The Nation article: we must transform the dem. Party

[JCanete]

84. the problem is your blanket assumption that a push from this direction is all empty sloganeering.

Your constant rebuttal to that "sloganeering" is the sloganeering that politics is "more complicated than you people understand. Leave it to the grown ups. One day you'll grow up and be on our side too."

It is an insistence, without specificity, that we're the rubes or the un-inquisitive, and that YOU are the informed, with the facts at your disposal that you see no reason to use when making these very generous claims.

Democrats sometimes blind us to what democratic positions are. That's the problem. Yes, politics is complicated. Sometimes a message will lose you the battle because popular opinion swings the other way. But when we pander on that message to the worst instincts of our constituents, for instance the way we approached inner city violence in decades past, we are making things worse, not better. We are making it harder to come back from a false narrative, and we are undercutting our own record. We could be on the right side of history and prove it over and over, but instead, we have too often in the past, tried to be on the right side of the voters right then. We have the power to be a beacon for voters if we don't also get lost in those waves.

I submit that us adhering to political realities as we have done, has lost us like a 1000 seats in recent decades. Even if the other way doesn't work either, I'm not sure why at this point, people think there is anything to lose for trying.