A revealing choice of words, this. "Meant", not "supposed", "meant" meaning deliberately positioned that way, "meant" meaning "the narrative was established, it was rock solid." Peck is aware that the whole heartstring-plucking "DREAMER" narrative is phony as hell, it's just supposed to have worked anyway and it didn't. What could be wrong?
Well, for one thing, the entire "the party should stop listening to those bigoted non-educated working class people and get back to its base, urban hipsters like me" has the virtue of having cost the Dems the last Presidential election and it doesn't look like our author has figured that out yet. For another, "unassailable" means simply that she thought they'd constructed an indestructible tool and look, they broke it! They can't break our tool! And for a third, had at any point over the last eight year administration, the Dems been serious about enforcing the existing laws, we wouldn't be having this conversation and their set-up victims wouldn't be vulnerable. We didn't set them up, the Dems did, like putting babies on a railroad track and then complaining when the train comes along.
This, however, is truly the face of communism: cynical, manipulative, and utterly amoral. I would no more take Peck's arguments seriously than I would a rattlesnake's.
Oh, I would take the rattlesnake's argument very seriously. "Get away from me or I will bite" is pretty convincing to me.