Six weeks before Barack Obama’s momentous election in November 2008, I signed up at Daily Kos so I could pitch my 2 pennies worth hereabouts. I had been reading DK diaries for about a year or so before venturing into some discussions. One of the reasons I took so long to have an opinion that I wanted to share was that I’m not a US citizen and not a US resident. I am merely an onlooker from Australia. But you should know that US politics and policies rock the world, and that’s where I live.
So, as an outsider looking in, sometimes it is hard to discern what is really going on in the swirling eddies and currents of the maelstrom that is US Democratic Party internecine warfare. In short: Why can’t Democrats all just get along and aim their rhetorical political weaponry at the Republicans, especially in the egregious Age of Trump?
It is a conundrum. The problem is usually couched in terms of left versus center, but if it were just an argument about degrees of progressiveness of policies, it would have been sorted out long ago as the mutual benefits of concentrating efforts on defeating what the Republican party has become must surely outweigh differences over policy details? Right. Right?
So what’s really going on with the never ending sniping between various Democratic luminaries?
Earlier today (and my day is UTC+10 compared to US EDT@UTC-4, PDT@UTC-7, so it began a while ago and has now ticked over into Wednesday) I read an article by Zach Carter over at HuffPost, titled “Nancy Pelosi Has Lost Control” with the sub-title “New York's corrupt machine is running its own show for House Democrats”.
Now, I looked up a bit of Mr Carter’s biography to see where he was coming from and I saw that he has blogged at Campaign for America’s Future, which I understand is a progressive ideas shop, and perhaps more relevantly Mr Carter has recently published other articles critical of Pelosi’s leadership, but I don’t care about that. What I care about is that his article that went up on Tuesday, July 16, helped me to see pieces of the puzzle of Democratic dysfunction that I, as an international onlooker, rarely get to glimpse. In a relatively brief piece, it explicated to a reasonable degree for an outsider just how messed up the Democratic Party is, and gives me no comfort at all about prospects for US politics into the foreseeable.
For those of you unwilling or unable to venture to the linked article, here are some quotations that provide an outline of Carter’s argument:
Two days after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called a meeting admonishing her caucus to stop publicly criticizing each other on Twitter, the official House Democrats Twitter account launched a public broadside against a staffer for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
…
One of Pelosi’s top lieutenants, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the caucus chair, effectively declared war on Ocasio-Cortez and her chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti on Friday night. Nobody in leadership has apologized for it, recanted or publicly rebuked anyone.
…
The divide between Ocasio-Cortez and Pelosi represents just about every split in the modern Democratic coalition ― generational, ideological, race, class, strategy, values, all of it.
But beneath it all is a simple struggle for power. House Democrats and their agenda have been hijacked by the corrupt machine politics of New York state.
…
Ocasio-Cortez represents a greater threat to this machine than Trump, which is why Democratic leadership in Congress is now diverting time, attention and resources to defend the machine’s turf, instead of focusing on the president.
The article also includes juicy details highlighting the awfulness of the corruption in the NY Democratic Party.
Bearing on Markos’s admonition to strive for “more and better Democrats”, I can only suggest that better Democrats will garner more Democrats, and the survival of the US government as anything worth saving absolutely demands more Democrats (or at the very least, fewer Republicans).
Get your house in order Democrats.
And fight to win.
(Winning means beating Republicans.)