As the authors of this article see it, the voices of the AOC/Warren/Bernie wing are speaking for the party, and candidates who reject their demands and their radical rhetoric are out of step opponents of the positions of their own party.
Of course, left Democratic media have been mendaciously claiming exactly that for weeks.
And now, when the major media adopt their own claims as very truth, they whine the media are unfairly painting Democrats as a bunch of scary, fiery radicals.
Democrats Diverge on Economy and Immigration in First Debate, says the Times
And yet the Democrats' most popular candidate - most popular among Democrats - was not in last night's debate, does not embrace that rhetoric, and does not support that agenda.
If the AOC/Warren/Bernie faction speak for the party why is Joe Biden the most popular of the candidates?
Why are most of the congressional Democrats far from enthused by their agenda, their rhetoric, and their rejection and condemnation of "the system"?
The strength of the party’s progressive wing was on vivid display in South Florida, starting in the first minutes of the debate when Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts branded the federal government as thoroughly corrupt.
Ms. Warren, the highest-polling candidate onstage, called for the government to bring to heel oil companies and pharmaceutical companies, and embraced the replacement of private health insurance with single-payer care.
“We need to make structural change in our government, in our economy and in our country,” Ms. Warren said, setting the tone for the handful of populists in the debate.
. . . .
The debate, the first of two featuring 10 candidates each, underscored just how sharply Democrats have veered in a liberal direction since Mr. Trump’s election.
On issues ranging from immigration and health care to gun control and foreign policy, they demonstrated that they were far more uneasy about being perceived as insufficiently progressive by primary voters than about inviting Republican attacks in the general election.
Primary voters tend to be further left than Democratic voters as a whole, true, but not by all that much.
Hillary, after all, soundly squashed lifelong non- and generally anti-Democrat Bernie Sanders among actual primary voters, though she did less well with the activists who dominate caucuses.
And she didn't skid very far left to do it.
And right now Joe Biden is a lot more popular among Democrats in general than Senator Warren.
But there were also several avowed pragmatists who voiced hesitation or outright disagreement over some of their party’s most ambitious policy demands.
Most prominent among them was Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who expressed doubts about liberal plans for single-payer health care and free college education; she instead called for more modest alternatives like the creation of an optional government-backed health insurance plan.
I have no idea what the following idea would even mean.
Mr. Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio, dominated the segment devoted to immigration, promoting his proposal to decriminalize illegal immigration — a policy that Ms. Warren has adopted in recent days and that Republicans have gleefully highlighted to argue that Democrats support open borders.
Turning to Mr. O’Rourke, whose unsuccessful 2018 Senate bid and presidential candidacy have overshadowed him, Mr. Castro asked his fellow Texan why he would not support making illegal immigration a civil offense.
“I just think it’s a mistake, Beto,” said Mr. Castro.
Mr. O’Rourke noted that he had introduced legislation in Congress to decriminalize “those seeking asylum” and said that he had unveiled a comprehensive immigration overhaul.
But Mr. Castro interjected that it was not sufficient to relieve only those seeking asylum from criminal penalty, because many of those charged for crossing the border illegally are “undocumented immigrants.”
Mr. Booker made clear that he sided with Mr. Castro on the question, an illustration of the party’s shifting center of gravity on perhaps the dominant issue of the Trump era.
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