What is actually not said but floats around this piece from Raw Story that critiques the major parties’ policy similarities is a conceit that the Democratic Party is a left wing political party. Despite the tremendous number of progressives wedded to the Democratic Party, they are not the driving political force within the party as evidenced by the highly compromised, progressivesque healthcare and finance reform legislation passed by Democrat-controlled Congress. Rather, the Democratic Establishment is very much centrist, moderate in socially liberal values (for example, Democrats as a party do not support marriage equality; instead, they support civil unions with equal federal privileges), and very much on board with economic liberalism particularly since Clinton, which oversaw NAFTA and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Many writers have already scribed their pieces on how President Obama himself is not a progressive either, but in fact a centrist-pragmatist. Today’s Democrats are certainly not FDR or his New Deal Democrats.

It’s an odd delusion that many progressive Democrats have about the party as well as Republicans and Conservatives. For the Right and a majority of the GOP, “liberal” is synonymous with “Democrat”; and more than a handful of occasions have progressive Democrats assumed I was a Democrat because I identified myself as a “liberal” or “progressive.” It appears that the ones who know better are the Democratic centrists who bad mouth the “professional left,” tell progressives to “fuck off” or to “stop whining.”

Compared on a global scale, Democrats are very much a center-right political party. Even a Canadian friend said to me once, “Your ‘Left’ is still pretty ‘Right’ to us.”

The point is to take off the blinders and really know what your party stands for. I wonder when was the last time most progressive Democrats actually read the Democratic Party platform. They should, of course, continue to support Democratic candidates who have proven their progressive metal, but why maintain delusions about what the party is and stands for when it’s out there to be read?