In the Democratic Party's ongoing election postmortem, two sides have emerged: woke activists ("the groups") who want the party to move further left despite evidence that its leftward velocity is the explanation for its defeat, and an apparently smaller or at least less-vocal faction consisting of center-lefties like Rahm Emanuel, Ruy Teixeira, Jim Messina, and James Carville, who are trying to arrest the leftward careen and even push a bit in the other direction (echoes of Al From, Will Marshall and the Democratic Leadership Council of the 1990s).

Think of it as a battle between ideological purity and likely electoral failure on one side versus ideological pragmatism for the sake of electoral success on the other.

Stepping into this factional dispute is the Democrat-linked organization Third Way, which in some respects seeks to broker a compromise by focusing less on ideology and more on messaging; more specifically, their recent memo advice to Democrats to stop using certain phrases and words that make them look like loons to ordinary voters who decide elections.

Third Way has identified no less than 45 words and phrases that progressives (or is it leftists or liberals or democratic socialists these days?) should stop using to convince people that they aren't "the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness."

I remember, roughly around the late 1980s, when New Deal Liberals........

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