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I saw this tweet and it struck me as one of the more powerful indicators of the need to untether ideology from “fight” in intra-Democratic battles. The party is very united on fight, very divided on ideology. So you unite on “fight,” let different constituencies/states find their center of gravity on ideology. It is certainly true (and I saw this a lot in comments when I posted this on Bluesky) that “move left” or “move to the center” mean many things to many people, often mean nothing and are often uncertainly connected to public policy. In which case it can be unclear whether we’re really talking about ideology or what we might call emotive signifiers. Those points are valid, interesting but mostly, I think, irrelevant. These are the slogans and catchwords that define the core intra-party battle among Democrats.
You can go to town arguing “well, you don’t really mean what you think you mean when you use these commonly-used phrases.” But that seems mostly like a laborious, if perhaps self-satisfying, effort at self-delusion. At least in this CNN poll when Democrats were asked this, they basically split down the middle. This is not necessarily a problem. Or, if it is, it is a manageable one. What I think we can take from it is that neither “side” is going to be dislodged by main force. It also makes clear that the side you’re not on is not just a paper tiger puffed up by corporate campaign dollars or the outsized voice of loudmouths on Twitter.
And yet on the closest we can get to “fight” questions — should you fight harder, do you want new leadership — you’re up at Russian, if not quite North Korean, levels of unanimity.
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