JF

If your "leftist," political project is to build a coalition of minorities and relegate questions of class to a secondary position, you need to explain how what you're doing isn't the exact same thing that the Democratic Party has been doing for the last fifty years.

The DNC is constrained by liberal norms. These people aren't. The actual policy positions are continuous - they want the same outcome as the DNC - but W taught them nothing happens if you break the rules and Obama (deceptively) taught them playing by the rules is for chumps.

The message Obama sent was "The senate is irredeemably reactionary regardless of what anyone does and is effectively impervious to any kind of influence from the major population centers." That's not actually true but it let him off the hook for not doing things he didn't want to