Subject: Re: Clintonites lost bigly
Yeah, those are progressive values and goals. The Third Wave Clintonite dems are not the party of those values.

They are, though. Despite your derision, the factions in the party have been coalescing along some rather coherent lines.

One faction is largely organized around the interests of the college-educated liberals, who tend to bury the needle on what we think of as "social" progressive values: things like aggressive action on climate change, anti-Racism and dismantling systems of white supremacy, fighting the patriarchy (including the MeToo movement), and other liberal positions. This is the Clintonite base. It is the faction of the party that centers things other than structural economic change. That's the faction that Clinton activated when she pivoted to the left on social issues against Sanders in 2016, and that Biden captured when he did his end run around Sanders (and Warren) to some extent in 2020. That's the Third Way/Clintonite coalition.

The other faction is organized far more around issues of economics, class. This is what we might now call the more "populist" wing of the party or the Sanders wing. This faction of the party prioritizes economic justice and structural changes to the economic system as their top priority. Other considerations, particularly those surrounding issues of race or gender, are relegated to a lower priority - if not deemed to be the symptoms of economic problems, rather than significant problems that cannot be materially ameliorated with economic reforms.

There is a very real conflict among these groups - perhaps not so much in positions (all the Sanders wing will nod towards the problems of race in the U.S., while all the Clintonians will acknowledge problems of class) but priorities. A wrong but useful heuristic is to say that the Sanders wing believes that it's more important to focus on structurally changing the economy (even perhaps to say problems of race and patriarchy and even climate change can be meaningfully addressed through those economic measures), while the Clinton wing believes that the focus should be primarily on fixing those social problems as a priority (even perhaps to say that the economic disparities will be materially addressed if you change the unfairness).

Again, if we simplify to the point of being wrong but still useful: Populists/Sanderites think that voters should (and do) think of their interests primarily based on class and their material, economic interests. Clintonites think that voters should (and do) think of their interests primarily based on their identitarian characteristics.

That’s what is so surprising about these primary results. Progressives are winning despite these fat fingers.

Not that surprising. The Sanders wing is winning primary contests in some races (Maine! NJ-12! CA-22!) and the Clintonites are winning primary contests in others (Iowa! CA-11! NJ-7!). And they're winning them in places you'd expect - the Sanderites in blue places, and the Clintonites in purple-to-red places. That's been happening for the last couple of election cycles. You could equally be surprised that the Clintonites are still winning races despite the national Sanderite machine pushing tipping the scales in those local elections. Heck, I'm actually more surprised the Sanders wing hasn't been more successful, since the salience of economic issues to voters has skyrocketed while the salience of Clintonite issues (like climate change and racial justice) has really collapsed. The overall environment is generally more favorable to the Sanderites issue set, but they seem to have mostly continued to have their candidates mostly succeed in the same sort of state/districts that they traditionally have (blue) and not so much in purple or red ones, with the very notable exception of CA-22. It will be very interesting to see what happens in Michigan's primary.