Dean Phillips, the former congressman from Minnesota who ran an unsuccessful primary campaign against President Biden in 2024, believes the Democratic Party should have a big tent, but not a tent big enough to include the choice of the party’s primary voters in America’s largest city:
This puts Phillips to the right of Joe Walsh, a radio talker and podcaster who was an extremely conservative Republican member of Congress before he became a Never Trumper. (Walsh challenged President Trump in the 2020 Republican primaries, and was about as successful as Phillips was running against Biden four years later.)
What’s striking about this is that Walsh has a history of being extraordinarily Islamophobic.
And there’s a lesson here. People who paid attention knew that Joe Walsh said many vile things, as both a member of Congress and a broadcaster. But more moderate Republicans didn’t rush to cable news in order to denounce him. They didn’t make a great show of denouncing Iowa congressman Steve King when he made overtly racist remarks. They quietly tiptoed away from bigots such as Carl Paladino, Andrew Cuomo’s Republican opponent in the 2010 New York governor’s race, and North Carolina’s Mark Robinson, whose offensive remarks were widely known long before the release of the porn-site message-board comments that derailed his 2024 gubernatorial campaign.
Many Republican candidates are grotesque and vile — but it isn’t considered a power move in the GOP to shout at the top of your lungs, “MY PARTY IS FULL OF EXTREMISTS AND THEY NEED TO BE PURGED ASAP!!!!” But that is seen as a power move in response to a Democrat who is merely redistributionist in economics and critical of Israeli government outrages.
Moderate Democrats don’t have to like Zohran Mamdani. But if they’re certain he’s bad for the party, they should simply say as little as possible about him. That way, they’re not denigrating the party as a whole and they have more time to criticize Republicans — y’know, the party they run against every election cycle? But Democrats apparently don’t believe that criticizing only your opponents is good politics. I still need someone to explain why that makes any sense at all.
Republished with permission from No More Mister Nice Blog.
