Democratic US Senator Calls Establishment-Controlled Democratic Party 'A Failed Enterprise'

A Democratic senator who has long been associated with the party's establishment is now conceding that its old approach to doing politics has failed.

In an interview with David Sirota of The Lever published on Tuesday, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) described "the establishment Democratic Party" as "a failed enterprise."

"It is so hard to lose two general elections to [President] Donald Trump, in political terms, to imagine a worse failure than losing two national elections to Donald Trump," he said. "And yet the establishment Democratic Party did, and I think of it as a failed party."

Bennet added that nobody "should feel an obligation to defend the party as it existed in the form that lost to Donald Trump."

Elsewhere in the interview, Sirota asked Bennet about how his political thinking had changed over the past 18 years as a US senator and why he no longer believes the politics of the status quo are tenable.

"There's something fundamentally wrong with the nature of our capitalist system that is delivering these outsize gains for the people at the very top at the expense of everybody else in the economy," Bennet said. "So I guess, from that vantage point, I think I've changed."

Bennet also chided fellow Democrats who are trying to force Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates to leave the party for being "too extreme."

"I think that's a huge mistake," he said. "Look: We don't have to agree on everything. We don't, and by the way, that shouldn't be the cost of admission to the Democratic Party or to America."

Bennet added that the goal of policymaking shouldn't be to "come to some moderate view of the world," but "to unleash the imagination of the American people to solve their own problem. And that's what they did 100 years ago in the last Progressive Era, and I think that's what they're going to do again."