I am sure that I will get hate replies for what I am about to present…that’s what those astoundingly hostile replies are, really, hate mail from stuck-in-the-past so-called “progressives” who are about as progressive as a worn out, beaten down pair of shoes. But I’m going to present it anyway. Somebody has to say something on this once progressive blog before the Dems nominate yet another old shoe that Trump or some other regressive will once again beat like…like an old shoe. And even if that old shoe wins…all gussied up in new polish by the DNC hustlers…it still won’t walk any different path than did Obama and the Clintons I and II.
Neoliberalism Rules!!! Hooray For The Good Guys!!!
The good guys…??? The ones that by their multiple failures brought us G. W. Bush, Dick Cheney, our lovely “Peace President” Barack Obama and a presently totally divided nation??
Give me a break!!!
Read on.
Emphases mine:
`There Is Going to Be a War Within the Party. We Are Going to Lean Into It.’
The Justice Democrats helped get Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elected. Who are they after next? By DAVID FREEDLANDER February 04, 2019
Maybe you’ve heard the warning: The country is beset by a menace. A fringe conservative minority is holding Congress hostage, extracting radical policy concessions over the will of the majority. And it’s leading the nation to fiscal, environmental and moral ruin.
Maybe you haven’t heard this part: These dangerous conservatives are Democrats.
I call them neocentrists, myself, but “dangerous conservatives” will fill the bill too.
Dangerous, cloaked conservatives.
“I am talking about the radical conservatives in the Democratic Party,” said Saikat Chakrabarti. “That’s who we need to counter. It’s the same across any number of issues–pay-as-you-go, free college, “Medicare for all.” These are all enormously popular in the party, but they don’t pass because of the radical conservatives who are holding the party hostage.”
Translation: “Radical conservatives” means the DNC and the old-line party leaders…the Clintons, Obama, Pelosi, Schumer etc.
Not long ago, this would have been an outlier position even among American liberals. Today, it’s the organizing principle of a newly empowered segment of the Democratic Party, one with a foothold in the new Congress.
Chakrabarti is chief of staff to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the closest thing to a new celebrity Congress has had in years–a 29-year-old former activist and bartender who, on the most recent Martin Luther King Day, sat on the same New York stage as the rapper Common, Black Panther director Ryan Coogler and MacArthur “genius award” winner Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Although it’s Ocasio-Cortez who gets all the headlines, she arguably wouldn’t be in Congress in the first place without the group Chakrabarti founded: Justice Democrats, a new, central player in the ongoing war for the soul of the Democratic Party. It was the Justice Democrats who recruited her in a quixotic campaign early on, providing a neophyte candidate with enough infrastructure to take down a party leader. And it is the Justice Democrats who see Ocasio-Cortez as just the opening act in an astonishingly ambitious plan to do nothing less than re-imagine liberal politics in America–and do it by whatever means necessary.
If that requires knocking out well-known elected officials and replacing them with more radical newcomers, so be it. And if it ends up ripping apart the Democratic Party in the process–well, that might be the idea.
“There is going to be a war within the party. We are going to lean into it,” said Waleed Shahid, the group’s spokesman.
The top Democrats in Congress have their hands full already, trying to use their new control of the House of Representatives to fight President Donald Trump, expand their majority in 2020, and maybe even capture the Senate. But they also find themselves with real anxieties about their left flank for the first time in memory. Justice Democrats is one of a handful of groups that represent a new and restive spirit in the party, a Tea Party-like populist coalition of voters awakened by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ cannonball run in 2016 and united by their superprogressive politics and a millennial disdain for the establishment.
Mark this phrase down. Remember when “The Tea Party” was considered a fringe group of deplorables and other losers by the Dems? About 10 years ago? Or…say 6 or 7 years before Trump began his march to Deploraglory? Things are moving even faster now. Watch. This movement is a popular movement in the U.S…especially in large parts of the 40% who haven’t been voting. Chakrabarti says above “It’s the same across any number of issues–pay-as-you-go, free college, “Medicare for all.” These are all enormously popular in the party.” What he doesn’t say is that these issues…along with higher taxation of the wealthy…are also very popular with habitual non-voters (See my recent post “An Alternate Look At Booman’s ‘Dems Prefer Electability to Ideological Purity’ Post” for more on that idea.), especially the young and working class/lower middle class voters of all races and cultures who have basically given up believing either party. Need I point out the very low approval ratings of the House and Senate in poll after poll after poll after poll over the past several years? Even the bought-and-sold pollsters can’t hide that simple fact.
