One small problem with this analogy:
Barney Frank on the post-Obama left: "In some ways, they’re like the tea party. They’re in this parallel universe." http://t.co/6R0k8OVES1
— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) July 20, 2015
…the tea party folks actually win elections. Frustrated as our grassroots may be with the federal results sometimes*, on the state level things are going rather nicely for conservative activists right now. Which suggests that, perhaps, the universes are a little less parallel than either Barney Frank or the Democratic party would care to admit.
Moe Lane
PS: Pretty much every Leftist quoted in that article will vote for Hillary Clinton, by the way. I know it. You know it. They know it. She knows it. And that last sentence is, really, the progressives’ big problem. The nominee will smack them in the face at some point, and the progressives will then gamely take the fall. Why should any of us pretend otherwise?
*I personally take great comfort in judging the 112th and later Congresses by the Horrible Example that was the 111th. Because that Congress absolutely sucked. Taught me the value of King Log, ya, you betcha…
And what is the reason that the netroots will vote for Hillary (or whoever gets the Democratic nod)? As you said earlier, all they need to hear is “what, are you going to vote Republican?) and their Pavlovian reflex will kick in. Decades of investment have gone into conditioning the netroots. And if they actually looked like they might upset the applecart, Hillary’s enforcers will restore order very quickly using their time-tested methods.
Meanwhile, among the Republican grassroots, it will be the usual battle between hyper-purity testing and disgust with the establishment. But at least there is some evidence of a learning curve among the grassroots, which we better hope rises faster than the establishment’s learning curve.