American social democrats are amazing creatures. A little over a century ago the Zimmerwald left ruptured with social democracy and the social democrats proceeded with a simple message: rights for workers and nationalism-lite. This message was wildly popular with the working class throughout almost all of Europe and many of these parties remain powerful even to this day.

In America however, we had Samuel Gompers. He and his cronies decided the unions wouldn't have a political party. This meant that social democrats had basically no constituents here and they never emerged. To this day they still don't really exist in any meaningful sense. Yet some people still pretend they are social democrats for whatever reason as if that means anything in the US context. They pretend they have independent political views when in reality they just toe the Democratic party line. Nobody knows why they do this. They don't get any clout or power from it and they never seriously act in a way that would build power to implement their ideas. They get spit on by every side of the political debate and for what? To post tweets like this? Incredible.