Trump’s latest attempt to change the subject from his involvement with Epstein, Iran, Netanyahu, and the billions he and his sons are making from their schemes is to label progressive Democrats “communists.” He has even suggested that some should be stripped of their citizenship, deported, or sent to one of his ICE concentration camps.

At the same time, open conflict is growing inside the Democratic Party over populist issues. So-called moderate Democrats are defending their reliance on corporate and AIPAC money to win elections and arguing for preserving the status quo created by Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that removed limits on independent political spending by corporations and unions, widely criticized as having legalized political bribery.

A recent example came in Michigan, where Governor Gretchen Whitmer — whose father was once CEO of Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan — endorsed Congresswoman Haley Stevens over Abdul El-Sayed in the state’s upcoming primary. El-Sayed, a public health official and former Detroit health director who ran for Michigan governor in 2018, has spent his career advocating for Medicare for All and wrote a book on the subject, Medicare For All: A Citizens Guide. Stevens, who has received corporate money, opposes the program.

El-Sayed described the dynamic plainly:

“I think in this race, at the end of the day, it tends to be that candidates who generally have been funded the same way will tend to go together. Those of us who don’t take corporate money tend to stick together. Those who have taken corporate money for most of their careers tend to stick together.”

The media has not helped clarify the debate. On Sunday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries what the party’s policy positions would be if it regained control of the House or Senate this fall:

“Your party is fighting over whether the path back to the majority runs through the center or the activist left who want to defund the police, abolish ICE, end aid to Israel, [have] open borders…”

The problem, the article argues, is that such claims blur the difference between fringe activists and actual elected progressive Democrats. It notes that the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America recently appeared on Fox News and called for abolishing the Senate, ending national borders, and shutting down prisons, but emphasizes that the DSA, an independent membership organization founded in 1982, is not the Democratic Party and does not speak for elected Democrats who identify with democratic socialism. Only a handful of sitting members of Congress, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, are DSA members.

The piece says there is no elected Democrat who has called for open borders, and that calls to “defund the police” are not a mainstream Democratic position aside from some police reform language after the murder of George Floyd. It also points out that Bernie Sanders has said, “If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation.” The article adds that even Republicans such as Senators John Thune and Roger Wicker have made the case for ending military aid to Israel, and that a recent YouGov poll found more than half of Americans support abolishing ICE and replacing it with a more professional and transparent agency.

The article argues that progressive positions are broadly popular. It says that not a single “far left” position held by elected progressive Democrats has less than 50% support among the Democratic base, and that most have well over 80% support. It describes these views not as far left, but as “the radical middle,” shaped by 45 years of neoliberal policy from both parties — marked by deregulation, tax cuts favoring the wealthy, corporate trade deals, and the erosion of union power — that, according to the article, have weakened the American middle class and the American Dream.

It says many Americans want a return to a time when a single full-time paycheck could cover the basics: a house, a car every few years, annual vacations, college for children, and a comfortable retirement. It notes that two-thirds of Americans had that standard of living when Reagan took office in 1981, and links that era to the “Square Deal” Theodore Roosevelt campaigned on more than a century ago.

The article then lays out what it describes as the core positions of progressive Democrats:

• Workers should have the right to organize in unions, and no one working full time should live in poverty because the minimum wage has not kept pace.
• Retired people should not pay income taxes on Social Security as they did before Reagan, and wealthy people should contribute more to the system. Social Security should provide enough to live modestly, and Medicare should cover expenses with minimal hassle.
• Every American citizen should be able to vote without unnecessary barriers, and taking away that right should require a judge’s action, similar to how the Supreme Court has ruled in cases involving gun rights.
• Gun violence is described as unacceptable, especially because bullets are the leading cause of death for children. The article calls for rational gun control laws like those in other developed countries.
• Extreme wealth inequality is criticized, including the fact that one man can hold more wealth than the bottom half of America — 165 million people — while paying a smaller share of income in taxes than an average teenager. The article says the United States should return to the 90% top tax rate favored by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower after the first few million dollars in yearly income.
• Children and grandchildren deserve protection from climate-change-driven extreme weather, drought, and wildfires, along with clean air and water. The article also criticizes subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.
• College should once again be affordable, as it was for many Americans in the 1960s, and the country should not saddle entire generations with trillions in student debt.
• Healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. The article says more than half a million families in the richest OECD countries are wiped out every year because someone gets sick, and that all of those families are in the United States.
• Small family businesses should be able to thrive again, which would require breaking up large monopolies across industries.
• People should be free to practice religion, or no religion, without government interference or public subsidies for religious schools.
• People should be judged, hired, and promoted based on merit, not race, ethnicity, or religion.
• Women should have equal rights in the workplace, in the boardroom, in healthcare, and at the ballot box.
• LGBTQ people should have the same rights as everyone else and be free from discrimination and harassment.
• America should pursue comprehensive immigration reform rather than what the article calls a brutal system that is killing people and tearing the country apart.
• The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which treated corporations as persons and money as speech, should be overturned.

The article says many corporate-money Democrats oppose these positions because they conflict with donor interests. It argues that this divide is now being tested in primary elections and that the Democratic Party must decide where it stands. It also says few of the positions listed would have been foreign to Franklin Roosevelt, whose New Deal created Social Security and the minimum wage, or Lyndon Johnson, whose Great Society established Medicare and Medicaid, describing them instead as a return to the political middle.

The piece closes by praising Hakeem Jeffries for steering the conversation back to affordability when confronted with the CNN framing, and says the burden now falls on progressives to explain their positions to friends, neighbors, and co-workers as billions are spent to portray them as extremists. It argues that the country should break with 45 years of bipartisan neoliberalism and return to the policies associated with Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, which Republicans and corporate Democrats have been dismantling since 1981. It concludes by saying average voters have begun to see through these arguments, and that the task now is to “wake up the Democratic Party itself.”