Democrats Start to Worry
Power LinePower Lineby Steven Hayward
What’s this? Trouble in Democratland? Several reliably liberal media mouthpieces are noting the growing hold of identity politics extremism in the Democratic Party, and are sounding the alarm.
Let’s start with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who offers the best headline of the week yesterday, “ Scaling Wokeback Mountain.” About AOC attacking Speaker Pelosi, Dowd says:
She slimed the speaker, who has spent her life fighting for the downtrodden and who was instrumental in getting the first African-American president elected and passing his agenda against all odds, as a sexist and a racist.
A.O.C. should consider the possibility that people who disagree with her do not disagree with her color. . .
A.O.C. pulled back and said she wasn’t calling Pelosi a racist. But once you start that ball rolling, it’s hard to stop. (You know how topsy-turvy the fight is when the biggest defenders of Pelosi, who has endured being a caricature of extreme liberalism for decades, are Trump and the Wall Street Journal editorial board.) . . .
The progressives act as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad. Not wrong, but bad, guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a moral evil that justifies their venom.
Where, oh where, would these “progressives” have gotten the idea that everyone who disagrees with them is a racist, etc? Maybe Times columnists and editors ought to look in the mirror more often?
Separately in a “news” story (but really a memo to the party to get its act together) the Post notes the intensity of the fight between Pelosi and the “progressives” further to her left:
Rahm Emanuel, formerly the chief of staff for President Barack Obama, chastised [AOC chief of staff] Chakrabarti in a follow-up column by Dowd on Saturday, calling him a “snot-nosed punk.”
[Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff] Hammill defended his retweet, saying he wasn’t defying Pelosi’s wishes because the speaker had been referring to public attacks on Democratic lawmakers, and this was about taking a fellow staffer to task. He said he retweeted the post by the House Democrats defending Davids, who is a lesbian, “in my personal capacity as a gay man who was bullied and beaten in high school.”
Whoa, my head is spinning trying to do the sums in my head about how the numbers add and subtract to see who has the highest Certified Victim Score on the Intersectional Justice Matrix. I doubt even Common Core math can solve for this X.
Witness number two is Richard Cohen of the Bezos Bulletin:
[T]he Democratic Party is on a tear. One by one, its candidates have embraced losing issue after losing issue. First came reparations for slavery, a noble idea lacking only popular support and practicality and possibly amounting to yet another attempt to right a wrong with money. Before that, the various candidates raised their hands in support of Medicare-for-all, which could strip millions of people of their private insurance plans. That is sure to be characterized by Trump as socialized medicine with the sick growing old and dying, covered in cobwebs while waiting to see the doctor. GOP strategists must be hyperventilating over all the goodies arrayed before them. This is a campaign even Trump could win. . .
The urgent challenge is to rid the nation of Trump, not to mollify this or that identity group or wrestle over issues that could not be solved when they were relevant — such as busing. As it is, the candidates are campaigning in an America of their own imagination — a bit to the left of Sweden and as racially unified as one of those old Coke commercials. They pander to the extremes of the early caucus and primary states, thinking they can seduce the middle later on down the road or, in my case, giving me a choice of one of them or Trump.
Witness number three is Kevin Drum, one of the few smart lefties worth reading in the pages of Mother Jones, who wonders “ Are Democrats Now the Party of Open Borders?”
Elizabeth Warren has an immigration plan. . . I have previously criticized Republicans who accused liberals of wanting “open borders.” President Trump tweets about this endlessly. But I have to admit that it’s hard to see much daylight between Warren’s plan and de facto open borders. As near as I can tell, CBP will be retasked away from patrolling the border looking for illegal crossings; if border officers happen to apprehend someone, they’ll be released almost immediately; if they bother to show up for their court date, they’ll have a lawyer appointed for them; and employers will have no particular reason to fear giving them a job.
Am I missing something here? Does Warren’s plan explicitly make it vanishingly unlikely that anyone crossing our border will ever be caught and sent back?
Finally, Damon Linker (the Missing Linker, as I nevertheless persist) notes the light speed with which the left embraced gender self-identification as a fundamental human right, to which is now attached the imperious demand (made this week in the New York Times by a person named Farhad Manjoo) that we must change our language lest we transgress the fundamental human rights if trans-humans:
The first thing to be said about these convictions is that, apart from a miniscule number of transgender activists and postmodern theorists and scholars, no one would have affirmed any of them as recently as four years ago. There is almost no chance at all that the Farhad Manjoo of 2009 sat around pondering and lamenting the oppressiveness of his peers referring to “him” as “he.” That’s because (as far as I know) Manjoo is a man, with XY chromosomes, male reproductive organs, and typically male hormone levels, and a mere decade ago referring to such a person as “he” was considered to be merely descriptive of a rather mundane aspect of reality. His freedom was not infringed, or implicated, in any way by this convention. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to think or feel otherwise. Freedom was something else and about other things.
The emergence and spread of the contrary idea — that “gender is a ubiquitous prison of the mind” — can be traced to a precise point in time: the six months following the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, which declared same-sex marriage a constitutional right. Almost immediately after that decision was handed down, progressive activists took up the cause of championing transgender rights as the next front in the culture war — and here we are, just four short years later, born free but everywhere in chains.
How should we understand this astonishingly radical and rapid shift in self-understanding among highly educated progressive members of the upper-middle class? . . .
The whole article has a lot more analysis, but let’s cut to the last paragraph, where we can see a liberal having a meltdown:
Will Manjoo’s call for liberation from the tyranny of the gender binary catch on in the way that the push for same-sex marriage did before it? I have no idea. What I do know is that, whatever happens, it’s likely to be followed by another undoubtedly very different crusade in the name of individual freedom, and then another, and another, as our society (and others like it) continues to work through the logic of its devotion to the principle of individualism.
The only thing that could halt the process is the rejection of that principle altogether.
Here’s one practical idea to bring that to effect: Vote for Trump next year.
Chaser: WaPo explainer of the week, with a question no one is asking:
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