Headline of the Day

No, Progressives Don’t Want “Purity.” They Just Want Some Courage

—The New Republic, on the cowardice of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment)

Truer than turnips this is.

Mainstream Democrats use dozens of old catchphrases that suggest they’re out of step. “When they go low, we go high,” for example, sounded fine when Michelle Obama first said it in 2016, but it passed its sell-by date almost the next day. For quite some time, the Democratic Party, which is still closely aligned with banks and billionaires, has needed to go anywhere but high. 

But it’s the meme of the “purity test” that should spike real worry that the Democratic Party is missing the moment right now. Party standard-bearers still use the phrase as a slur to trivialize legitimate questions from the left. It’s a petty and defensive move, and it comes across as a refusal to engage with the most obvious and urgent questions facing the party and the country.

A recent case in point involved New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. Booker is a tireless legislator who two weeks ago sponsored a promising bill to provide support for family caregivers, but he has sometimes been criticized for his coziness with Big Tech and Big Pharma. In October, the popular firebrand Jennifer Welch of the podcast I’ve Had It asked Booker why he and other Democrats had turned to “Neville Chamberlain–type appeasement” with President Trump. As just one example, Welch cited Booker’s confirmation of one of Trump’s shadiest ambassadors, Charlie Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law; a felon and a billionaire real-estate developer from Booker’s home state of New Jersey.

“What do you have to say about the capitulation that you participated in?”

Booker smiled. He tried to seem unflappable. He then waved away Welch as “holding up a purity test.” 

“That’s such bullshit,” Welch shot back. “It’s not a purity test. It’s, Are we in this fight? Are we being beholden to corporations and corporate interests? Or, Are we really the party of the working class?”

Welch was right. “Purity test” is bullshit, and it’s a deflection Democrats must stop using. Challenges to politicians on major issues, including foreign policy, acceptance of corporate money, and failure to keep ICE out of cities—these are not puritanical attacks on their lifestyles. They are credible allegations that the party must acknowledge and address: that Democrats are allies of Republican hawks like Liz Cheney, valets for private equity, and hopeless incrementalists on social justice. 

The problem is that many of the politicians in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) have achieved their positions entirely from their prowess at fund raising.

Cowardice is self-interested job protection.