The Democrats are about to blow it.

That’s the emerging consensus of the party’s moderates, anyway. Every week brings a new Politico story in which Democrats grouse about the party’s resurgent left wing, warning that its pie-in-the-sky proposals and heterodox rhetoric threaten to squander the party’s hard-earned electoral momentum under President Trump.



“As we run up to this presidential [election], we need to show that Democrats, as a whole, are not socialists,” said California Representative Katie Hill, who flipped a longtime Republican district last year. Another first-term representative from California, Harley Rouda said that “while Steve King’s views don’t represent the entire Republican Party, those on the far left of the Democratic Party do not represent the mainstream caucus.” Stuart E. Eizenstat, an adviser in the Carter administration, wrote in Politico Magazine that he’s twice “watched pressure from the party’s liberal wing tear the party apart and bring down a Democratic presidential candidate,” adding, “Today, I fear it could all be happening again.”



This is an age-old wail. For decades, Democrats have been telling themselves that there exists a liberal cliff: Move too far to the left and they’ll fall off it, handing the country to an increasingly draconian Republican Party and dooming the Democrats to years in the political wilderness. Thus, when out of power, they inevitably tack toward the center when out of power, ever fearful of being labeled tax-and-spend liberals or, god forbid, socialists.



The Democratic Party of the past half-century has been defined largely by this timidity. Now here comes a crop of fearless left-wing politicians, from first-term congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar to septuagenarian Senator Bernie Sanders, whose fearless policies are generating much of the excitement among the rank-and-file. For the party to turn its back on them, out of certainty that history will repeat itself—now that would be blowing it.