they just don't know it, mistaking antagonism to mainstream for different principles and goals. But they literally don't claim a single goal or value that haven't been widely accepted among liberals for decades.
Sure, America has genuine farther leftists, with beliefs that are not common among mainstream Democrats and who see Sanders etcetera as mostly just variations within the mainstream, but they're too few and moribund to make themselves noticed these days.
In any case, what happened heading toward 2015 is that Democrats discovered the truth about each other -- that everyone else wanted MORE too. We'd been wanting bigger, farther reaching goals and strong statements of liberal principles for a long time.
But before then pollsters, deliberately and/or incompetently, had been asking wrong questions for a long time. They seriously undercounted and reported those of liberal and progressive ideology (requiring self-identification in an era when they knew liberal was a "dirty word"
, and their questions also seriously undermeasured commitment to Democratic ideals. And so they kept reporting, and ambitions were scaled back to what our party leaders, most of whom ARE very strong progressive liberals themselves, thought their voters would empower them to achieve.
Then suddenly, as I experienced it at the time, response mainly to the actions of "mainstream," "establishment" Elizabeth Warren astonished them and us by revealing how we really felt. Whether actually directly from that or, more likely, some bigger synergy it was part of because the time had come, all of a sudden I saw that I was far from alone in what I wanted, or in my happy, relieved excitement at the response to what she was achieving and calling for.
It was tragic that Senator Warren felt she shouldn't run for president, at least through the primary. I believe she'd go back and make a different choice if she could.
Edit history
= new reply since forum marked as read
