Maxspeak on what the Democratic Party should strive to be:
Coalitions are about reaching understandings through dialogue and/or compromise with people of different views. The Democratic Party needs to be a coalition of working people. It needs to ease up on cultural and social liberalism. I mean fetishes about gun control and tobacco. It needs to stop pretending that Southern whites are more racist than other people. It needs to welcome the “seamless web” Catholics who oppose both abortion and the death penalty. It needs to stop overselling rehabilitation and underselling punishment. It needs to find ways of establishing reasonable environmental regulation other than on the backs of workers. What it endorses as a party is ideally the outcome of a rational debate and compromise on these issues. For some, one or another such compromise could be a ‘deal-breaker.’ So be it. That’s the process we need. The constant and lodestar should be an unwavering commitment to the living standards of working people, and opposition to the corporativist, war-mongering ways of the Republican Party.
Without class politics, the Democratic Party becomes cats-paw of the big donors, a party of well-to-do white liberals lording it over second-class minorities organized by race and ethnicity. The economic policy of such a party boils is neo-liberalism (balanced budgets, free trade, smaller government, and Federal Reserve supremacy in monetary policy), with tokenism and crumbs for the minorities.