IT IS TIME TO REJECT THE FALSE BINARY.

I've never figured out what the writers at "The Bulwark," who style themselves as "No partisan loyalties. No tribal prejudices" are really about.

The service is an effort of Charlie "Never Trump" Sykes and a number of other disaffected individuals, such as Mona Charen, to ... punish Trumpians by helping install Democrats?  Or something.  Note the confusion by Bulwark contributor A. B. Stoddard.  "Some Democrats are telling us that it’s just too much to expect their voters to turn out in November because, to them, Biden’s first half of his term has been a failure. Their perception seems to be that current events are terribly disappointing, but not dire." Why, it's as if there's an aggregation problem in electoral politics.  A goodly number of people might have voted to oust Mr Trump and to gridlock the government, and yet the communist wing of the Democrats' coalition saw an opportunity to immiserate the normies.  Now they're wondering why people aren't returning their calls.

Voters put Democrats in power with a very narrow majority and in return they got an ambitious COVID rescue plan, a bipartisan infrastructure law, and bipartisan gun reform. If Democrats want more of their legislative priorities addressed, then they should be eager to vote. Because that is how you solve your problems. And the bigger the majorities you can make, the bigger the problems you can tackle.

Those ambitious projects are going to come to grief, and turning out bigger majorities is going to be difficult.  Byron York diagnosed the problem.

The Democrats' most fundamental problem is that they entered the Biden administration with wildly unrealistic expectations. They expected to be able to get big things done, such as massive spending programs, far-reaching action on climate change, large tax increases, and more, without having won a majority of seats in the Senate. Indeed, there was talk, apparently serious, of Biden winning legislation on the scale of the New Deal or the Great Society. And all this would be done with a 50-50 tie with Republicans in the Senate, broken in the administration's favor by the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.

The communist rump of the party, though, wants a change at the top of the ticket for different reasons than those of the corporatists. "A third of respondents answered that the president's job performance is the primary factor, another 33% cited Biden's age, and 10% said their preference stems from Biden not being 'progressive enough.'"

Memo to A. B. Stoddard: there aren't enough self-styled progressive voters to vote in the kind of majority to enact the less incrementalist agenda they'd like.  It might be that punishing Trumpian Republicans by supporting Democrats is therefore less hazardous than some pundits would suggest.

All the same, a false binary in which both major parties are beholden to noisy fringes is one that voters ought reject, either by choosing the least insane alternative on offer, or by considering those other parties.