The Democrats Are Divided, Just Not in the Way We Think
There are three distinct political universes, not a center-to-left continuum.
They are not on the same spectrum.
Photographer: Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg
Democrats have been rallying around former Vice President Joe Biden, but they are struggling with serious internal divisions. The more you examine what they’re actually saying, the more you see that it is hopelessly inadequate to say, as most people are doing, that some Democrats are in the center while others are on the left.
If you hope to understand the tensions within American progressivism — and most Democrats do qualify as progressive to one degree or another — your best bet is to explore the work of three influential writers from a century ago, when the U.S. saw a flowering of left-wing thinking.