Thread by @Gwynnion

The white left has no intention of working with Democrats as long as Democrats center women and people of color. Policy is merely pretext to attack Democrats and refuse them support. As soon as Democrats endorse a policy, they shift the goal posts to maintain the same posture.

This dynamic intensified over the years as Democrats clued in the white left can't be mollified on policy terms and is simply blackmailing them on "identity politics" with no hope of return, forcing them to make do with whatever they can get in the post-Reagan world.

The white left, in turn, said, "Ah-ha! Clearly they cannot be trusted!" They started calling Democrats all sorts of neoliberal gobbledygook names while having white populist and third party candidates tilt at windmills in order to help maintain the charade.

As disappointing as Democrats are, the white left helped make them that way and are, in fact, their own worst enemies by refusing to negotiate in good faith. Because the white left mostly wants to take over and remake the Democratic Party in its own image.

Democrats became leery of promoting progressive policies because Republicans would inevitably scream "socialism" or "communism," the leftists pushing those proposals wouldn't lift a finger to help them at the ballot box, and nobody much liked the leftists anyway.

It's actually easier for Democrats to win over moderate to conservative white voters, and there are more of them in any case, which is a perfect recipe for the mushy centrism leftists claim to despise. That's where Clinton and the Blue Dog Democrats came from.

Obama is a fairly middle of the road guy but became something of a progressive darling as the anti-Clinton option of 2008. That support didn't survive Trayvon Martin, though. Democrats were kneecapped in 2010 and Bernie wanted to primary Obama in 2012.

This is a simplistic description and it certainly cannot be said Democrats, Clinton, or Obama are above reproach, but the dynamic and sparring between Democrats and the white populist "left" wing has been going on a long time. Nader, Dean, Edwards, Bernie...

The white left's biggest tell is their strange indifference or even chumminess toward Republicans, even as Republicans have become an openly white supremacist fascist party over the past 40 years.

No, the problem is always Democrats, obviously.

Because in the white populist imagination, Republicans are no obstacle. If they can take over the Democratic Party and steer it away from its concern with racism, sexism, etc. then they can build a supermajority coalition with "good" Republicans to do as they please.

In other words, these white leftists are less concerned with progressivism or socialism than in recreating the Democratic Party as it was before the Civil Rights Act.