People are talking past each other with really silly accusations such as, "You're siding with the alt-right!" It's happening more with people defending Pelosi, tbh, though I do think there's a really good argument for Pelosi right now (but maybe not in 2020).
There are two trains of thought for and against Pelosi and House leadership (and Dem leadership in general) that I'll try to outline. Against Pelosi:
1) Many progressives oppose Pelosi because we have her and Hoyer in power still, two people in their late 70s, with barely anybody on the bench to take over the reigns once they're finished. Democrats haven't built up the next generations (X and Millennials) for ages, and in order to be effective in the future, we need new blood with true progressive ideas. Schumer in the Senate is a great example of someone we don't need.
2) People focus too much on votes of "most liberal/most conservative" without reading into why someone voted a certain way. Ohio had a marijuana legalization measure in 2015 that I would have voted against. Why? Because it would have given one company exclusive rights to distribute it, giving them an unfair monopoly. Voting against it wouldn't make me conservative, but if you tallied my vote, all of a sudden I'm not as "progressive." You're not going to convince progressives how liberal someone is through votes because a lot of them have different ways of deciding what makes things liberal or conservative, sometimes as simple as party vote.
3) The people who want big change want to stop arguing from the center and shift the overton window. I sometimes don't think this board isn't as progressive as it thinks it is, because the progressives I know and speak to wanted Obama to argue from a more progressive position in 2009/2010 for health care. He called the public option a sliver of the total health care law, but really, he should have argued to the left of that and compromised to a public option. That should have been the goal. Arguing for Medicare-for-All and true universal health care should be the goal because, 1) it's popular, and 2) if there's compromise to be had, you compromise to the right of that, not to the right of an already compromise position. You continue to argue for the position so it eventually doesn't seem "extreme" to the public. What I'm glad Democrats ended up doing was sticking by the ACA, and now, lo and behold, it's crazy to not want to expand Medicaid and cover people with pre-existing conditions.
Now, the argument for Pelosi is a strong and simple one:
4) She understands how the House operates. And it's as simple as that, but it's true. Due to popularity of many progressive ideas, she can use her smarts from pushing cap-and-trade and the Affordable Care Act back in 09/10 and do that now and make the case for it. We don't even have to go into the fact that there aren't big AOC/Gillum/Abrams progressives challenging her right now.
I hear Pelosi wants someone to take over in the future. Good, let's actually make that a reality. Gen X and Millennials are waiting to take the reigns from the 70-somethings who have had power for ages. Have Pelosi be the speaker now to make deals with Trump, and get the young House people ready to take over since there's very little power in the House if you aren't to make change via being a committee chair. And let's not worry what Republicans say is extreme: they called opposition to the Iraq War and support for gay marriage extreme, they called the ACA extreme, and they were wrong and are now extreme.
