Smart by Liz Bruenig on how Sanders should use the family security benefits of his agenda to win over "anxious suburbanites wearied by the tumult of the Trump years." True, but it's worth a memory trip as to how opposed this idea has been on the Left. /1 nytimes.com/2020/03/05/opi…
This well-debated June 2018 piece is 1 of 2 worth revisiting. Geismer/Lassiter argued there's no way to address the concerns of affluent suburbs without demobilizing other voters or throwing the interest of working-class communities under the bus. /2 nytimes.com/2018/06/09/opi…
It benefits from being pre-primary, but it suffers from projecting a 1980s analysis 40 years forward. e.g. suburbs are different, the piece struggles to update for that. But it also assumes what it needs to prove, that there is no agenda capable of bridging the 2 communities. /3
Matt Karp (Oct '19) has a direct answer to Bruenig's idea. There's (1) no way to win over anxious suburbanites without defanging the revolution and rerunning the Obama years, and (2) that they could be open to this agenda is a sign they can be defeated. /4 jacobinmag.com/2019/10/future… 
Karp's piece is indicative of a primary that the Left entirely spent debating Warren vs. Sanders.
You wouldn't sense that Biden would go on to rinse Sanders with working-class (non-college) voters on Super Tuesday, having assumed they were the backbone of his revolution. /5
You wouldn't sense that Biden would go on to rinse Sanders with working-class (non-college) voters on Super Tuesday, having assumed they were the backbone of his revolution. /5
Meanwhile the on-the-ground big tent of the Democratic Party seems to be navigating the left-liberal ground fairly well. The problems that are appearing are not something like "Atari Democrats 2.0" but new things that need new analysis. /6
Anyway, another reason I find this moment frustrating and terrifying. The idea of a ideologically-strong-but-narrow primary electorate has collapsed, and the intellectual work hasn't been about how to broaden the appeal of democratic socialism, but instead how to limit it. /fin
