Today, an anonymous member of the Democratic leadership claimed the “Justice Democrats in general are trust fund kids”. That’s an interesting line of attack (it echoes Republican attempts to paint AOC as a wealthy kid from Westchester), it merited this response:
Both Speaker Pelosi and the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, owe their positions to the fact that they can raise money from wealthy backers. Meanwhile, the left wing organizations and candidates are largely funded by small dollar, individual donations. Given these facts, this line of attack on the left is both unhinged and inept.
That wasn’t all. The official Democratic caucus account also tried its twitter skills on a weeks old tweet by AOC’s chief of staff. By the way this was after Speaker Pelosi dramatically told the entire caucus “don’t tweet”.
And that still wasn’t all. Senior Democratic aides decided it was open season and have been sending racist memes targeting AOC.
What’s going on here?
Like everyone who’s accustomed to holding power, senior Democrats do not like to be challenged. The center-right which has controlled the Democratic party for three decades, knows that all its influence and all its power comes from control of the Democratic party. If you control one of the two major parties in the US, you will eventually enjoy the fruits of power, even if you are incompetent or actively malign. That is the nature of a two-party system.
This means the first and most important objective is to maintain control of the party. Without control of one of the two parties, you simply aren’t in the game. That is part of the reason why Democratic leadership is wildly overreacting to even the slightest challenge from the left. Though the left is weakened by decades of assaults on it from both the far-right and center-right, it is still the only credible challenger for control of the Democratic party.
When the center-right leadership look at the caucus, they can see all the energy is on the left. All the public attention is on the left. All the ideas are on the left. Witness the discussion during the presidential debates. Just how many cheers did you hear for “tax credits” and how many did you hear for “Medicare For All”?
Every day that passes makes clear what direction the Democratic party is headed in, and it is not the center-right mold that people like Steny Hoyer have built their careers upon. This is both threatening and scary. When powerful people are threatened, scared or believe they are about to be eclipsed, they rarely back away gracefully.
Worse, their impotent and weak attempts to hold back the left appear downright destructive when we consider the magnitude of the threats to the most vulnerable population. The past week was almost a caricature of this dynamic.
Nancy Pelosi, granted an interview to the NY Times, which was published over the holiday weekend. In the interview, she deliberately and intentionally sought to diminish four of the left’s stalwarts, AOC, Omar, Pressley and Tlaib by name. Pelosi, a millionaire many times over, spent the holiday comfortably ensconced at one of the vineyards she owns in Napa. This was a day or so after handing the Trump administration several billion dollars in funding for their concentration camps without any additional oversight. Senate Democrats were blindsided by the move.
Meanwhile, Pressley, AOC and Tlaib had spent that Monday visiting a CBP/ICE detention facility with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. That direct action sparked far more interest and dozens of substantive news stories into CBP and ICE’s human rights abuses. In contrast, Pelosi’s verbal barbs aimed at Trump and planted in the NY Times seemed especially meaningless. The only thing that seems to have stuck from her interview is the invective directed at the Squad.
The contrast could not be clearer, the Squad’s actions were directly focused on alleviating the suffering being visited upon the most vulnerable people. Meanwhile Pelosi’s interview was all about preserving power and fending off challenges to it.
Now that Pelosi has provided cover, center-right Democrats are throwing knives in the left’s direction. And it’s not just “unnamed” senior Democrats, it’s the actual official caucus organs as well. And they’re doing it in the worst possible way.
It’s increasingly clear that the Democratic party is at an inflection point. We can keep going in the direction of the center-right, Third-Way, neoliberal wing. Or, we can correct course. It’s clear that the center-right, neoliberal wing won’t gracefully cede even an ounce of power. That is why they worked so hard to keep Barbara Lee out of the Democratic caucus chair post.
The reigning sentiment among Democratic leadership seems to match this old story:
"Yes, but I'll preside over the ruins." — Boies Penrose's reply to a Republican Party reformer's accusation that Penrose was ruining the party's prospects for victory (and the reformer's chances for dominance over the party's apparatus) by putting up a slate of candidates who were stand-pat party hacks with no chance of winning. —
en.m.wikipedia.org/...
— @subirgrewal