How is this a “Left-Flank Pile-On Against Heather Cox Richardson”? Left flank??? I don’t know David Shaw, but I would hardly call Nate Silver part of the left flank.

The Democratic Party has a strong, intolerant right wing. Watching MSNBC during the Biden years, it was remarkable how enthusiastically the network platformed the constant stream of Democrats carping against Biden. I’m not just talking about the last months. From 2020 to 2024 (and since), every time Biden backed a somewhat progressive idea, mainstream news gave the microphones to Democratic “centrists” who would explain why the idea was unreasonable, unaffordable, divisive, and despite how well the idea polled, was clearly going to be unpopular and disastrous at election time. The media taught me a huge amount, in great detail, about what was wrong with Biden’s ideas and almost nothing about what he was actually advocating for or accomplishing. Silver’s piece reads like just another pellet from the same old shotgun.

Will Rogers is often quoted as critiquing Democratic politics by saying that if you run a Republican against a Republican, the Republican will win every time.

What you call a traffic ticket, the allegedly incorrect characterization of Tyler Robinson, was not Silver’s primary complaint against Dr. Richardson. As I understand his article, his complaint is that she espouses views that he considers too idealistic, too popular with elite boomers and no one else, and too likely to lead the Democrats into yet another losing election. The traffic ticket is just an example that, if left unchallenged, can be useful to discredit her as untrustworthy, added support for the attack on her as a person who is presented as politically and socially irresponsible.

I’m pretty enthusiastically capitalist and there are a lot of things about the “abundance” movement’s ideas that I like. There’s probably a way, in theory, to tie the best of these ideas with other ideas (like national health and affordable-enough-to-be-genuinely-public education) that offer the American Dream to a broader segment of society than the middle-class-and-above folks that “abundance” will help most. But when I read the writings of Ezra Klein and admirers (including Silver), I just don’t see empathy or the desire for opportunity for all needed to pull it off. Instead, it feels as though I’m reading Republicans who think they are Democrats running against Republicans who think Reagan was a wonderful president running against Republicans who think Reagan was a supporter of MAGA. And in that race, the Republican will win every time.

As to the “traffic ticket”, I think we saw photos of Robinson dressed in a Groyper costume. I think we saw some other circumstantial evidence that made a plausible case that he had paid some attention to the Groyper crowd. Was he ever really a Groyer or strongly sympathetic to their views? I don’t know. I doubt that you know either. I think we saw a strong PR push against the idea from people who wanted to present Robinson as a gay-rights supporter or a lefty of some sort. As an enemy of MAGA. Frankly, I don’t think we have any idea why he did what he did or what his political views are or whether those views were what drove his action. I read a whole lot of stuff back then, and I am quite certain that no one made a case that I found persuasive.

I don’t see any reason for Dr. Richardson to retract her comments. She didn’t say she was presenting anything more than a hypothesis with some supporting evidence and I don’t think anyone has refuted the evidence she presented. Maybe her interpretation was correct, maybe not. But attacking her for presenting the evidence and not retracting her interpretation feels a lot like bullying. It is a demand that she adopt a viewpoint that seems as poorly supported as the one she is being asked to apologize for. It is a cheap shot, along with the emotion-stirring description of her work as comparable to the Tea Party.

The acceptablility, within our party, of this kind of self-righteous, mean-spirited bullshitting is what makes me wonder whether the Democratic Party is doomed to winning only after the Republicans screw up so badly that Americans would vote for a flock of pigeons if that was the only non-Republican party on the ballot. If the best that right-wing Democrats can do is to come after Dr. Richardson with attacks like Silver’s, our role in history will be to serve as the punctuation pause between one Republican administration and the next. Maybe we should replace our spirit animal (donkey) with a pigeon.