No, Joe Biden has not gone too far to the left.

Centrists keep telling us that the party is too far left... in an attempt to move it to the right.

Hey Friend — This weekend I wanted to send along a recent post I wrote for The New Republic. For the last few months I’ve been writing in their opinion pages, covering pandemic school closures, climate change, and, of course, Joe Manchin.

You can find an excerpt from my most recent piece below. Or read the whole thing at their website: newrepublic.com

There’s a new conventional wisdom emerging to explain the Biden administration’s bumpy first year: He’s “too far left.” Centrist lawmakers, Democratic strategists turned talking heads, and Never Trump conservatives are all jumping on the bandwagon.

It’s curious, considering President Biden’s highest-profile legislative failures didn’t break on his ability to achieve broad consensus among the party. They failed over the obstinance of just two centrist extremists. The cognitive dissonance between the reality and the spin suggests a broader strategy: fear-mongering over the left to shift the party to the right.

Consider the aftermath of the disastrous Virginia elections, in which Terry McAuliffe, a white middle-aged centrist former governor who made his name in the party fundraising for the Clintons, was defeated by Glenn Youngkin, a political neophyte. Any objective assessment would suggest that throwback Clinton-era “New Democrats” don’t have a future in the party. But instead, James Carville, the cantankerous former architect of Clinton’s “third way” chalked it up to “stupid wokeness.” Wait, what? No one has ever accused McAuliffe of being woke. Wokeness didn’t lose him the campaign; the fact that he (a) repeatedly mistook his opponent for Donald Trump without articulating a vision for the future and (b) said that one dumb sentence in a debate, about giving parents no say, did…. Read the rest of the piece at newrepublic.com