Yglesias notes that a lot of "leftists" trace their politics to the arrival of Bernie Sanders on the national stage in the 2016 primary. He points out two historical facts: that the Democratic Party arose from economic populism associated with Andrew Jackson (and Martin van Buren, but Yglesias omits him). He also notes that Bill Clinton and Al Gore ran on broadly Bernie Sounding themes of a middle class being squeezed by the rich. I would add the Woodrow Wilson ran against the predations of great wealth. FDR was explicitly populist in its rhetoric, talking about how "economic royalists" hated him and "I welcome their hatred."
This - broadly speaking - is the problem with the Very Online Politics. So many of the loudest voices online are just young. They think they invented things that long predate them. One example would be nonviolent protest. Basically, the concept of nonviolent civil disobedience traces its origins to Henry David Thoreau and then Mohandas Gandhi and finally Martin Luther King. One of the important concepts of this is that you willingly go to jail. That's a huge part of it. You lay down your body on the gears of injustice and accept the consequences. Many of today's protestors think that they can raise hell and escape the consequences.
We saw this with the "protest" against Jewish owned businesses in Philadelphia that was pretty anti-Semitic and echoing of Kristallnacht, with which is shared an anniversary. "How could we have known that it was near the anniversary of a Nazi riot against Jewish businesses?" Well, you are responsible for your actions and their impact.
Bernie and his minions have become an especially toxic force in Democratic politics. This toxicity is linked to the idea that Bernie was some sort of sui generis force in American politics. Bernie did not invent this, and in fact, it has a long tradition in Democratic politics - the longest tradition. Hillary Clinton may have been leaning into policies designed to continue the long and slow recovery from 2008, but her demonization as a "neo-liberal" was largely silly. I remain convinced that a lot of latent misogyny sunk her with a certain segment of Very Online Young Men. They have since dug deeply into this position, with Bernie as their lodestar.
Bernie - it must be said - has accomplished astonishingly little in his long career in the Senate. The actual hard work of legislating has eluded him. Getting a universal or more universal health care system is really, really hard. It will likely happen in the slow incremental way that it has happened so far: Medicare and Medicaid, then decades later you get the ACA. In between, you had Ted Kennedy who famously killed a half-measure in the early '70s in his pursuit of every thing he wanted. He regretted it, which made him a forceful advocate for the ACA. For Berniebros, the ACA is a betrayal of the preferred outcome. The perfect made the enemy of the good.
Finally, we have the stupid kerfuffle over Florida. Angie Nixon was very, very unlikely to win Florida - a state which is tilting further and further right. Schumer decided to prioritize places like Iowa and Mississippi, which are cheaper to win in. Meanwhile, Saint Bernard sat on tens of millions of his PAC money, when - if it's really about money - he might have saved Nixon and proved the perfidy of "establishment Dems."
I've been exposed to a ton of online arguments that are made by people who seem ignorant of basic ideas of government or history. That's not a recipe for long term success.
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