nodemocratsleft

The role of the Democratic Party is to persuade Republican partisans and the public in general that Democrats represent the left. Democrats are a centrist party (that is, pragmatic, bureaucratic, and oriented to discrete policy-by-policy and issue-by-issue behavior and decisions) with some token left-wing mascots. (No, the names regularly invoked in conservative "stop so-and-so from doing such-and-such" scare-mails aren't them.) As Howard Zinn noted, the tradition of the Democratic Party is to be somewhat more liberal than the Republican Party on domestic issues, but not too liberal, and not to differ meaningfully on foreign policy issues at all.

In this way, conservative voters are (perversely) comforted at having defined badguys to reflect off their own assumed goodguy badges. Capital-class insiders to the mechanics of power are served by both major parties, each party standing in periodically to take the blame when different aspects of the system as-is awaken a glimmer of dissatisfaction in the disinformed populace. In this way, resources and activism are diverted from any efforts to create actual representation and participation from the people.

People working within the Democratic organization often believe is is necessary (however unfortunate it may be) to move to the 'middle' to pick up more support. In doing so, they only help the opposition move American political discourse further to the right. There is no ideological 'middle.' A person may apply a progressive moral logic to one issue and a conservative moral logic on another, but there isn't anyone consistently and ideologically devoted to "somewhere in between" along most issues, unless you count simple apathy. To avoid openly embracing progressive moral causes while accommodating conservative issues gives people no encouragement to think progressively, and no disincentive to think conservatively. (See George Lakoff.) We all have both underlying moral logics in our heads, as they exist for dealing with different kinds of situations and relationships, but people's minds will most readily use the tools they've practiced, and evading your alleged values as extreme offers no practice in thinking and living them.