I have my concerns about how Nancy Pelosi is handling her job as Speaker of the House, but the way she’s dealing with unruly freshman progressives is not one of them. I think Nancy LeTourneau ably described the different institutional roles at play, so I don’t need to need to go into that in depth. Simply stated, Pelosi is supposed to keep her caucus on track and do everything she can to protect the party’s House majority. If that means she has to crack the whip on people who are off-message or talking nonsense, then I applaud her for not shying away from her duty.

Right now, the Democratic base is clear-eyed about some things that seem to be in Pelosi’s blind spot, like how to confront Donald Trump, but their agenda is dangerously out of synch on a host of issues. Some of it how they’re handling the topics of the day and some of it is what they’re choosing to emphasize. To be honest, the presidential candidates (who are, after all, catering to the base) are just as guilty on this score.

For starters, the Democrats are managing to actually lose the debate over the border despite the fact that Trump’s positions and strategies are immoral, inept, and virtually indefensible. The American people, writ large, do not want open borders. They don’t think people who cross illegally should be allowed to stay in the country. They basically agree with Trump that people should be deported, disagreeing mainly over what exceptions might be made and how to do it humanely rather than having big qualms about the principles involved. But the Democratic base is seemingly opposed to the very idea that people should be detained at the border or deported under any circumstances other than a history of violent crime. The candidates are tripping over each other to offer subsidized health care to people who are not citizens and are not legally residing in the country. This is not politically popular. I could not walk into most Americans’ living rooms and defend these positions.

This is really irresponsible in my opinion, because it leaves voters a choice between policies they see as nonsensical and the policies of Trump, which amount to crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, this mainly works to make the crimes against humanity look like a comparable option.

What’s legitimate is the desire to offer asylum to people who need it. What’s legitimate is expecting all human beings to be treated humanely. What’s legitimate is to oppose the way Trump uses demagoguery, racial stereotyping and xenophobia as political weapons. His policies are designed to be so cruel as to act as a deterrent against not just illegal entry but legitimate petitions for asylum. This is why he wants to separate people from their children. It’s why he wants the detainment facilities to be as uncomfortable as possible and doesn’t discourage guards from mistreating people. These are winning political arguments against Trump that also happen to be correct on the merits. I can go into people’s homes and argue these points and not have people look at me like I have three heads. In fact, Trump’s actions are so egregious that I can actually use these points to change people’s minds about what kind of immigration and asylum policies we should have.

I can’t do that if the argument is that no one should ever be deported and that the agencies in charge of immigration enforcement should simply stand down. If I go even further and start offering people expensive benefits like health care and college, they want to know what kind of drugs I am taking. They close down and stop listening with a sympathetic and compassionate ear.

The Democrats are currently taking positions on a variety of issues that either pander to a narrow slice of their base or simply have no relationship to the needs of their poorer constituents. A low-income black agricultural worker in Mississippi with no family history of higher education isn’t any more interested in the government spending every free dollar on college loan forgiveness than the average white coal miner or auto worker in the Rust Belt. They might want their kids to have a shot at a college education or they might think that’s a poor investment. But there are other things they’d like to see that money spent on, like better K-12 education, the opioid epidemic, affordable prescription drugs, basic infrastructure, or even crop subsidies.

Few of these people are going to relate to academic debates about gender identity or the patriarchy or neoliberalism or school busing policies in the 1970’s. It’s not that these things are unimportant, but these voters need to hear something else entirely if the Democrats want their enthusiastic support. Successful political campaigns are not seminars. There is a place for hashing out policies and advocating for transformational change, but people in real immediate need rarely have much interest in or patience for such things.

Pelosi may not understand how to deal with President Trump, but she understands branding.  There’s an overlap between the seats she needs to hold and the voters the Democrats need to attract to win the presidency, and anything that presents a threat to those goals is going to get her ire up. There are some things, like an impeachment inquiry, that she is reacting to with too much fear, but there are others that are plainly reasonable.

Trump has only one real chance to win reelection, and that’s if he can paint the Democrats as totally out of touch and nearly as radical as he is. If she just lets the loudest voices run roughshod over everyone else, that’s exactly what will happen.

What’s really tripping people up is that the white working class Obama/Trump voters and the less advantaged people in the black community are both arriving near the same place when it comes to Joe Biden. These groups are supposed to be about as antagonistic as any two groupings in America, but they have a meeting of the minds over what kind of nominee they’d like to see. They want a lunch-bucket type of guy who talks in plain understandable English and isn’t just advocating policies that appeal first and foremost to the professional class or the academic mindset.

Like it or not, this is a class-based consensus, and the lower classes simply have a different definition of progressivism than the college-educated do. They are practical minded because they don’t have the luxury of being anything else, and they see a Democratic Party that seems to look out for the neediest less and less and more and more caters itself to dreamers and idealists.

No, the lower classes are not the only people who matter. Everyone matters in their own way, and we need professionals and venture capitalists and inventors and scientists just as much as we need people to work retail, build our cars and tend to our crops. But what we need as a society does not always line up neatly with what we need to do to win an election.

The Democrats are supposed to be the worker’s party but their coalition has shifted on them. They are now a party based more on identity than class and more on a urban/suburban alliance and a farmer/labor one. They’ve got the intelligentsia locked up.

But they still need more of the farmer/labor vote than they got in 2016 if they want to win in 2020. They have to know how to talk to these folks and, just as important, how not to talk to them.

What Pelosi is really trying to do is keep the party in the mainstream because Trump left the middle for the taking. Much of the left has no use for the mainstream, and often for very good reason. The left wouldn’t be doing it’s job if it were satisfied with the status quo or with a return to a less than satisfying past. In some areas, Trump’s abandonment of the center offers a real chance to move things meaningfully in a more progressive direction.

But someone has to try to hold the line. That job has fallen on Pelosi, and she’s not apologetic about it. If she holds her majority and a Democrat is elected president, she’ll be ready to push a lot harder, but not before then.

To me, her main mistake, and it’s a big one, is not allowing an impeachment inquiry to formally begin. She should use the same standard that was used during Watergate, the investigation of which, you may remember, began almost immediately after Nixon was reelected in an historic landslide. If those Democrats were not afraid of a public backlash, I really don’t understand why she is today.