Former DNC chair Howard Dean went off on the “whiny” left this morning on AM Joy, as MSNBC’s Joy Reid and her panel took on the backlash in some corners to Kamala Harris.

Pieces this week titled “Democratic rising star Kamala Harris has a ‘Bernieland’ problem” and “Why leftists don’t trust Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Deval Patrick” have given way to another ongoing debate about friction in the Democratic party.

Zerlina Maxwell told Reid the “ideological purity” some Bernie Sanders supporters are pushing for is a “manifestation of privilege,” arguing that “people of color and women who are running for office can’t abide by purity tests because of the structural difficulties in running for office.”

Jason Johnson added that right now, the Democrats should be “embracing anyone who elicits that level of excitement,” like Harris or Sanders himself.

Reid then asked Dean, “Is there any pleasing a certain set of progressives who essentially think anyone who isn’t Bernie Sanders is not progressive enough?”

Dean responded thusly:

“There has always been a section of the left, which I call the whiny party––the party that doesn’t really wanna win, they just wanna be pure, and if they go down swinging purely, then that’s fine. Well, the problem with that is it leaves behind the people who really need their help. If we’re gonna have a single-payer or Medicare for all or whatever we’re gonna have in health care… then we all have to pull together. And people who sit out or crank on some candidate because they did this or that that wasn’t to their purity test are basically turning their back on the very people they pretend to represent. So I don’t have a lot of patience with this wing of the progressive party.”

He went on to say a lot of this friction on the left is just a “media creation.”

Watch above, via MSNBC.

[image via screengrab]

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