Obama Too Conservative for Democrats? The Sandernista attack on a leftist. James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/obama-too-conservative-for-democrats-1507070466
Leftist Jonathan Chait reports in New York magazine that he’s under rhetorical attack from other leftists. It seems that Mr. Chait has made some of his ideological comrades angry by admitting that the evidence does not exist to call President Trump a white supremacist.
Mr. Chait is being lampooned as some kind of squishy moderate. This has sparked a larger debate about how radical the Democratic Party should be and whether it has already moved well to the left of Barack Obama. Unlike Mr. Chait, many readers of this column probably don’t consider the nation’s 44th President to be a man of the “center-left.” But as Democratic Party leaders continue to lurch toward Bernie Sanders’ brand of Marxism, they are clearly making Mr. Obama appear more moderate.
The question is whether Democratic voters as well as independents who tend to vote Democratic are all coming along for the ride leftward. According to Mr. Chait:
Political activists and writers can get the impression that the Democratic Party is riven by conflict between leftists and liberals. But social media is deeply unrepresentative. On Twitter, which is swarming with communists and Nazis, every day feels like the 1932 German federal elections. The massively elevated concentration of political extremists of all varieties creates a deeply misleading portrait of the public. (This is why libertarians have managed to portray themselves as a significant proportion of the electorate, when practically speaking, they don’t exist.)
The actual Democratic Party is not divided between liberals and leftists. It’s divided between liberals and … moderates and conservatives.
Mr. Chait then marshals a variety of polling data to show that most of the party’s voters don’t consider themselves leftist or even liberal. For example, he notes Pew Research data showing that in 2016, a full 36% of Democratic voters described themselves as moderate, and another 15% called themselves conservative.
Of course such survey results can be misleading because political or philosophical labels mean different things to different people. For example, observing so many potential candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination endorsing Mr. Sanders’ single-payer health plan, Mr. Obama might also be calling himself a moderate.
But it is striking, given that Mr. Sanders won 22 states and nearly 1900 delegates in the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, that even among Democratic voters almost nobody will cop to being “far left” and just 16% call themselves “very liberal.”
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