Ah, the fast-paced world of politics. One moment you’re lauded for testifying against Jeff “It Was Unacceptable in the ‘80s” Sessions, the next you’re a drug-grubbing megashill for not symbolically voting Yea on the right symbolic amendment. That’s the wheel of fortune for you.

Make a “morally bankrupt politician” joke and I will turn this car around.

I’m not interested in exculpating Booker for his recent pharma votes; if you don’t like them, you don’t like them. However, the furor that resulted illustrates some still-problems on the left, and if I’m going to get through the next four years without valium, we’ve gotta name and work against them.

Unpacking your indivisible knapsack

As I see it, the instant toxic ragefest over Booker’s hideous betrayal has a couple assumptions at its core:

There is a “corporate wing” of the Democratic party overwhelmingly funded by and sympathetic to the interests of corporations over people. (Booker is part of this wing because of his support from the pharmaceutical industry.)

Corporate Democrats and their dollar-driven hobnobbery are why Trump is president.

Most left-leaning and progressive people favor anti-corporate, anti-establishment candidates, so it’s in our interests to rid the party of these Dems whenever we find them.

Are these assumptions true? Let’s break it down!

Follow the money (but not over there)

Who is the corporate wing of the Democratic Party? It is weirdly hard to find an answer other than “potentially anyone, except Elizabeth Warren.” However, since PAC and corporate contributions are at the center of recent kerfuffles, we may as well start there and assume that “corporate” Democrats are the ones most beholden to PACs.

OpenSecrets.org, run by the Center for Responsive Politics, reports that over his career, Cory Booker has received 11% of his total funds from PACs. RUH-ROH. However, Bernie Sanders has also averaged 11%, which would seem to put the two on equal footing so far as Shill Score is concerned. (Because current data suggests that Elizabeth Warren is actually perfect, her PAC percentage is just 2%.)

Meanwhile, Amy Klobuchar, the sponsor of the best symbolic pharmaceuticals amendment ever, received a career average of 20% of her contributions from PACs. Klobuchar and Booker received comparable amounts of funding from pharmaceutical and health professional PACs in 2016 (about $225k and $250k respectively).

For more on this specific vote, Sanders, Booker, and the corporate Dems, I recommend Lamar White’s piece on the subject. He does an excellent job breaking down the total lack of correlation between pharma contributions and votes on the Klobuchar amendment.

So who are these shadowy corporate Democrats, and what do they have to do with drug reimportation? The jury’s still out. But follow the money, my friends! Only don’t follow any money that leads to Klobuchar and Sanders, because their money comes from good PACs and also shut up.

Why is Trump the president-elect?

I don’t want to bore you with another rehash of this totally wrong assessment, but many (white) people on the left seem to believe that Trump’s populism delivered him his victory.

Couple things:

Trump voters are on average about as wealthy as Ted Cruz voters were, and significantly wealthier than Sanders and Clinton voters. This is not necessarily a huge deal, since Democratic voters are, on average, a lot poorer than Republican voters; however:

Voters who listed the economy as a top priority, exit polling shows, went for Clinton. What did Trump voters report caring about? Immigrants and terrorism. MURICA!

A paper by Jonathan T. Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell of Gallup demonstrated that objective economic status played a negligible role in explaining Trump support.

Because the Gallup study doesn’t get a lot of love, let’s hear what it has to say about those who support our Pussygrabber-in-Chief:

These results do not present a clear picture between social and economic hardship and support for Trump. The standard economic measures of income and employment status show that, if anything, more affluent Americans favor Trump, even among white non-Hispanics. Employment status and occupational categories are among the least important explanatory variables for Trump favorability. Surprisingly, there appears to be no link whatsoever between greater exposure to trade competition or competition from immigrant workers and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign. These results make it very unlikely that direct exposure to harm from globalization could be a causal factor in motivating large numbers of Trump’s supporters.

In other words, whether you were actually a victim of globalization or actually lost your manufacturing job did not predict Trump support. For the people in the back:

The analysis provides clear evidence that those who view Trump favorably are disproportionately living in racially and culturally isolated zip codes and commuting zones.

That awkward moment when the one in the bubble is you.

Despite this plentiful evidence, anti-“identity politics” progressives persist in using the white working class as sock puppets to spout their utopian ideals, ignoring what Trump voters are actually saying. Because what they’re actually saying is that they don’t really care whether they’re better off or not, because if brown people have it worse they’ll feel better off.

There’s one more little rumple in all this cannibal logic.

Left-aligned voters don’t hate the Democratic establishment

The Brookings Institution ran an analysis of Congressional primaries in 2016 to see how progressive candidates fared against establishment shillionaires. And since “progressive” is itself a subjective term, here’s how Brookings defined it:

By examining every candidate’s campaign website, we identified and coded each candidate according to basic demographic information, their self-identified factional placement within their political party, their positions on various political issues, and their performance on election day. […] In 2014, this study was the first of its kind to take a comprehensive look at candidates in congressional primaries. In 2016, we repeated the study, adding a handful of new issues to the database.

But enough boring methodology stuff! Did progressive paladins issue a righteous beatdown to the hoary establishment or not?!

In a word … no.

As the Washington Post reports, the people’s mandate envisioned by Berniecrats doesn’t particularly exist:

If you look at progressive candidates writ large — both incumbents and challengers — their win percentage actually dropped between 2014 (67.9 percent) and 2016 (52 percent).

This sad chart confirms:

Meanwhile, Brookings found that Democrats still tend to be primaried at lower rates than Republicans, and that their margins of victory are significantly higher — in 2016, the average incumbent margin of victory was 64% for Democrats, just 52% for Republicans.

So what does this mean for Booker?

Let’s revisit our logic chain:

There is a “corporate wing” of the Democratic party that votes by the dollar.

Corporate Democrats are why Trump is president.

Most left-leaning and progressive people favor anti-establishment candidates.

Now, are there corporate Democrats that we can identify by consistent voting behavior? I think there’ve gotta be, though they have yet to be named and agreed upon as far as I can tell. But is Booker one of them? Whether you like Booker’s recent votes or not, the allegations that they’re born of corporate whoredom are tenuous at best.

Plus, the rationale for coming down on him so hard — “People like him are why we lost!!!” — is unsubstantiated. DOUBLE-PLUS, Democrats demonstrably didn’t want to boot the Democratic establishment this year. (Whether they do in 2018 or 2020 remains to be seen.)

What does that leave us with? A bunch of progressive flesh-eaters eager to flay a guy who just got done denouncing Jeff Sessions, all because he disagreed with them (and Sanders) on one minor point.

The reason we can’t afford people-eating and firing squads isn’t, to my mind, because following a party line is inherently good. It’s because these firing squads do not serve a purpose. They’re not a response to actual corruption on Booker’s part. They’re not based on what a majority of left-voting Americans want. And, most importantly, the firing squads blame the wrong factors for Donald Trump’s rise, so their solutions will invariably be wrong as well. These purity tests truly are for purity’s sake.

And here’s the thing about purity: it’s a niche market. The more perfect a candidate is for you, the less perfect they’ll be for someone else. Of course it’s our job as progressives to limit the concessions we make — and some concessions truly are unconscionable. But figuring out how and when to compromise is a necessary art, an ongoing discussion, and a rigorous process. It’s not a job for the trigger-happy.