Cover story of TIME: What Do the Democrats Stand For? Inside a Fight Over America's Future

[question everything]

They are both Democrats: Joe Biden, the 76-year-old former Vice President, and Ilhan Omar, the 36-year-old freshman Congresswoman. An old white man, with blind spots on race and gender and a penchant for bipartisanship; a young Somali-American Muslim who sees compromise as complicity. To Biden, Donald Trump is an aberration; to Omar, he is a symptom of a deeper rot. One argues for a return to normality, while the other insists: Your normal has always been my oppression.

How to fit those two visions into one party is the question tying the Democrats in knots. What policies will the party champion? Which voters will it court? How will it speak to an angry and divided nation? While intraparty tussles are perennial in politics, this one comes against a unique backdrop: an unpopular, mendacious, norm-trampling President. As Democrats grilled Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, on July 24, their sense of urgency was evident.

The one thing Democrats agree on is that Trump needs to go, but even on the question of how to oust him, they are split. Ninety-five of the party’s 235 House Representatives recently voted to begin impeachment proceedings, a measure nearly a dozen of the major Democratic presidential candidates support. The party’s leadership continues to insist that defeating the President in 2020 is the better path. Half the party seems furious at Speaker Nancy Pelosi for not attacking Trump more forcefully, while the other is petrified they’re losing the American mainstream, validating Trump’s “witch hunt” accusations with investigations into Russian election interference that most voters see as irrelevant to their daily lives.

(snip)

The Democrats’ crossroads is also America’s. As Trump leans into themes of division, with racist appeals, detention camps for migrants and an exclusionary vision of national identity, the 2020 election is shaping up as a referendum on what the country’s citizens want it to become. This is not who we are as a nation, Trump’s opponents are fond of saying. But if not, what should we be instead?

More..

https://time.com/5634769/future-of-the-democratic-party/

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Guess Time has forgotten about the 'Big Tent' Democratic Party.

[ismnotwasm]

2. It's a shit title and a short article

This is the last paragraph

Only a big, diverse party could contain pols as divergent as Biden and Omar. And so the Democrats’ challenges are also an opportunity. This nasty, brutish chapter of American politics has voters hungering for stable leadership, a unifying vision, a path out of the darkness. From the ashes of Trumpism, the Democrats have a chance to build a new American creed–if only they can figure out what it is.

[Me.]

4. I So Hope That The Never Ending Tendency Of The Media

to bash, call out, insinuate the party is weak and divided and so on and so forth will have an end sometime soon.They helped elect him and need to own it or they will be helping keep him in office. They were all over HRC with disdain. Remember Ruth Marcus and her ooh so cute column of not believing she was agreeing with trump in that HRC needed to own Bill's misdeeds? And how she Andrea Mitchell and Cilizza used to spend an hour kicking HRC around and laughing at the names trump called people?

And there is an endless list of people telling the Dems what they must/need to do. Friedman Jason Johnson, Michele Goldberg, Brian Williams, Joy Reid, David Jolly. Nicole Wallace and on and on it goes. There is one subject you seldom hear coming out of their lips or read from their pens and it is that of the REcons and how they are helping the traitor wreck this country.

[murielm99]

5. Another bullshit article.

We are a big tent. Live with it, media.

[StarfishSaver]

6. Looking forward to Time's second in the series: What Do Republicans Stand For?

[emulatorloo]

7. DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY !!!!

[defacto7]

8. Gees, not again... spare me the redundant media rhetoric

and get on to supporting party unification for the war on the GOP. I don’t want to read their magazine sales pitch.

[spanone]

9. As in 2016, we'll have to try and beat the republicans and the media...

who gave trump $2BILLION in free airtime.

[kentuck]

10. Exactly the opposite of what Trump and Republicans stand for.

Is that so hard to figure out?