This doesn’t mean that Democrats can or should stake out an absolutist opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage, and immigration. But it probably does mean that they would be well-advised to return to (and update) the general cultural outlook of the Clinton administration while combining it with a more left-wing economic agenda. In the present context, that would translate into a refusal to push the left’s side of the culture war any further, and a willingness to pull back from some of the Democratic Party’s more extreme stances on immigration in recent months and years.
Imagine a Sanders who defined himself as an economic nationalist promising to expand access to health care and college for American citizens instead of favoring the abolition of ICE and the decriminalization of border crossings. Imagine a Warren who spoke about her respect for religious freedom and the moral convictions of pro-life voters with half the passion that she reserves for the topic of economic injustice.
I’m hardly the only pundit to suggest that Democrats could scramble the Electoral College in all kinds of favorable ways by making an effort to place themselves smack dab in the middle of this alternative ideological center. Indeed, The New York Times’s Ross Douthat recently went so far as to argue that Sanders is already close enough to staking out that territory that a social conservative like himself finds something reassuring about voting for him — on the grounds that Sanders is “the liberal most likely to spend all his time trying to tax the rich and leave cultural conservatives alone.”
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