This is gonna be short.

There is a mistaken view that Trump eviscerated and then changed the Republican party, but that’s not true. Trump is the culmination of the Tea Party’s two-decades (at least) long effort at taking the party over. But this wouldn’t have been possible without a sympathetic constituency and without a strong desire to fight for it.

Bernie’s gambit was that structural, institutional change of the Democratic Party would come with a groundswell of support from a significant number of party insiders who sympathized with or even supported the policies he supports. It was an attempt at a “tea party of the left, except without the violence and knuckle-dragging” takeover. The primary elections of 2016 and 2020 are very strong indicators that this isn’t a winning play. What we have seen instead is something that the previous 40 years of Democratic Party trends and voting should have made obvious: that democrats (rank-and-file, not just the leadership) are supportive of center-right and right-wing economic and social policy (they had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the civil rights era and through marriage equality fights). We don’t have enough sympathetic allies in the DP to win the same way the tea partiers did with Republicans.

It’s past time for progressives wrapped up in party politics to realize this. Fundamentally the path forward isn’t with the Democratic Party, but rather through it, over it, and around it: the same way a tank might get by a wall. It might also be useful to realize just how badly outnumbered left-of-center political thinking is in this country. Only after we truly understand that can we begin to set a course for real change, because fighting the foe we wish we had will continue to be disastrous.