–snip–
Four years ago, Ocasio-Cortez was waitressing at a Union Square taqueria, Donald Trump was the host of a fading reality-TV franchise, and Chakrabati was a digital entrepreneur who had nothing at all to do with politics. He was living in the San Francisco Bay Area and working for a digital payment processing company when he suddenly, unexpectedly found himself electrified by a 73-year-old presidential candidate named Bernie Sanders. “I liked what he was saying. He seemed like he was one of the people,” Chakrabarti says. “It wasn’t just that he was a progressive, but that he really cared about building a movement around these ideas.”
He reached out to Claire Sandberg, the digital organizing director of the Sanders campaign, who was arranging “Bernstorms” around the country, getting previously apolitical activists together to host phone banking and door-knocking parties.
Eventually, it became clear that Bernie wasn’t going to win. But it felt clear to Chakrabati that the political revolution Sanders had stoked was close to coming to fruition. He began meeting with a small group of his fellow Sandersistas to figure out how to channel that energy in the next election.
Like Chakrabarti, they were entirely from outside government, and mostly outside politics altogether. Corbin Trent was a political neophyte who’d been volunteering for Sanders in Knoxville, Tennessee; when the food truck he owned burned down, he left Knoxville and joined the campaign in Vermont. Alexandra Rojas was a student in community college in Orange County, Calif., when Sanders announced his run — “It was the first time I got excited about politics,” she said — and started volunteering on campus.
Today, she’s the executive director of Justice Democrats, and Trent, the group’s co-founder and former communications director, is Ocasio-Cortez’s spokesman. The group’s current communications director and perhaps fiercest firebrand is Shahid, the only member in its leadership who had any experience in politics before the Sanders campaign.
–snip–
“The idea is that you bring moral questions to the public’s attention, and have the public rally around it,” [Shahid] says. “Reframe the issue so that the choices are stark, and let the public decide rather than people in power.” He points to how the “99 percent” became a buzzword after Occupy Wall Street; how Obama and Hillary Clinton eventually came to oppose the Keystone Pipeline after supporting it; how “Abolish ICE” quickly went from a fringy Twitter slogan to one embraced by mainstream Democrats. Either you favor ripping kids from their homes, or you don’t. And if you don’t, suddenly the policy choices aren’t incremental: They’re rather stark.
–snip–
…in the wake of Trump’s shocking win, the notion of a nonpartisan effort to replace every member of Congress with some nonpolitical person didn’t seem as important as creating the sharpest possible counterweight on the left. And so after the election, Chakrabarti, Trent, Rojas, Uygur and others split off to found Justice Democrats.
This time, the goal was far more modest: Push the Democratic party closer to Sanders’ politics by challenging centrist Democrats in their primaries. The idea was to recruit 12 working-class candidates to confront incumbents, muster some of that Sanders-style populist energy on a local level and push incumbents to the left. If a couple of breaks went their way, they might even score an upset or two.
“After the election, was I mad at Donald Trump? I guess, kinda,” said Uygur, who ended up leaving the group when a series of previously deleted misogynistic blog posts were unearthed. “But mainly I was mad at the Democratic Party for blowing it. How could you lose to this guy?”
“I came to realize Democrats are never going to learn,” he said, “and that the only way to make a difference is to defeat the corrupt corporate Democrats. They get paid to lose. The corporate donor pays them to be weak, and pays Republicans to be strong.”
I repeat:
“The corporate donor pays them to be weak, and pays Republicans to be strong.”
There it is in a nutshell, folks.
Deal wid it.
–snip–
Ocasio-Cortez took on one of the most powerful congressional Democrat not named Nancy Pelosi, and by a decisive margin, she unseated him–shaking the party’s power structure and getting nationwide attention for a democratic socialist newcomer who embodied nearly everything that thrilled young movement voters. Several other candidates they’d endorsed, but weren’t as closely involved with, also won, including Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
The Crowley defeat brought to mind Dave Brat’s surprise 2014 victory in Virginia, taking out Republican majority leader Eric Cantor by primarying him from the right. Shahid looks back at the power of what a single race can do, recalling the Politico headline that ran at the time: “Eric Cantor Loss Kills Immigration Reform.”
