Taken together, this is empirical proof that core Democratic constituencies may finally be evaluating their party’s president on his actual record, rather than just mindlessly cheering him on because he’s wearing the blue home-team jersey.
This healthy attitude is starting to seep into popular culture. As one example: The Daily Show – historically the normiest of normie Democratic television programs – is now openly mocking party leaders’ refusal to do anything to stop the Republican onslaught. As Democratic policy wonk Will Stancil put it, that’s a sign that “anger at do-nothing Dems really has gone completely mainstream in a way that seemed impossible three or four years ago”.
If history is any indication, that’s good. Democratic leaders only did things like enact social security, create Medicare, pass the Voting Rights Act and end the Vietnam war once they feared the electoral consequences of inaction. The same dynamic holds today: you can bet Democratic leaders will not fulfill their longtime promise to statutorily codify reproductive rights until and unless they feel the same kind of anger and pressure as their predecessors felt in their day.
That’s how democracy is supposed to work: we’re supposed to evaluate representatives not on their personalities or party affiliations, but on their records, and when they fail to deliver on their promises, those representatives are supposed to fear being denied their party’s nomination and thrown out of office by their own voters.
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