Liberals and Progressives need to stop self identifying with the Democratic party. They need to understand, as the Christian right did with the Republicans (and they got their payoff in two anti-abortion justices, so those who said that the Republicans never give them anything were simply wrong) that the Democratic party is a tool, and that your job is to become the stronger party within that party, so that when it comes into power, it carries out progressive and liberal policies, not conservative ones.

What this means, individually, is that while you always vote Democratic (because conservatives are prefferable to reactionaries) you shouldn't be working for or donating to Conservative democrats. Because, bottom line, they will sell you down the river on key votes like the bankruptcy act or Alito. So, no money, no time, for them.

Not ever. You only have so much money and time and it should go to people who will actually represent your views. If your local candidate isn't a liberal or progressive by all means vote for him, but find someone else to donate to, to give time to. There are always progressive candidates who need help.

Welsh's basic ideas -- help progressive candidates, save our limited resources for people who support our views -- is certainly a defensible one, but the basic attitude of the piece, which is something on the order of "the heck with you, we're taking care of our own" is wrong-headed and unecessarily divisive at a time when we need to be working together to remove the Republican Party from power.

Here's what I wrote in a comment on MyDD:

I spent most of my early years identifying myself as an "Independent". I even registered to vote that way (in 1972), until it was clear that (at the time) winning a Democratic primary in New York City was tantamount to winning the election, so I changed my registration in order to have some voice about who was on the ballot.

Even then, though, I thought of myself as an Independent, not particularly connected to our beholden to any party, despite the fact that I almost always voted for Democrats. (I would usually vote for them on 3rd party lines when I could, something that's allowed here in New York, where all votes for a candidate, on whatever line, are added together.)

That changed, and what changed it was the election of 2000 and the dawning of the Bush Era. It wasn't an immediate thing, but more and more as time went on and the horrors of the Bush admnistration continued, I came to identify more and more with the Democratic Party, until now, I'm committed to thinking of myself as a Democrat.

That may seem odd, given the very weak job that the party as a whole has done in opposing Bush, and in keeping the progressive agenda moving forward, but it was actually utterly necessary, and, in effect, forced upon me by the structural peculiarities of our system. Not being a Parliamentary system, where splinter parties can survive as partners with larger parties in forming governments, we are always going to have at any one time only two major parties that count, that have any chance at all of governing. One is going to be center-right, and the other center-left, and the only way another party can come to the forefront is by one of the prevailing parties disintegrating and leaving a hole to be occupied.

Given that, and given that the Republican party has been hijacked lock, stock and barrel by the radical right-wing, which now controls the entire apparatus of the Federal government, if I want to stop them, there's really only one viable way to go about that -- and that's through the other major party.

That's why I'm a Democrat, and why I'll continue to identify myself as a Democrat, in spite of the Joe Liebermans and Ben Nelsons and Mary Landrieus. I'm a Democrat because the Democratic Party is without a doubt the one and only way to remove the Republican Party from power. I may not like that, and it may well be that under future circumstances I will no longer feel as strongly about supporting a party which doesn't have the same progressive agenda that I do, but for now and the foreseeable future I am a Democrat.