Progressive policies don't always make for good politics. In many heavily white, sparsely populated parts of this country, it would be less than pragmatic for Democratic candidates to campaign on abolishing ICE, banning semiautomatic weapons, slashing the defense budget, revoking the tax-exempt status of churches, or a whole host of other excellent ideas. And in just about any part of America, progressive policies that require large middle-class tax increases come with genuine political risk — even when said policies are broadly popular in the abstract — as single-payer advocates in Colorado and Vermont recently discovered.
This much, stodgy pundits and centrist scolds get right. The trouble comes when they take the banal fact that moderating on some issues, in some places, is politically beneficial — and extrapolate that moderating on all issues, in (virtually) all areas, must be even more so.
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