General Discussion

But it doesn't really matter.

And it's not as though people within the party haven't said deeply critical things about the party, from wildly differing perspectives.

When Bill Clinton and Al Gore emerged as national figures in the late Eighties, they were deeply critical of what we stood for. At times, they were UNFAIRLY critical-they claimed Mondale and Dukakis were ultraliberals, when in fact Dukakis was a centrist and a homophobe, probably the last anti-gay nominee we will ever select, and Mondale ran to the right of Carter on some issues while choosing a vice presidential nominee who, as chair of the Platform Committee, tried to remove our traditional endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment from the platform, and did so at a time when that change would not have gained us ANY significant number of votes) and their message was that the party had to move sharply to the right or die out.

They "remade the party in THEIR image". And did so in a way that left everyone in the party who was even marginally to their left largely out in the cold. In the nineties, the progressive wing was treated as the enemy, there was nothing signinficantly progressive in our policy offer(we were only socially progressive on choice, our message on social services was barely distinguishable from Newt Gingrich's-basically, we were promising to be nicer about it-we were to the right of Nixon on crime policy, and we did whatever Wall Street wanted on economics).

Nobody on the left of the party, nobody calling for change, is calling for anything close to equivalency with that in terms of how other Dems would be treated. We aren't saying anyone should be silenced. We aren't insisting on iron-clad control of the platform. We aren't saying conventions are places where nobody should be able to express even mild disagreement with us. We seek unity and we want to work WITH those who prioritize social justice(a justice struggle we support with equal passion)to assuage their concerns.

We want these things because last fall proved that saying no to these things means we lose.