A monograph on the populist left incursion.
The Justice Democrats are the left–populist PAC that is responsible for AOC and her skinfolk squad. Their stated goal is to be the “Tea Party of the Left”: to take over the DNC the way the Teabaggers took over the RNC. Their method, likewise, is to attack complacent moderates in safe districts at the primary level. Their end game is for the entire DNC to be purged of liberals, who are to be replaced with populist pod people.
These actions are frequently defended as “pulling the DNC to the left” and “demanding a voice”, but this is a false narrative. To understand why, just consider the alternative.
Imagine if a group of people—people who reliably vote Democratic but are underrepresented in its leadership and policy focus—decide that they want their seat at the table. They insist upon more substantive representation from the party, which is to say the promotion of politicians who support their interests, whether or not they look like them.
Notably, they do not demand the replacement of the “establishment” with their own partisans. They do not insist that only their own agenda should be followed and everyone else has to wait their turn. They do not threaten to throw away their votes in protest if they don’t get their way.
Actually, this doesn’t take any imagination: it already happened. Black people put their foot down and insisted upon Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They have, quite successfully, pulled the focus of the party back towards the restoration of equal rights, both civil and human, and have not done so at the expense of other groups.
In contrast, the left-populists are not content with influence in line with their numbers and degree of support, they want full ownership. They brag that they will destroy the DNC as we know it and turn it into another dysfunctional, extremist-controlled party, exactly like the RNC.
The populists don’t want compromise, they want every one of their slogans, like M4A and GND and Free College, enacted into law immediately. They want their eat-the-rich agenda to crowd out the core liberal goals of equal rights. And their own goals are selfish to the point of being anti-social. Their platform of intergenerational economic cannibalism is good for them, at least in the short term, at the exclusion of everyone else.
Let’s be serious: if the left-populists knocked on the flap of the Big Tent of the DNC and wanted a seat, they’d get it. But they’d have to be content to sit in it, not stand on the table and try to bully us into submission. They’d have to reliably vote Democratic and accept that their influence on policy would be proportionate, not absolute. In short, they’d have to be completely different from how they are today.
As it stands, the left-populists, are not a faction of the DNC, they are a hostile party trying to destroy it. They are the enemy within; inside our borders but loyal only to themselves. This war is not infighting for the simple reason that they are not Democrats; they’re invaders who don’t even see themselves as Democrats.
We live in interesting times. The left-populists, having exhausted all other options, are finally getting on board with us against Trump, however belatedly and half-heartedly. But we must not forget who they are—what they are—after Trump is deposed and they come around demanding payment for their 11th-hour support.
Remember, these people didn’t join us until after it looked like we were going to win. They’re rats leaving a sinking ship and jumping onto our bandwagon with the intent of turning it into their new breeding ground. They’re not here to join the party, but to take it over.
They are here to colonize us; to consume us from within and live in our skin. But even if they succeeded in their coup, they would never be Democrats because they do not share our values and are not committed to liberalism. Left-populism is just white grievance politics with a Marxist bent. It’s angry young white men impatient with their rich grandparents refusing to die immediately and leave them an inheritance.
They’re not the reason for our upcoming victory over Trump; they’re why we had Trump in the first place. They stabbed us in the back in 2016 and they will gladly do it again in 2020 by continuing their war against the Democratic Party while we are distracted by the job of putting out Trump’s fires and Building Back Better.
They will insist that we owe them everything, but we owe them nothing. All we can offer them, and then only in return for a lasting ceasefire, is the limited influence that some of them claim is all they demand.
I owe you an apology. You were right all along. The populist (woke) left are not our friends. Hell they are not even their own friends. They didn’t come down South to talk directly to black voters, or the few white left leaning moderates. They insulted us. They called us low information voters. They threw Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang under the bus during the entire campaign. Now they are turning on Bernie Sanders, himself. They didn’t even come down South to build any coalitions with black voters, and the few white voters to center left.
I apologize.
You nailed it, again, Deli Master.
Just read this:
“A common framework for interpreting populism is known as the ideational approach: this defines populism as an ideology which presents “the people” as a morally good force and contrasts them against “the elite”, who are portrayed as corrupt and self-serving.”
Oh, the irony.