quick reminder: Democrats have had control of house, senate, white house exactly 4 months of the last 44 years. There’s been little opportunity for the ‘fight back’ part where they fight for democracy when most of their time is undoing the absolute worst of the fascists’ hate-ball of regulations. THAT’s the exhausting part.

It is fairly rare for either party to control Congress and the executive for long, so I’m not sure if that’s exactly the main pitfall we’ve run into.

I think this is mostly an unforced error on the part of neoliberalism, specifically 3rd way political ideology. In the 80s and 90s 3rd way politics grew as an idea to work around congressional gridlock.

Basically, the democratic party figured they would work across the aisle with moderate Republicans on policy they could both agree on. Hoping that this would show the American population that they were the party that could get things done.

This worked in part, Bill Clinton the main architect of American 3rd way movement became very popular. However, it had two repercussions that we are still dealing with today. It gave the policy initiative to the Republican party, allowing them to be the directors of this across aisle cooperation. It also drastically shifted the democratic party to the right.

If the DNC is rating Congress members based on criteria of Third way ideology, then the members most willing to cooperate with moderate Republicans are going to fill leadership positions. Which is why the DNC leadership is currently full of center right senior citizens conditioned to bending backwards to the whims of Republican economic policy.