The word “socialism” is likely to resonate throughout the 2020 election campaign, regardless of which candidate eventually gets the Democratic Party nomination. … What does the word “socialism” mean to the average American? Thanks to the reintroduction of the term into the political discourse by Sanders (and other politicians like […] Read more »
Super Tuesday Democrats Picked A Lane: Pragmatism
… The 2020 primary has been prisoner to pathologies Democrats have developed during the Trump presidency. Though the party has spent the years since the president’s election grappling with internal ideological differences — to the point where any real meaning has been wrung from the words “progressive” and “establishment” — […] Read more »
Bernie’s revolution will be postponed until further notice
It now appears that most Democrats don’t want a revolution. Change? Sure. Revolution and chaos? No thank you. The country already has that with the guy in the White House. But after a very rough Super Tuesday, Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has doubled down on his attacks on the […] Read more »
Trump and Sanders lead competing populist movements, reshaping American politics
… Four years after Trump seized control of the Republican Party with a right-wing populist movement, a new populist crusade has risen on the left, fueled similarly by grievance and anxiety and powered by Sanders’s remarkable drive to dispatch Trump from the White House. Each is powered by a disdain […] Read more »
What Makes Southern Democrats Unique
… The states of the former Confederacy will elect a little over one quarter of Democrats’ pledged delegates in 2020 — six of them on Super Tuesday (Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia). And so as the 2020 Democratic primary contests move to the South, I figured it […] Read more »
Frozen in Anxiety: How Democratic Leaders Struggled to Confront Bernie Sanders
Late last year a group of first-term House Democrats, anxious over the party’s fractious presidential race, convened a series of discussions intended to spur unity. … That effort was just one in a series of abandoned or ineffective plans to rally the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, and the […] Read more »