Except that’s not really how it works. I’m a Democrat because I agree with Democrats roughly 60-70% of the time. In my view, Democrats are ideologically more diverse (or fractured, if you prefer) than Republicans. As I’ve gotten older I’ve become more centrist than progressive–partly, I’ll concede, as a result of my job–but the “ideological purity before achievable solutions” progressive wing of the party mostly leaves me cold. I’m happy for the Bernie Sanderses and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortezes of the world when they win, but there are a lot of policy questions on which we don’t see eye to eye.
I think it’s better to have a diverse party that doesn’t always have to leap immediately to a single, facile soundbite of a solution but can have a robust internal debate, in which multiple voices are heard. For me, the Democratic party stands for a belief in process and pluralism, the value of diversity, a belief that government can be a useful tool for protecting the vulnerable, and the view that complex problems often don’t have tweet-length solutions. As a result of those principles, the Democratic party has landed on policies–like favoring women’s unfettered access to reproductive healthcare; rejecting laws and policies that allow race-, sex- and sexual-orientation-based discrimination; promoting the availability of healthcare to all; providing social safety nets–that I think are correct. It’s also landed on policies that I think are misguided–like Tipper Gore’s 1990s music-bowdlerization campaign–or that result from the difficulty inherent in applying pluralist decisionmaking to problems that may require faster decisions, like President Obama’s interminable incrementalist approach to becoming involved in or removing ourselves from foreign conflicts.
The long and the short of it is that, for me, any time you have some more folks willing to caucus with Democrats, the party gets stronger. (And that goes double for the U.S. Senate, where caucusing with a party usually means supporting that party’s judicial nominees.) When we start applying ideological purity tests we end up sitting home, for instance, in the 2016 election or voting for Jill Stein because Hillary Clinton isn’t as progressive as Bernie Sanders. I’ve frankly had enough of the result of those politics.
