Those who accuse progressives of calling for "purity tests" want this party to stand for nothing.

[Ken Burch]

49. Party officials do favor "centrists"(we should just call them conservatives)

Rahm and DWS and Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer time and time again push to nominate the most conservative Dems they can find in what they see as "swing seats". Mostly, those kinds of candidates fail to win. When they DO win, they mostly spend their time trying to stop what the other 90% of the party wants. It's a waste of time and effort to base efforts to revive our party on a tacit agreement to make sure there are enough right-wing Dems in the House and Senate to either stop anything of value from passing or only pass it after watering it down to nothing(as was the case with ACA and Dodd-Frank). We don't need to campaign as though progressives are a permanent minority.

And this isn't about ME trying to instruct anyone. I'm just one voice among many. And I post what I post after watching the party repeat the same failed tactics over and over and over again, going back in my own experience to the late 1970s. Why should we stay with what we already know doesn't work?

BTW, why is it that you think "social justice" matters but economic justice somehow doesn't?

It's not as though women, people of color, and LGBTQ people aren't affected by what corporations do, aren't harmed by austerity, layoffs, and outsourcing. It's not as if any of the groups you claim to be the only one concerned about ever benefit from letting corporations essentially control every major decision in this country. And it's not as though you can make lasting gains on rights issues without addressing the economic uncertainty and fear of falling back into want that is the actual driver of things like white backlash politics. Economic justice is necessary to protect the people whose causes YOU prioritize. MLK saw that. Gloria Steinem used to see that when she was a progressive. Harvey Milk saw that.