Former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Howard Dean gave his opinion of the Democrat's progressive base the other day, and it seemed very familiar.



“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," Dean, who ran for president in 2004, told MSNBC's Joy Reid on "AM Joy."

"Well, the problem with that is it leaves behind the people who really need their help," he continued. "If we’re gonna have a single-payer or Medicare for all or whatever, we’re gonna have healthcare that covers every American, as every other industrialized country has, then we all have to pull together."

..."So I don’t have a lot of patience with this wing of the progressive party.”

There's a lot of unpack here, including a) his laughable insinuation that it's progressives that are holding us back from universal health care, and b) that it's progressives that are keeping Democrats from winning, instead of a party establishment that doesn't even show up.

What I would rather address is the "whiny party".

How did the Democratic Party establishment get to the point where they can show absolutely zero respect for their voting base and get away with it? It isn't just an important question for those interested in economic justice. Feminists are in the process of getting kicked under the bus by the Dems. What progressive group will be next?

"The Democratic party is where progressive politics go to die."

- Rosa Clemente

To understand how a political party can disrespect its base so much, you have to look at what its base does when it is disrespected.



Last week, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found a third of Bernie Sanders’s supporters saying they wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in November if she’s the Democratic nominee, and nearly 60,000 people have signed the “Bernie or Bust” pledge. This is causing plenty of hand-wringing, with one Salon writer warning that “Bernie supporters could blow this election,” and a Huffington Post columnist calling it “the Democrats’ worst nightmare.”

But if history is any guide, a mass defection of Democrats and Dem-leaning independents is the last thing anyone should worry about. We’ve seen this before and we know how it will play out...

Those self-described “PUMAs”—“party unity my ass”—may have stayed home by the dozens that November, but at the end of the day nine out of 10 Democrats supported Obama in an election that featured the highest turnout in 40 years. A similar dynamic played out with Howard Dean supporters in 2004.

It turns out that in 2016 a lot of progressives stayed home, which cost Hillary the election.

Oops! Didn't see that one coming.



However, 2016 was the exception, not the rule.

What normally happens is that Democrats Punch Hippies for fun, and then progressives turn around and vote for the bastards.



President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden had some harsh words for the liberal base this week, telling them to "buck up" and "stop whining" about what the administration has yet to accomplish. It's as if the administration has been trying to give liberal voters a guilt trip as a way to get them out to the polls.

...Yet even as liberal activists and bloggers warn the White House that its attitude is only discouraging the Democrats' strongest supporters, the administration has not shied away from taking digs at its critics on the left.

...This isn't the first time Mr. Obama has jostled with the partisan left, however. In 2005, then-Sen. Obama wrote an open letter on the liberal blog Daily Kos. Much as the president is now beseeching liberals to "buck up," he urged liberals in 2005 to stop attacking Democrats who voted to confirm Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts...Portions of the president's letter sounded as if they could have been written this week: "When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive 'checklist,' then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems. We are tying them up in a straightjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted."

It turns out that we don't share our fundamental values, and progressives are gradually coming to realize it.

"You want us to help you, the first thing I would suggest is enough of the hippie punching. We're the girl you'll take under the bleachers but you won't be seen with in the light of day."

- Susan Madrak

Even after progressives were so discouraged that they didn't show up in 2016, the Dems decided that the solution was to Punch Left even harder.



Since losing the presidency to a Cheeto-hued reality TV host, the Democratic party’s leadership has made it clear that it would rather keep losing than entertain even the slightest whiff of New Deal style social democracy.

Even a symbolic victory cedes too much to those youthful, unwashed hordes who believe healthcare and education are human rights and not extravagant luxuries, as we saw when the Democratic establishment recruited Tom Perez to defeat the electorate-backed progressive Keith Ellison for DNC chair.

Recall that it was the Obama White House that coined the derogatory phrase "professional left".

Speaking of language, it was right-wing conservatives that coined the term "Alt-Left", yet establishment Dems have adopted the term to bash progressives anyway.

The alt-left is no longer the Bernie wing. These people are uncompromising extremists with a cult of personality. https://t.co/wrjIglpQl6 — Markos Moulitsas (@markos) August 1, 2017

So what do we do?

Either you challenge the Democrats from the left, something Dems will always tell you is the wrong time, or you undermine the corrupt Dems from within, which is what Berniecrats are trying to do.



Our Revolution has already endorsed 16 victorious candidates for a variety of elections at the local level in 2017. Other groups that have formed since the Sanders campaign include Brand New Congress (BNC) and Justice Democrats, which are allied in their efforts "to recruit and run dozens of outstanding candidates in a single, national campaign for Congress in 2018." Another organization, #WeWillReplaceYou, is specifically targeting corporate Democrats.