By
Ed Kilgore,
political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015
A blast from the distant past.
It’s a strategic truism in politics that if you can’t seize the political “center,” where a lot of unaffiliated voters live, you try to push the opposition out of the center by labeling them as extremist. This has been a constant preoccupation of Republicans in the Trump era, thanks to the 45th and 47th president’s inveterate habit of playing to his MAGA base. Hence the effort to brand Democrats — even aggressively centrist Democrats — as “the radical left” is not particularly surprising. Radical is, after all, a relative term on which people can differ, odd as it is to apply it to staid boomers like Joe Biden.
