The center-right, moderate-to-conservative pandering in Congress isn't doing much for me or folks like me, or for the country as a whole, IMO.

Ideological diversity means accepting left ideas and going with them, not just accepting republican-lite ideas. When your own party marginalizes you for years, then calls for unity, well, whose unity? I am I supposed to sell out New Deal and Great Society policies for unity?

Long time, no talk.  

Thanks so much for the props about our commitment to honest and civil discussion at TDS.

I do want to respond to your concern that we were creating a straw man by suggesting some Dems want a temporarily smaller but more coherent party. We were specifically thinking of Ari Berman's recent and much-discussed NYT op-ed on the Blue Dogs, which very explicitly called for a temporarily smaller but more coherent party. Yes, of course, he and everyone else ultimately wants a "big tent" party, but some argue the route to that goal goes through some disciplinary measures that are seriously exclusionary (and nearly all of us think there are some lines that can't be crossed, regardless of the political consequences).  

We certaintly weren't making any broad-based criticisms in that passage; just trying to accurately describe the perennial points of view that are often expressed.

From this perspective, what's strange is that defenders of private health insurance--or what Digby calls "Republicans and corporate centrists"--are still fighting the largely symbolic public option as it exists in the Senate today. She interprets that as a matter of pure power politics, and as an effort to crush progressive liberalism. Naturally, she thinks the Left should respond in kind--not out of indifference to "substance," but as a recognition that the real substantive fight has largely been lost, and as a demonstration of the Left's own power, backed up in this case, she argues, by public opinion.

...

But what this debate illustrates is a broad and pre-existing gulf between Democrats on a pretty fundamental issue. Those of the Clintonian, "New Democrat" tendency have long argued for the use of "market means" to implement progressive "public goals." In the context of health care, that's always meant support for what used to be called "managed competition," and more recently, "premium support": a private health insurance system regulated and subsidized by government to provide universal coverage. On much of the Left, as noted earlier, "market means" are considered inherently illegitimate when it comes to health care. In the end, the "public option" didn't serve to bridge that gap. But we all need to be honest about the gap itself, and aware of its possible existence in other areas of public policy.

Democractic Ideological Diversity