For the last ten years, Democrats have been locked in a brutal battle over the direction of their party. One wing of the party, let’s call it the mainstream, took the lesson from the Obama years that leaning into social issues, pluralism, and changing demographics was the pathway to a longer term majority. The other wing felt that the Occupy Wall Street movement, anger at wealthy people, and a more ideological policy portfolio would lead to victory. The “mainstream” generally won this fight and occupies a majority within the party. But the insurgents are a sizable bunch. Either way, neither has been successful.

The mainstream Democratic Party, for lack of a better way to put it, decided it needed to lean into social issues and “identity” politics late in the Obama years. This was driven in no small part by the party’s failures in elections where Barack Obama was not on the ballot. The thinking was that if you could turn out the “Obama coalition” consistently, you would win elections consistently. Not only did this fail in 2016, but Trump has seen his share of the vote improve amongst most of the groups that Obama rode to big victories, at least at the margins. The only place the party has seen real growth in this era with this strategy has been among college educated voters, particularly white ones, and that has had to offset declines with lower educated white voters. Basically running on what leftists call the “HR Lady politics” is not very popular and can’t build a sustainable majority outside of white collar, educated enclaves. It’s a losing strategy. Outreach to non-white voters who gave Obama huge numbers in his runs usually has brought leftists into the fray with circus clown candidates like Graham Platner who make fools of the party, and unpopular, absolute joke policy soundbites like “Defund the Police,” which end up not only costing us White voters, but also Black voters and Latino voters. In short, Democratic “mainstream” operatives have no bloody idea how to reach any group of voters right now besides white folks with grad degrees, and they’re still the better option because they don’t sound crazy, harmful, and destructive.

Then there’s the other side, which sounds like a campus protest at this point. These fools thought the reason Obama was successful was leftist protest movements such as “Occupy Wall Street,” and well, that’s went how you’d expect. They have jumped from “omnicause” to omnicause, hoping to jumpstart their revolution, and it just never quite finds enough support outside of lower and lower turnout primaries where they can edge out a low intensity win. They come up with slogans like “defund the police,” “Green New Deal,” and “Free Palestine,” none of which have any actual substance behind the plans (they often argue over what they even mean), and end up as the subject of Republican attack ads. They have leading figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who don’t have many career achievements and generally dislike the party more than they hate their opponents, and it ends as horribly bad as you’d expect. They give us ideological lunatics like Tulsi Gabbard, John Fetterman, and Graham Platner, who end up practically making the Republican arguments for them as they run away from the Democratic Party, people so intellectually flexible that they end up disagreeing with themselves on what kind of America they want. They make up roughly a third of the party that is just angry and wants to “FIGHT” or “DO SOMETHING” even if there is no concrete idea what that is. They can’t build a majority of the party, let alone the country, and if they did take over a lot more of the existing Democrats would leave. Which is bad when you’re 27% of America. They justify this though by living in an imaginary world where they’ll convert some portion of non-voters and Trump voters into leftists, which is nonsensical to any thinking person, but it’s the only way to justify moving left when the country thinks we’ve gone too far now.

The second problem is truly a problem of leadership though, and it’s made these problems way, way worse. Instead of standing on their beliefs and values and presenting a plan of any kind to the country, they have bent over backwards to appease these folks. What’s come out of it is slop policy, adaptation of half measures to try and appease people which does not appease people, and the perception among less ideological voters of all stripes that Democrats are a bunch of weirdos obsessed with changing everything in society. Let’s be honest, I kind of get people defining us by our furthest left flank- they at least have a list of things they want to do. They might not have a real plan to get there, or any clue how they’d change a government not meant to change, but they have policies. What does a Chuck Schumer Democrat do, run the government better? It’s basically a management class political party that promises to appropriate money better than the other guys and maybe be a bit better about hiring more diverse people, and defending achievements the party had in the past, like Medicare, Obamacare, or Social Security. Really, let’s be serious, most of the great achievements Democrats have in recent times are cleaning up messes left to them by Republicans. It’s not as though they’ve put forward serious regulatory bills on things like the internet, social media, or AI. It’s kind of just “we’re better at governance,” which makes people’s eyes glaze over. Then the leftists yell about giving out free shit, and most voters know it will never happen, but some folks do latch onto it, and so people assume that’s the party’s position. I mean, it’s dumb, but I can’t blame people.

So not only are Democratic leaders appeasing people who want to change the very core of the support they currently have to become something less popular, they’re also literally putting nothing forward as a party. And this has been the case for ten years. We’ll pass continuing resolutions for the same government you don’t like, but do it better than them, so vote for us. Then we wonder why we’re being defined by the least popular among us. I don’t know why we’re shocked. Ten years into this.