They wield prog retards like a weapon.

It goes a long way back.

Carter's failure demolished the mid century liberals. In the post-mort the Democrats realized that Reagan had managed to take old labor from them by appealing to cheap nationalism even while running the economy even further into the ground with the farm crisis and the savings and loan crisis.

Now, Reagan failed to actually reinvent the GOP because the wrong faction won in his wake. GHW Bush and the rino crowd successfully marginalized the proto-Trumps like Pat Buchanan. The proto-populists had their revenge with Ross Perot, but in a sense it was a pyrrhic victory to kick out GHW.

Meanwhile, the Democrats realized that they COULD NOT run a progressive and win. But they also couldn't win without the progressives. So the compromise they arrived at was Clinton, with an ultra progressive VP (Gore). Clinton-Gore was essentially a bait and switch the DNC played on the far left, or at least that how it came to be perceived when Gore failed in 2000. Obama inflamed that divide even further by being in many ways a continuation of Bush's policies.