This very extraordinary year has offered an extensive lesson in the centuries-old truth that seemingly contradictory things can both be true – mostly because the contradiction is imaginary.
Think of the apparent confusion in the forces of ‘resistance’ inflicted on Donald Trump, reflected in the unanswered question affecting the Democratic Party: Do Americans want a return to “normal”, adopted for the moment that such state existed in the recent past and can somehow be traced back? Or do they – as the George Floyd protests suggest – seek greater and more ambitious change that goes beyond the lame political duopoly to tackle the enormous economic inequality, structural injustice and troubled national priorities?
In early March, just before the coronavirus in the United States began to sweep (or to be more precise, just before we began to take it seriously) Democratic primary voters overwhelmingly elected former vice president Joe Biden over senior Bernie Sanders as president of the party. Progressives can mumble and complain about anything they want, and they certainly did: The theory that Biden’s sudden reversal of fortunes was made by Barack Obama is highly plausible, and the theory that the primary campaign in 2020 will be a generational conflict in the Democratic electorate. represented, in which older voters triumphed, is simply true.
But the expulsion of both white supporters and Southern Black voters for Biden, who have carried out an inadequate campaign that seems to promise nothing specific other than a return to a 2016 borderline-minded policy of decency and moderation, sent an unmistakable signal . Democratic voters generally wanted the potentially disruptive ‘political revolution’ promised by Sanders. They were afraid to return to a “normal” America, more or less defined as a place and time where they did not have to constantly obsess over politics and were not kept up at night by the fact that the president was an ignorant and dangerous racist buffoon.
Who can blame her, honestly? And yet, and yet: Since Biden soared to victory on Super Tuesday and the subsequent primaries, Democratic primary voters in various places have delivered a different and more complicated message. Three more long-time resident members of Congress have been primed this year by more progressive opponents, including a commission chairman, Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, and the scion of a Black political dynasty in St. Louis. Louis, Rep. William Lacy Clay of Missouri.
Another committee chairman, Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York, survived by a pennant after a painfully slow six weeks of voting. Two other New York progressives – City Councilman Ritchie Torres in the entire Latino South Bronx, and former Attorney General Mondaire Jones in the most white northern suburbs – defeated founding Democrats in open house, and will be the first two openly gay become Black members of Congress. Similar conflicts lie ahead: Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and grateful recipient of Big Pharma and dollars from the large-scale financial industry, states a intriguing challenge from Alex Morse, openly gay 31-year-old mayor of working-class city Holyoke.
When I wrote back in June, the primary race between Engel and Black middle school principal Jamaal Bowman was without a doubt a proxy war between Chamberlain Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (whose district borders Engel’s), as well as part of the long tail of the 2016 primary campaign between Sanders and Hillary Clinton, which essentially never ended. A 30-year-old official with a long history as a foreign policy hawk and a supporter of Israel, Engel was endorsed by Pelosi, Clinton and Chuck Schumer, and leading Democratic PACs threw millions in his campaign. Bowman was supported by Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren, and drew support from Justice Democrats and similar groups left. In the end, it was not even close.
When you go to down-ticket races, the primary results are even more striking. If Clay’s defeat in St. Louis by Cori Bush, a registered nurse and activist of Black Lives Matter, backed by Sanders, AOC and the Justice Democrats, has made clear this trend is not limited to large coastal cities – although New York is certainly its epicenter.
In the primary June 23 of New York, seven introduced Democrats in the State Assembly lost to opponents affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party or both. That result sent shock waves through the region’s political establishment and provoked wild prosecutors that the challengers (mostly people of color) were part of some sinister racist conspiracy funded by white radicals out of state.
Clearly across the country in New Mexico, the pattern was just as distinctive: Five powerful Senate officials considered moderate to democratic – including the president of the House of Representatives, the chairman of the Finance Committee and the former chairman of the Judicial Committee – were defeated in early June by younger progressive challengers. As de Santa Fe New Mexican put it, “the conservative wing within the Democratic caucus in the state Senate is largely gone. “
It is important to note here that in the U.S. Senate race, which by its nature attracts more media attention, public interest, and donor money, the Democratic establishment has been much more successful in protecting its favorite candidates. In virtually every case where Democrats see a realistic chance of winning a Republican seat – especially now that winning a general majority seems within reach – the candidate has been hand-picked by Chuck Schumer and defeated by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Maine, Colorado, Iowa, Montana, Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Georgia could all hypothetically elect new Democratic senators (at different levels of chance), and not one of the nominees in those states is even remotely infected with the Bernie virus.
