By Our Revolutions head says, Democrats have lost their souls. She will make them find religion.

[Jim Lane]

101. The course you recommend is exactly what most of us followed.

By "us" I mean the 13 million or so who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Overwhelmingly, we voted for Hillary Clinton in the general election (by a larger margin than Clinton's 2008 supporters voted for Obama).

I completely agree with you about primaries. That we now have primaries, instead of the old smoke-filled rooms with party bosses, is why third-party politics is boneheaded. There's never or almost never a plausible scenario in which a progressive could be elected on a third-party line but could not win a Democratic primary.

The corollary, of course, is that it's also boneheaded to spew vitriol at progressives who do follow the course of contesting a Democratic primary. That kind of attack has no practical effect except to make it more likely that some people will make the error of leaving the party.