They don’t exist. Not in politics, at least. All we get are crooks and 80 year olds.

In a real way, both major parties are still fighting out the battles of the civil rights era, and are effectively led by people who came of age then. Unfortunately, that they (or their ideas) are still running the show in the way that they are means both parties are stuck in a particular past, forever trying to avoid the calamity they’re fighting to un-do

The GOP’s leadership is fighting like a wounded animal to un-do desegregation and Roe, and to dismantle voting rights and industrial regulation

The Dem’s leadership have spent decades fighting super-hard to prevent their voters from advancing progressives out of primaries and into general elections. McGovern’s loss in 1972, they think, is forever evidence that progressives can’t win and their subsequent curb-stomping of progressives (denying them party support, fighting hard to prevent them from winning primaries) serves as evidence to their way of thinking that ‘progressives can’t win’.

That this last bit (progs can’t win, never mind we make sure they can’t, so you have to vote for what wins or else all is lost) begs the question it pretends to answer seems pretty obvious to me. It has the same energy as saying ‘socialism doesn’t work’ and then pointing to socialist governments that ‘didn’t work’ because CIA ran coups to depose them and replace them with right-wing dictatorships. Of course these things don’t work when you kill them off, the whole argument becomes self-fulfilling and circular.