Progressives thought they'd overtaken the Democratic Party. Now they're in despair.

[Hortensis]

74. :) You're right that averaging everything together,

the Democratic Party was not as effectively liberal in the 1940s as it was in the 1970s -- but that's because liberalism continued to advance its influence on societal attitudes over that period. What changed wasn't liberal ideals but what could be achieved and was realistic to strive for in the face of dominant attitudes. Nevertheless, the New Dealers came together and achieved magnificent, giant, liberal advances.

Those advances our very imperfect but wonderfully diverse coalition has and will continue to create are only possible because we accept everyone who wants to join the fight, instead of driving away all but a small, ineffectual fraction by requiring adherence to pure liberal ideals and currently unachievable goals.

Notably, in the beginning of FDR's presidency half of all AA voters were Democrats. By the end, virtually all were -- Democrats who helped create the New Deal. The liberals among them on average didn't meet the 1970s standards either; a bunch for instance opposed miscegenation for various reasons. And roughly half of AA Democrats were and are conservative: conservatives joining an imperfect party to both create great advances for themselves and occasionally to help retard them.

Like the fraction who in 2016 joined with imperfect white male Democrats, all of them rejecting "too much" equality, to oppose nominating and then electing our first woman president. Btw, a small but real fraction of GA's black male Dems also refused to vote to elect GA's first black woman governor. But no one wants to run them off for being too imperfect -- we NEED them. No one doubts we'll eventually elect women of whatever color to both, though, and it'll be still very imperfect liberal party that does it. The Repubs have been purging female conservatives from office, part of that giant backlash thing slightly echoed in our party. But they're down to 13 female congressmen out of 196, 5 senators out of 54.