What are ‘moderate’ Democrats FOR?

A big reason the left keeps gaining power in the Democratic Party is that the party establishment really has nothing much to say: It has become little more than a creature of special interests that feed off the taxpayers.

A moderate Dem might reject open-borders extremism; absurdly pro-criminal “justice” policies; toxic anti-“Zionism”; lunatic “pro-trans” policies and the radical critique of America as a fundamentally racist society; “climate” policies that amount to a recipe for economic suicide.

But what are they for, that Republicans aren’t?

Higher taxes on “the rich”; somehow extending the social-safety net to make health care and child care more affordable for all; improving public education, perhaps.

Problem is, Democrats trying to deliver on this agenda quickly run into trouble.

• Our tax code is already highly progressive, so raising real revenue means hitting the broad middle class.

• Any kind of added social spending means new revenues or adding to the federal deficit — or cutting spending somewhere else, when defense is still a shrinking slice of the federal pie.

• Improving public schools runs right into the chainsaw of the teachers unions, who for decades now have provided a plurality of delegates to every Democratic National Convention. President Barack Obama tried anyway, but the unions got to work and now the party has abandoned his support for charter schools and other innovative approaches to saving public education.

• Public-employee unions in general are a major barrier to making urban America work better: They’ve worked for decades to guarantee their members great retirement and health benefits, and won’t surrender a dime without a war.

• Dems who want to go big on public infrastructure investments wind up with fiascos like California’s “high-speed rail,” with tens of billions out the door and not a foot of track laid, with no hope of ever actually connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles.

As Gov. Kathy Hochul is now discovering, even something as simple as making car insurance more affordable infuriates another major Dem special interest: trial lawyers, who feed off the lawsuits that send premiums soaring.

Yes, Dems can vow to protect access to abortion, but those rights are totally secure in blue America — and the national gridlock over the issue isn’t breaking any decade soon.

The nation’s oldest political party doesn’t just need to beat back the crazy left; it needs to find a different agenda that won’t outrage some major part of the rest of its base — and not one of its brightest lights has any idea what that might be.