Democrats are firing away vigorously -- at each other

Maybe Democrat Ralph Northam will win the Virginia governor's race today and significant numbers of Democrats will breathe a little easier. And then again, maybe he won't. And Dems won't stop to catch their breath, determined to continue their intra-party hissy fit.

As anyone who has been paying attention knows, people who do these kinds of things have been re-litigating the 2016 primary. Professional Dem operative Donna Brazile has dropped some bombshells (or at least firecrackers) about the Clinton campaign's control of the Democratic National Committee. People who insist that "Bernie would have won" (and was somehow robbed because Clinton accumulated more primary votes) are again raging.

Come on, folks -- grow up. We have work to do and an aspiring authoritarian in office who has announced he'd like nothing better than to use the machinery of government to hound and punish his political opponents. Do we want to replicate the fate of Social Democrats and Communists in the Germany of the 1930s who were too busy fighting out their very real disagreements with each other to combine to stop the Nazis? They had the majority, but they couldn't focus on the essential threat. We also have the majority, but we have to hold our coalition together if we want to win power. No one faction can do it alone.

Charles Blow accurately describes the national Democratic Party as a "dinosaur of bureaucratic machinery." I have tolerant feelings toward many of the people who make up the party apparatus; sure, there are plenty of self-important, power-hungry jackasses, but there are more grunt workers who do the boring work of attending interminable meetings, keeping up data bases, and scratching out local fundraisers. They aren't very ideological usually; they just know which side they are on. A lot of them are people of color.

But Blow is also right: in this moment when so much is required of us, the tired old Democratic party shows potential for a new life.

The Resistance isn’t part of the old Democratic Party; The Resistance is the new Democratic Party, or at least its future.

We are stuck with a two party system, so we need the Dems or something like them in some form. But we don't have to keep fighting old fights. Progressive impulses are mostly winning within the Dems. If we can forge majorities in more and more areas, progressive values will carry us forward. We need a little confidence in ourselves, not better backroom brawling.

A few days after the 2016 election gave us the Orange Cheato, I warned that, come whatever, resistance would require unity.

Don't play circular firing squad.... The various elements of our big tent coalition do not easily get along with each other. Whites will act racist, men will behave like pigs, more conventional people will look askance at gender queers. But when we rub each other wrong, we have to ease up.

That is no less true a year into the Trump regime. Circular firing squads empower the authoritarian. Even the "winners" lose when we can't build a big tent.