(CNN) James Carville thinks his party is losing its mind.

"We got to decide what we want to be," the longtime Democratic strategist and mastermind of Bill Clinton's 1992 victory told MSNBC earlier this week. "Do we want to be an ideological cult or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct to be a majority party?"

At the heart of Carville's critique is the party's embrace of, in his words , extreme liberal positions like "people voting from jail cells. ... We're talking about not having a border." (In the Democratic debates, several presidential candidates expressed support for decriminalizing illegal immigration. And at a CNN town hall in the spring of 2019, Sen. Bernie Sanders suggested he might back allowing jailed criminals to vote .)

More broadly, Carville believes his party has gone off the liberal deep end -- supporting policies on immigration and health care (among other things) that simply lack the support of a majority of the country.

That criticism is aimed directly at the likes of Sanders, a Vermont independent who, heading into next week's New Hampshire primary, is one of the favorites to be the Democratic nominee.