Even the lone exception is instructive: in Tennessee’s primary senate last week was Black environmental activist Marquita Bradshaw, who ran an entire volunteer campaign for almost no money, stepped up a big turnout over DSCC chooses James Mackler, a white military veteran who spent $ 1.5 million on the race – and finished third. That race attracted virtually no national media and was not a focus of national fundraising, as no one expects a Democrat to win a large statewide office in Tennessee. Mackler was anointed to hold affairs respectable against Trump-appointed Republican Bill Hagerty, and perhaps to divert GOP resources from other races, most notably the one between Amy McGrath and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in neighboring Kentucky.
I’m not suggesting that Bradshaw is more likely to win in November than Mackler would have been. That’s not her. But McGrath will not defeat McConnell either, and the liberal voters across the country who pass their checks could just as well invest in Nigerian principles’ online banking schemes. At least Tennessee voters will have a remarkably clear moral and ideological choice – one that is likely to galvanize Black voters in Memphis, Nashville and Chattanooga and could lead to local victories after the vote.
As I wrote six weeks ago, it’s high time for Democrats to stop pretending that the progressive uprising that began with the Sanders campaign of 2016 is a deceptive and dangerous Marxist white-young cult, or just a spot. “But a distinctive pattern has become clear since then: When founding Democrats pay close attention and have a big canvas to work with – as on Super Tuesday, as in a highly visible statewide campaign – they can master media messaging, modern voters exposing and generally achieving the desired result.At the more granular, retail-political level of congressional districts, state legislators sitting and local races, candidates for establishment are highly vulnerable to grassroots activist campaigns.
None of this is a completely new discovery: This is exactly how evangelical Christians and other right-wing groups built a power base within the Republican Party, eventually expelling the party’s Northeastern country club ‘liberals’ and the so-called GOP mainstream. sharply forcing to the right. For decades, observers have suggested that a similar conflict within the Democratic Coalition was unforgivable, especially as party leaders sought to split the gap between their own constituents and the increasingly imperfect and insufferable Republicans.
I do not think the confusing results of Democratic primaries reflect a fundamental contradiction. It is more than a rapidly changing political dynamic, than perhaps a dialectic. In the year of the coronavirus pandemic, the uprising of the Black Lives Matter and the imposition of the Trump presidency, people are seeing power with enormous suspicion and longing for something else – how well defined as bad. In that sense, the same forces that Joe Biden and a bunch of Senate candidates have fielded for a sweeping victory this fall, ek threatened grooves-in-down-vote Democratic scammers across the country.
For months, politicians and the mainstream media told us that there was a contradiction between controlling the coronavirus and ‘rescuing’ the US economy. Like my Salon colleague Amanda Marcotte has been observed several times, this was always a false dichotomy: By opening the doors of Buffalo Wild Wings and Bed Bath & Beyond, no kind of economic recovery will be fought in the midst of an uncontrolled pandemic that has now been killed – I’m used to look up the number every day – more than 162,000 Americans.
Nor is it a contradiction that a year when most Americans have spent most of the last five months in their homes also witnessed the largest explosion of street protest since the Vietnam War. Conservatives have used this as evidence of America-hating libtard hypocrisy, but that is based on the brain-dead assumption that leftists are progressive. nice collaborated indoors, and had some sadomasochistic desire to see that continue. Indeed, the killing of George Floyd and the broader issue of institutional racism caused an uprising that was not only partly about those things, but was also an outburst of anger at the tragic abuse of the Trump administration. pandemic, its rampant bigotry and corruption, and its efforts to undermine democracy and tip the country to fascism with discount stores.
Do Americans want to go “back to normal,” whatever that means, or do they want to break down the whole system and rebuild it? Now, different people want different things in different contexts, of course – but on a more global and historical scale, the only possible answer to that question is yes. All the contradictions of 2020 have revealed an enormous appetite for change: that is both exciting and dangerous, and offers more reasons for hope than we have had in decades.
