In my previous post, I wrote about the need for the Democratic Party establishment to lose its fear of embracing progressive policies that actually help people. Afterwards, I came across this brief video by Robert Reich, who expresses similar sentiments in a little over three minutes, probably much more effectively than I did.

As well, a lengthy article in The Guardian addresses the progressive movement within the party, which the Trump regime has helped to stoke, says Larry Jacobs, director at the University of Minnesota’s Centre for the Study of Politics and Governance.

“There’s a sense that the Democrats have been patsies in the face of Donald Trump. When Democrats say they want to fight back, they mean it.

“Donald Trump has radicalised the Democratic party,” he said. “This revolt within the party would not have happened without Donald Trump. He is provoking a kind of earthquake, raising lots of unsettling questions within the Democratic party – its direction, its leadership, its policy priorities, its beholdenness to big donors.”

If the right can conceive a radical programme in documents such as Project 2025, why can the left not be similarly ambitious?

One of the biggest impediments facing progressives in the party is the fact that the ‘traditionalists’ (“timid incrementalists”) are beholden to powerful interests, says Joseph Geevarghese, director of One Revolution, 

“Because some of their funding depends on corporate donors, moderates have to pull punches. They are not able to articulate the causes of people’s problems. You’ve got progressives who are able to call out the corporate class and the corruption of our politics and how that affects people’s standard of living.”

Norman Solomon, director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said: “One might say that hell has no fury like corporate Democrats scorned. I’m thrilled by the results in Michigan but at the same time I’m a bit apprehensive about the blowback from the powerful forces that have been accustomed to literally running the national Democratic party for many decades, arguably since the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was so successful at the beginning of the 1990s.”

The DLC, founded by Al From, has the progressive movement in its sights.

From reflected this week: “We’ve been focusing on beating Republicans and the democratic socialists have been focused on beating us. We’ve got to fight back. We’ve got to make it harder for them.”

As well, the rhetoric from the Republican Party paints progressives as true threats to the very foundations of America.

Trump and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, have been seeking to revive a cold war-style panic by branding democratic socialists as “radical Marxists” and “godless communists”.

The Democrats have a history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Continued internecine attacks against the party’s progressive movement may well accomplish what Trump and his minions alone cannot. In my opinion, only by embracing a diversity of views that, yes, challenge the status quo so favoured by party traditionalists, can they stand a real chance of gaining power in the near future.