Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous quote that “what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger” is only true, at least in politics, if you learn from your mistakes. And last year was a teachable moment for Democrats.
Democratic leaders missed huge opportunities on election reform (including the all-important Electoral Count Act), climate change, police reform, the right kind of immigration reform and much else, all because their eyes were too big, packages were too ambitious and most of all because they refused to say “no” to the extremist purity tests of the party’s hard left. Build Back Better was sacrificed on that altar.
Success requires tapering untested grandiosities and selling commonsense ideas to the 70% or so of the public that reject the extremes of the hard right and the hard left.
