If it is a stone cold certainty that, in the holy name of bipartisanship, Carper, Coons and (probably) Rochester will all go along with whatever bullshit the right foists on them, isn’t it the political vacuum on the left is what allows that to happen?
Furthermore, while we liberals don’t have any leverage with people like Carper, Coons and Rochester, if we fled the party while signaling that we’d be reliably voting for Dems who were demonstrably left of center, might we gain some leverage? At least more than we have now, which is none.
(Signaling that we’d be voting for Dems is an essential part of the strategy. Otherwise,it would be pointless. The world is already chock-a-block with irrelevant zealots.)
I’m a dyed in the wool dem, so for me this would be a cynical ploy to try and make the party better. To force Coons, Carper and Rochester into taking my vote into consideration when they “represent” me in Congress. Right now my vote is taken for granted. For me, this would be about making liberals a visible part of the Dem coalition. My major gripe with the Greens is that they are prissy snobs who are too good to enter into a Dem coalition. That can be changed from the inside.
Of course, there are downsides. We would not be able to vote in the Dem primaries for example. So we would not have had a say in the Markell/Carney primary race that was really the general. But Coons, Carper (and now) Rochester are never primaried from the left, so what are we really giving up? There are no doubt other downsides to explore, but political vacuum on the left is real, and it is killing this otherwise decent country.
“As the center shifts right, liberals press closer to the center in order (being practical and realistic) to forestall the calamity of finding themselves too far out. As they rush in this direction, the equilibrium of the system necessarily shifts right again–and the cycle repeats…The secret of the whole process is the political vacuum on the left. There is no left opposition in American politics. It is this vacuum which pulls the new Right out of the walls.”
–Hal Draper, “The Ultra Right and the Liberals” (1962)
The Overton Window quote was lifted from Dana Garrett’s FB page.