“It was just one fucking race,” he said. “One fucking race and suddenly immigration reform was dead.”
The Sanders race had established the existence of a populist Democratic base eager to vote against its own party’s establishment. Now there was an organization willing to lead the charge. “It’s remarkable,” said Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which started a decade ago as a liberal alternative to what it saw as its stodgy counterparts in Washington. “Everybody is so concerned about clout and about relationships, and they have no relationships, so they just go for it, taking big chances.”
The fact that Ocasio-Cortez, and for that matter Pressley, Tlaib and Omar don’t hail from the traditional background in a body in which the median wealth is over $1 million is very much part of the point. As Ocasio-Cortez faces criticism for her bank account, her wardrobe and her supposed lack of knowledge of the details of policy, the strategy from Justice Democrats and her team has been to face it head on.
“Our theory is that when a working-class person wins, when a person without a political background wins, there is going to be a backlash–you don’t have experience, you don’t know anything, you are dumb,” said Shahid. “All of this happened with Ocasio.”
This, as he sees it, is the culture shift, a way of turning the lens around to reveal the now stark choices. “That is an awesome story for people to see, because the way the D.C. media and the conservative media in particular tear into AOC around being a working-class person or a person of color or a Puerto Rican, I don’t think the public likes it very much,” he said. “The public sees a Cinderella story, a bartender who goes against the machine and wins. And you see the way she is dragged by the D.C. establishment and the media, we lean into it, as if to say, `If that’s what they think about her, what do you think they think about you?'”
Nice!!!
For now, it is still unclear where Justice Democrats will fit in among the various groups that emerged in big numbers out of the 2016 election, including Democratic Socialists of America, Indivisible, Brand New Congress, Swing Left and the Sunrise Movement, just to name a few. Justice Democrats made a bet that a single giant felled would rewrite the political landscape, and so far they have been proven right.
The Green New Deal, a joint production of Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement, has 45 co-sponsors and is embraced by several Democrats running for president. Justice Democrats helped galvanize support, getting 150 people to sit in at Nancy Pelosi’s office just after the midterms.
Shahid, the group’s spokesman, predicted that, besides further agitation on the Green New Deal, the group would attempt to push for free college and an end to mass incarceration. And to force some support, they won’t be afraid to threaten primary challenges against anyone unwilling to sign on.
“We already are a pariah in Washington, D.C.,” he said proudly. “It’s about attention. Either it helps you gain leverage because people are scared of you or you lose leverage because people are annoyed with you. We will see.”
–snip–
As they move into the next election cycle, their hope is that Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Tlaib and Omar form more of a unit, one in which they share staff, best practices and strategy, and care less about personal brand-building. Justice Democrats plans to provide cover with its 350,000-person email list and active social media feeds.
Limited resources mean that playing in the presidential primary will be difficult, but the energized new left has already seen some of what were once considered its most outré ideas–the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, Abolish ICE and free college–become a central part of several likely presidential campaign platforms. Next cycle, members of the group plan to target from five to 10 House Democrats who occupy safe blue seats. Some names of the targets have already been floated out, like Henry Cuellar, but Sean McElwee, a liberal activist and co-founder of Data for Progress, where he works closely with Justice Democrats, listed a handful more who are vulnerable to a Crowley-sized challenge, including Kathleen Rice of Long Island, Jim Cooper of Nashville and Dutch Ruppersberger of Baltimore. (Shahid, asked if they were targets, declined to list any names.)
–snip–
Will this group continue to grow in power?
Not if the Government Media Machine has anything to say about it, of course. But…how effective have that media been in stunting the growth of the Tea Party movement into a Trump presidency? Not very, on plain evidence.
Will they be more effective trying to stop what is really a grass roots progressive movement?
We shall see.
Won’t we.
Will it win in 2020?
I doubt it.
Maybe O’Rourke has a shot. And maybe not. The next few weeks will tell that tale.
But the seeds have been sown.
Watch.
An American Spring?
In say 2024?
Or even earlier?
Let us pray.
Later…
AG
