Do centrist liberal Democrats have a unique vision for the future that isn’t just rehashing the Obama, Clinton or FDR eras?
As we near the midterms, I can’t help but feel the malaise between the progressive/DSA and the liberal centrist wings of the party comes down to a fundamental disagreement on whether it’s practically possible or even desirable to make the Democratic party’s chief goal to permanently live in a political time capsule from decades ago.
I lean more towards the DSA wing largely because they seem to recognize the perils of existential risks like wealth inequality, climate change, pandemic risks, and AI. I haven’t really heard liberals provide a vision for the inevitable future where our current factory farming model of agriculture physically will break down, or a future of what happens if tech broligarchs achieve AGI and use it to permanently disempower all of us and make us defacto slaves, regardless of UBI. The socialist/DSA folks usually vary between pausing AI or stopping its development entirely, alongside international treaties. From what I’ve seen of liberals like Ezra Klein and The Economist, they seem to be on the path of continuing to accelerate AI development while also supporting vague “guardrails”.
Another issue that grinds me about liberals is they seem totally impotent on the issue of massive wealth inequality. When any notion of taxing the rich, wealth taxes, implementing rent control, or capital controls, or anything to inconvenience the wealth and power of oligarchs is proposed, liberals vigorously explain why it’s impossible to check their power in any way whatsoever.
At the end of the day, it sadly seems to me that the Democratic establishment’s policy agenda is to do minor policy tweaks while we barrel face first into a concrete wall at 200 mph. I genuinely hope I’m mistaken and can be proven wrong, but I just don’t see the path to addressing these issues from the centrist liberal democrats.