I dont agree with the premise of this article at all. The party absolutely does have a base, and the base wants social justice and economic opportunity. Thats universal and obvious. Thats more than enough right there create a platform around without reaching to the fringes like pro lifers, gun nuts and zionists. Josh Marshall who runs that blog is a zionist so maybe thats what he is talking about. He wants to pretend there is no unifying philsophy amongst Dem voters, so theres room for "centrist’ nuttery in the party, and room for tacit war crimes supporting nuts like himself. There is not, because of our strong base drive toward social justice.
Not only does the Democratic Party have a base, its base is larger and more loyal than those of almost any other party in the world, even in other two-party systems. Voter loyalty in general is extremely high in the US, which is one of the major issues that has led to the current constitutional crisis.
Exactly. Its utterly fucking ridiculous to suggest that there isn’t a Democratic base. Its just that the base has been at odds with party leadership for 10 years.
71% of the party voted for progressive Platner in Maine. His politics got the most votes ever in a Democratic primary. We don’t have to worry about nationwide definitions of ‘base’ in this instance to argue about who deserves special deference from party leaders.
And I have a hard time believing this piece would EVER get promoted when people talk about “black voters are the base”, which is almost always only used to justify white centrists rather than, say, police reform. But for some reason it’s important to establish when progressives in 3% black Maine win a landslide and then ask for recognition by their own party leadership.
The reality is that party leadership has basically never represented any of these bases. The demographic that leadership represents extremely well is big money donors. Judging by leadership, that’s the real base. They’re the group that must always be catered to and whose loss they’d see as a 5 alarm fire.
Why does this matter? Certainly every party or large societal group has various factions and pressure groups. It matters because lots of groups have the sense that the Democratic Party is fundamentally theirs or that they should have some pride of place in its direction. But in a purely descriptive sense this is simply not true. And that leads to what we might call chronic discourses of betrayal running through all its factional struggles. We’re seeing one of those now, unfolding in multiple directions.
Every other democracy on the planet figured this out a century or more ago, with party pluralism through proportional representation. Instead we have a defacto two party system, due to our winner-take-all, first past the post elections. In any other democracy, social democrats (“progressives” in the US) would have their own party, the liberals ("centrists, moderates or establishment Democrats in the US) would have their own party, and socialists/Democratic socialists would have a party. There would likely be a labor party, and a green party. Here, just the Democrats. That’s it. All of those ideological groups competing for control of one party.
This country is such bullshit. My whole fucking life I’ve been fed this crap about the unparalleled virtues of our glorious, enlightened, liberal representative democracy. But it’s a crock. Millions of us have no representation. Sure, there is a member of the House and Two senators in Congress who are supposed to represent me and every other American in my congressional district and state, respectively, but I didn’t vote for any of them. The candidates I did vote for all lost. The candidates who won don’t represent me. They don’t represent my values, my beliefs, my morals, my ideals. No one does. Representative democracy my ass.
Do not worry, the DNC found the anti-AIPAC party member in their midst and got rid of him without prejudice, stopping just short of a televised actual beheading. Their base is clean once again.