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As the Democratic Partyleadership attemptsto rebrand the party as populist with itsBetter Deal agenda,establishmentDemocratshave already startedtoconsider whichcandidateto getbehind for the2020 electionand, perhaps unsurprisingly, the top picks arentexactly populists.

According to a Politicoreporton Tuesday,former President Barack Obama and his allies have begun to encourage former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, who is currently a managing director at Bain Capital (thats Mitt Romneys old firm), to run for the nominationin three years. Other wings of the Democraticestablishmentseem to be leaning toward Sen. Kamala Harris of California, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, and former Vice President Joe Biden, who will be 77 years old in 2020.

Not surprisingly, progressives have notgreeted theseprospectivecandidates with open arms. Harris, for example, who is undeniably becoming a star in the Democratic Party, has beencriticizedby activists who were connected tothe Bernie Sanders campaign. She is the preferred candidate of extremely wealthy and out-of-touch Democratic party donors,saidWinnie Wong, co-founder of People for Bernie, toMic. Her recent anointing is extremely telling. These donors will line her coffers ahead of 2020 and she will have the next two years to craft a message of broad appeal to a rapidly changing electorate.

There are a number of legitimatecriticisms made against Harris for her recordas California attorney general, includingherfailure to prosecutecurrent Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchins bank for foreclosure violations. But the overall problem progressives seem to have with her is that Harris appears politically inconsistent, and shifts positions wheneverit is convenient. Thats equally true of Cory Booker, a longtime Hillary Clinton ally who hasclose ties to Wall Streetand a history ofsupportingconservative-friendly policies like school privatization. Booker was formerly close to Betsy DeVos, now Trumps secretary of education, andsat on the board of her school choiceadvocacy group.

In response to the left-wing criticisms of thesepotentialcandidates, liberals have adopteda familiarline of attack,rehashingthe 2016 BernieBro narrative, which maintainedthat leftist opposition to Clinton was rooted in sexismrather than politics or ideology. Clinton ally Neera Tanden responded to the aforementioned Mic article this way:

So odd, no, that these folks have if in for Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.... hhhhmmm.

— Neera Tanden?? (@neeratanden) July 31, 2017

In a similar vein, feminist author AndiZeisler sarcasticallytweeted this:

The following day,Zeislerclarifiedher position,tweetingthat she had not been sufficiently up on Harris record as attorney general; by then, however, her previous tweet which implied there was no legitimate political basis for opposing Harris had been liked by over 25,000 people.

There seem to be two possible explanations for this line of attack on progressives: Either certain liberals have made the cynical decision to smear their opponents instead of engaging in honest debate, or there is genuine confusion about why politicians like Booker and Harris and Clinton, for that matter are distrustedby people on the left. One suspects that a large percentage of Clinton loyalistsare indeed acting in bad faith, and would rather try todiscredittheir critics many of whom are women and people of color than engage in adebate. But theres no doubt that some are genuinely bewildered by progressive criticismsof the Democratic Party. The Democratic leadership is, after all, starting take on more of a populist tone, while prominent elected Democrats like Booker and Harris have embraced more progressive policies since last years election.

In a recent Jacobinarticlecritiquing the Better Deal platform introduced by the Democrats last month,historian Matt Karp expounded onthe fundamental difference between the populist rhetoric we are currently hearing from neoliberal Democratslike Booker and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the authentic populism that was conveyedby the Bernie Sanders campaign last year:

What distinguished the Bernie Sanders campaign more than any other issue including his support for free college or Medicare for All was that he named his enemy. Among his other objectives, Sanderss attacks on the 1 percent were an attempt to reorder American politics around class lines: not with a stale disquisition on stratification, but by tapping into Americans anti-billionaire sentiment, religiously excluded from mainstream politics by both parties but thrumming powerfully just below the surface.

For Democrats, Bad Billionaires like Trump or the Koch brothers represent an existential threat to democracy, but Good Billionaires are vital campaign allies (Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, Mark Cuban), crucial donors and policy shapers (George Soros, Haim Saban), or even possible secretaries of labor (Howard Schultz).

This distinctionreveals the underlyingconflictbetween leftists and liberals. While the former reject the status quoandbelieve that a system that produces billionaires and historic levels of inequalitymust be completelyrestructured, the latter generallyaccept the status quo as fixed, and advocatepiecemeal reform. If to be a radical is to grasp things by the root, as Karl Marx once put it, then to be a liberal, one might say, is to look only at the surface of things.

Needless to say, a neoliberallike Cory Booker, who is beloved byWall Street donorsandpharmaceutical companies, is not likely to challenge the economic status quo, since he is a product of it. One can expectleftists tocontinue criticizing prospectivecandidateswho embody the status quo, irrespectiveof their ethnicity or gender.

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First Democratic contenders for 2020 are unveiled: For progressives, it's not an inspiring batch - Salon