How Democrats Can Stop Bickering and Focus on Stopping Trump

Here’s my attempt at an intervention. What’s needed is a clearer sense of roles within the party and the broader anti-Trump movement. Democratic politicians in Boston, Seattle, and other very progressive areas and left-leaning intellectuals and activists don’t need to be analyzing every action they take through the minds of Wisconsin swing voters. At the same time, Democratic politicians in purple and red states probably can’t always adopt the most forthright positions on sexism, homophobia, transphobia, excessive corporate power, racist policing, right-wing Christianity, and other ills of American society and get elected in those places. We need socialists, progressives, liberals, centrists, Democrats, independents, moderate Republicans, union organizers, business owners, elected officials, and lots of others to join together in the fight against Trump and the MAGA wing of the Republican Party—and agree to disagree on many policy issues. 

While my ideological views are closer to those of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, many leftists/progressives are just as guilty as the rest of the party of one major sin: trying to come up with some coherent agenda everyone in the anti-Trump coalition has to agree to. This push for policy and messaging unity comes from a sincere place. A political party is in many ways a big brand. And the assumption by many Democratic thinkers is that winning elections means creating a brand that can win in small towns, cities, and states across the country. So that leads to asserting that the Democrats, everyone in the party, must be for creating abundance, fighting oligarchy, defending the working class, or whatever idea some faction of the party is promoting. 

And according to this theory, no one with any prominence in the party can be for reducing police funding, allowing transgender girls to play high school sports, or anything else that polls badly in red or purple America.