"Making the perfect the enemy of the good."

[JHan]

38. There's very little overlap to the right from Democrats.

This is a myth Jonathan Chait tears apart here:

"This chart indicates that Democrats have not moved right since the New Deal era at all. Indeed, the party has moved somewhat to the left, largely because its conservative Southern wing has disappeared.

Now, the Poole-Rosenthal measure does not end the discussion. No metric can perfectly measure something as inherently abstract as a public philosophy. One obvious limit of this measure is its value over long periods of time, when issue sets change in ways that make comparisons difficult. The Poole-Rosenthal graph has special difficulty comparing the Democratic Party before and after the New Deal. But it does raise the question of why the Democrats’ supposed U-turn away from social democracy does not appear anywhere in the data.

Any remotely close look at the historical record, as opposed to a romanticized memory of uncompromised populists of yore, yields the same conclusion as the numbers. The idea that the Democratic Party used to stand for undiluted economic populism in its New Deal heydey is characteristic of the nostalgia to which the party faithful are prone — no present-day politician can ever live up to the imagined greatness of the statesmen of past.

In reality, the Democratic Party had essentially the same fraught relationship with the left during its supposed golden New Deal era that it does today. The left dismissed the Great Society as “corporate liberalism,” a phrase that connoted in the 1960s almost exactly what “neoliberalism” does today. The distrust ran both ways. Lyndon Johnson supported domestic budget cuts after the disastrous 1966 midterm elections, to the disappointment of liberals who already loathed the Vietnam War. “What’s the difference between a cannibal and a liberal?” Johnson joked during his presidency. “A cannibal doesn’t eat his friends.”

I think specificity is needed here, and the mythologizing of former presidents don't help.

I know the current trend in the streets is to look to FDR ( and even LBJ) as some sort of perfect template, but let's also keep in mind governance than was a lot less transparent than it is now. Times are different.

Where I agree with you though is how to sell liberal ideas. Bear in mind, Democrats are in this situation because they took huge risks on healthcare, and faced well-funded opposition. Dems didn't have an effective response to the rampant conservative ideologues they faced - btw, if centrism held greater sway in the Republican party, the ACA would have been fixed by now. After the dust was settled and the ACA became law, the Dems still lost the meme wars. Ideological Republicans got away with their anti-government memes, even though the ACA was originally the brainchild of their centrists.

Conservative ideologues are good at framing the debate because their rhetoric taps into anti-political attitudes embedded in America's political DNA. It's easy to rail about Government intervention, as HRC says in the quote it's easy to just say "NO". So it's constantly an uphill battle. If Dems want to combat this, controlling the narrative is critical especially in this age of information wars. Tearing down allies and lashing out at your own side is the quickest path to defeat. It also serves the interests of ideological Republicans who serve the interests of capitalist predators to smear those who oppose their efforts through false equivocation. It would help if Liberals not fall into this trap.