party has to compete if it wants to win.
To bleed over into foreign policy, the German government has apparently been grooming aspiring politicians to be part of the DSA coalition. A conservative Democrat would tell them to stop it or else.
The Democrats cannot attract conservatives without abandoning the practice which drove the conservatives away: Phony racism accusations. Read "Nothing Left", by Evan Barker, for abundant examples.
What the country needs is Democrats who understand that to keep the big tent big, sometimes you need to kick the assholes out.
Bill Clinton had his Sistah Souljah moment. Obama publicly distanced himself from Jeremiah Wright. Go all the way back to Truman, and you see that Wallace and Thurmond’s campaigns helped him by peeling off the most disliked elements of the party.
“No enemies to the left” is simply a losing strategy.
Clinton didn’t win because of Sista Souljah
Bush’s main attack was Dems were soft on crime. He beat Dukakis over the head with it in 1988.
1992 was pretty close to peak crime in the United States. The LA riots had just happened. Clinton had to establish that he was no Dukakis to blunt Bush’s attack.
It was part of the tapestry, but not the main one. The economy was. And if the progressive/left is now a bigger part of the party, telling them off has a greater risk than it did in 1992 after Clinton was already the presumptive nominee. And her remarks were not going to be backed by anyone.
Regardless of how much of your incredibly long post really reflects reality in the Democratic Party, you’re certainly contributing fodder Republicans will use to our detriment in the next 50 days.
Whether you go with a two party system, both who have disparate factions, or additional parties with differing agendas, those in power will have to govern by building coalitions with imperfect allies and your ally on one issue may be your adversary on the next issue. Politicians, let alone the American voting public, have yet to come to this logical conclusion. Failure to do this assures gridlock, nothing gets done, where we are today. To get there, all sides are going to have to build bridges with each other. While I do not have much respect for him, I sense Fetterman sees that.
Promotion of Evan Barker, who proudly said she voted for Trump out of spite, is disqualifying
And I’m saying that spite is illegitimate, and voting for the guy who fucked up the pandemic and cant handle crisis, and creates them constantly, should have been cause to override that spite.
And, what was the source of that spite? The Democrats refused to deliver what they had promised her and voters like her for many years. In her own words, "The night I filled out my ballot for President in the 2024 election, I couldn't help but think back to the Barack Obama campaign (in which she was a campaign volunteer). It was over fifteen years ago, and so much had changed."
Later in the same chapter, she related what she saw at the Republican convention: "The people around me...were the people everyone ignored--everyone except for him (Trump). He was their lifeline, the single voice to scold both parties for shipping their jobs away, to dare the politicians to secure the border--to scorn the media elites in their bubble, calling them names. Everyday people enjoyed seeing power structures challenged, and Trump did that."
My favorite fictional politician, Willie Stark, said, "Nail 'em up if they don't deliver." The Democrats did not deliver, so the voters nailed them up.
I agree with the latter half of the argument, that more and genuine outreach is needed for the Democrats to regain working class and rural voters to keep competitive in not just the House, but the Senate as well, where a half million Wyoming residents have as much power as 39 million Californians.
The idea that conservative Democrats would have prevented the party from taking unpopular positions is wishful thinking however. As an example former senator Manchin is so conservative he just endorsed Collins, the Republican candidate for senator from Maine, yet he endorsed none of the supposed positions mentioned above and attributed to conservative Democrats.
The simple truth is both parties once overlapped considerably in the middle ground between their respective positions and policies. There were liberal New England Republicans like Collins, now alone in that region, and conservative southern Democrats like former Texas governor Rick Perry (in his early political career) and Phil Gramm. They too are now gone.
As the parties moved away from overlapping political positions, such as pro-life Democrats or pro-choice Republicans, the people who continued to defy their respective party dwindled to the few left. In defense of the Democrats both Golden and Gluesenkamp-Perez remain examples of this rare breed, while I cannot think of any Republicans who vote with the Democrats regularly.
It's simply getting more and more difficult to find voters who tolerate cross aisle positions from their elected representative and senators. I do not find, for example, senator Fetterman's rabid Zionism to be a mark of independence, but rather a betrayal of our nation: I care not what the senator thinks, but any American politician who hoists another nation's flag over our own ought to be taken out and shot in front of a TV crew. I cannot support too wide a tent, and enabling genocide and war crimes with my tax dollars is too far a bridge for me.
Other voters will have their own and likely different red lines but these limits to what can be accepted exist and affect who gets elected. Indeed, not to harp on Zionism, but it is clear that even a 10 to 1 financial advantage isn't enough to keep a liberal out if one remains too supportive of a foreign nation over our own, as the current Michigan senate race demonstrates.
That said there are areas where disagreement can be not just tolerated, but encouraged: gun control for example. I'm a strong 2A supporter, it's as much a part of our constitution and as valuable a right as the 19th Amendment allowing women to vote, and no more subject to interpretation or limitation than any of our rights. Abortion is another example: if a politician is pro-life but fights for what his or her voters support that is a divergence I could tolerate.
A big tent is essential, but so is policing how much tolerance is acceptable for one's base. Biden and Harris lost for numerous reasons, simple and obvious incompetence among them, but enabling war crimes was one of them. Losing Afghanistan against military advice was another, igniting inflation a third, along with insisting on defying retirement even as senility crept in, an ongoing issue among too many current politicians.
Moderation will not rescue incompetence or corruption but too often we're asked to conflate them: former senator Sinema wasn't thrown out because she was conservative, but rather due to a failure to listen to her voters, along with flagrant corruption and openly paid off support of the likes of hedge fund managers over the rest of us.
A politician with their own views and independence is fine. As a voter though I am helping elect someone to get certain policies put into effective use. That's my motivation as a voter. A big tent where things get done, bills passed, oversight maintained, and the essential work of government done on time and well is welcome. Getting stuff done is critical however, and of much greater concern than a wide array of political philosophies for variety's sake alone.
Re: whether conservative Dems would have stopped the party from pursuing unpopular policies, I think Ruy's argument isn't that one or two members would make a difference. Rather, it's that if they constituted a sizable faction in the party -- larger than the party's House majority margin, e.g. -- they would have the ability more strongly curb the far left's influence. Manchin, Golden, MGP, etc. can't do that on their own with the numbers they have.
Many of those you and Ruy call "conservative democrats" are liberal on economic and labor issues. Failing to make this clear makes it appear that you and Ruy believe that the party needs to be conservative on economic and labor issues. Is this the case?
At a macro level, no, that is not our argument. You'll notice that Ruy didn't point to economic issues in his piece. If you want a sense of his perspective on how the Democrats might rebuild a compelling economic worldview, I'd recommend the first piece he wrote for TLV. https://www.welcomestack.org/p/the-long-slow-death-of-social-democracy
Jesus Ruy. Always respected and agreed with your critique of the woke cultural liberals pontificating at the working class. Did you write this one after climbing out of bed with Shumer and Pelosi? The (formerly) democratic party has 2 problems. One is the cultural liberals. The other is the party leaders dependent on billionaire and AIPAC money who helped destroy the social democratic programs and policies which protected the working class and the poor from immiseration and baresubsistance. While funding useless and genocidal wars. Are these the people you want us to support to save ourselves from the cultural liberals. Even Tucker Carlson, who has defended El Sayid (a social democrat, not a socialist or a cultural militant) and recognizes that BOTH party elites are corrupt and incompetent has a more balanced take on the overall situation than you do in this article. Have you given up on social democracy rather than trying to restore it?
Give it up, Ruy. You’re no longer a Democrat.