Progressive..

 

Liberal Democrats known as progressives have never commanded a political majority. Not even close, really. That’s why progressive candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren bombed in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, while the more centrist (at the time) Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination, then the presidency.

The high point for progressives may have been the Green New Deal, which the newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York spearheaded in 2019 after her come-from-nowhere upset of a party stalwart. Democrats re-took control of the House that year, and the Green New Deal was a vision for sweeping, egalitarian change in the energy sector and much of the economy. It wasn’t a legislative package, but a manifesto for ending 40 years of crony capitalism.

It's been mostly downhill from there, and the majority of Democrats themselves may have now tired of progressive visions of 

a mythical Shangri-La. In the June 7 primary elections in California, voters recalled the progressive San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, whom they elected in 2019. Boudin crusaded against “two systems of justice,” one for the wealthy and one for everybody else, and he advocated alternatives to prison for many convicts. San Francisco’s liberal voters endorsed that view a couple years ago, but with worsening crime, homelessness, drug use and untreated mental illness on the city’s streets, they’ve now said, enough of that! Enough of it.