What Welcome Means

Making progressive activists uncomfortable is required to make a majority feel welcome

“I am not looking for a messenger that resonates with me,” says Ashley All, who ran the campaign that defeated the anti-abortion measure in Kansas. “I’m looking for messengers that resonate with the people I’m trying to persuade.”

That quote, from a 2023 story in The New York Times on The Surprising Places Where Abortion Rights Are Winning, is about more than one issue. It’s about a choice facing practical leaders within the Democratic Party:

• Elevate messengers who resonate with the few million progressive activists? 

• Or build a platform for those who reject the litmus tests and condescension that drove voters to select a GOP trifecta?

We choose the latter, even when uncomfortable.

Fantasy Land

Like other pragmatic Democrats, we were dismayed by the leadership elections for the DNC last weekend. Here’s Lanae Erickson and Jon Cowan in MSNBC:

At the Democratic National Committee’s winter meetings this past weekend, there was almost no acknowledgement of the depth of the political hole the party finds itself occupying. Instead, attendees heard that a little tweak in messaging here and a new podcast or two there can fix the problem. That, to put it mildly, is a fantasy.

Many have pointed out that newly elected Chair Ken Martin's successful campaign was explicit in rejecting a need for change. But this is no surprise: as the Chair of the association representing his fellow state party chairs, the Minnesota Chair was the early frontrunner and had little to gain by rocking the boat.

It was the election of David Hogg as Vice Chair that caused us to ring the alarm. While primarily known for gun-related advocacy, Hogg expanded beyond his core issue to take maximalist positions on other issues like abolishing ICE and legalizing all drugs. And he built a PAC that hurt a dynamic centrist Democrat in a key primary race.

Politico captured several of our concerns in the story Why some centrist Dems fear David Hogg could ‘do more harm than good.’

That framing somewhat misses the point, though: Hogg is the symptom of what ails the Democratic Party, not the core problem.

Welcoming is Uncomfortable

Jason Paul, a candidate for Chair of the DNC,¹ wrote a piece objecting to our critiques of Hogg’s elevation as a formal leader of the Democratic Party.

Titled Unwelcome PAC, Paul’s piece echoes critiques from others: we are being mean to 24 year old David Hogg, and any sort of fractious debates within the party are counterproductive to the goal of a lock-step mass protest of MAGA.

And, given our “Welcome” name, raising such tensions is counterproductive.

But that mistakes what the point of “Welcome” is about. Like abortion rights advocates in Kansas, we are not looking to give greater comfort to the people who are already dedicated Democratic activists. The entire point is to invite in others who currently feel unwelcome in the Democratic tent. There is little point in making progressive activists feel more welcome: they are not just welcome in the Democratic Party, they have become dominant - and themselves are hell-bent on making potential allies unwelcome.

There are full-time progressive activists, backed by millions in foundation spending and thousands of keyboard warriors, whose entire job appears to be making large swaths of the American electorate feel unwelcome in the party.

How do we know that? We ourselves have often felt unwelcome in the party. And not vaguely unwelcome: there are professional activists who see pushing people like us out of the party as part of their job. And they are succeeding: even sitting state legislators are leaving the Democratic Party at a rapid clip.

Conflict Can’t Only Be For The Left

Most critiques of our Hogg opinion have been progressive doublespeak: now is not the time for infighting…. when it comes from the center. While also looking on as progressive activists whip up a frenzy, attack incumbents, attack moderate groups, and organize primary challenges to sitting Democrats.

Hogg himself had tweeted “I’m one of the most politically toxic people in the country and I’m too radical for American politics.”

So how did he end up running for DNC Vice Chair?

Melisa Byrne is who Hogg publicly credits as the person to recruit him to run for DNC Vice Chair. She typifies the progressive doublespeak on party unity: Byrne demanded that we stop criticizing Hogg - that we need to just “spend time fighting Musk”.

Meanwhile, in the same 24-hour period as she called for unity, she attacked Democrats on Israel (asked if Democratic Majority For Israel supports ethnic cleansing in Gaza, declared John Fetterman is “literally promoting ethnic cleansing”), attacked Never Trumpers (“Tell never trumpers to fuck off. We lose with them. We win without them.”, “trashy Never Trumpers had too much influence”), asked David Axelrod if he is okay with killing Africans with AIDS, said Politico likes dead children, claimed Chuck Schumer has failed comms folks promoting his dumb strategy, and that Tim Ryan is “doing nothing except making money for big oil.”

While these comments may sound like the pained blather of a random twitter account,² Byrne is a leader of the modern progressive Shadow Party.

She led the student debt cancelation movement - the one that alienated non-college voters and harassed swing-district winners like Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, whose business was attacked in response to her opposition. She is regularly quoted in stories like The Washington Post’s “Biden has canceled $138 billion in student loans. Some say it’s not enough.” President Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain sought Byrne’s counsel and invited her to Zoom meetings with the transition team.

And she is who Hogg credits for initially calling on him to run for Vice Chair.

Her slash and burn approach is representative of the entire progressive Shadow Party. Just in the past few days:

• The ACLU’s Stefan Smith proposed putting a proverbial “sword of Damocles above the electoral heads” of Democrats in swing states by raising money to spend on primary challengers “depending on how elected officials act.”³

• Justice Democrats founder Saikat Chakrabarti launched a primary challenge to Nancy Pelosi.

• In The New Republic, there is a call to primary every Democrat.

• The president of Run For Something is saying “challenging Democratic incumbents is good & I expect we’ll see a fuckton more of it.”

Again, this is primary challenges of Democrats, not Republicans.

In the current Democratic Party ecosystem, this is what avoiding infighting means: progressives launch attacks on centrists, while centrists need to be quiet.

Attacking fellow Democrats with allegations of “ethnic cleansing” and the like is fine, but criticizing progressives is not.

David Hogg is not the problem - he’s just a clear manifestation of the problem.

Hogg should delete the worst of his tweets, where he said “Good Riddance” to Rep. Mary Peltola, and Democrats should continue pressuring him to do so. But we also need to counter the ACLUs and Melissa Byrnes and Justice Democrats who run the Shadow Party.

Progressive activists are looking for messengers who resonate with them, not the people we are trying to persuade. That means conflict is necessary.

Silence from centrist Democrats may make progressive activists more comfortable, but it makes the party less welcoming to the majority required to win.

1. Paul provided the highlight of the DNC Chair elections: when Sunrise protestors repeatedly interrupted a Chair forum after they agreed to their demands, he remarked: "I signed the pledge they wanted me to sign, so it's a little surprising... it's a little odd, when people onstage agree with you, that you then yell at them."

2. Although it should be noted Byrne has tweeted more than 207,000 times. It is possible to both be a random Twitter account and a powerful leader of the progressive movement.

3. Leaders of large ideologically rigid groups raising money to threaten primary challenges is exactly the behavior progressives point to as one of the biggest problems in the Republican Party