Cosplay Democrats

When it comes to abortion rights, as with so many other issues, Democrats engage in performative rather than actual meaningful action. Mainly they are interested in your votes and your money, and they are unwilling to do anything substantial to get them.

Biden Is Making Fools Out Of Progressive Democrats

            Like a lepidopteran Charlie Brown drawn to Lucy van Pelt’s flaming football, Congressional progressives keep falling for corporate Democrats’ pathetically predictable, and transparently self-serving, pleas for unity. Support our priorities, the centrists keep urging, and we’ll get around to your stuff later.

How much later?

We’ll tell you later.

            “Progressives have grown increasingly accustomed to disappointment with the Biden administration,” the Daily Beast reports with the breaking-news tone of “sun rises in east,” “and now a proposed increase in Department of Defense and law enforcement spending are causing them to air their grievances anew with just months left before the 2022 election.” Insanely—remember, we just left Afghanistan so war spending should drop precipitously—President Biden’s latest budget proposes a record high of $813 billion in military spending, an increase of $30 billion from last year. He just sent $13 billion to Ukraine. Plus he wants $32 billion for cops.

            Refund the police.

            Whether working inside a system diametrically opposed to your values has ever been effective is historically debatable. Since Bill Clinton ditched the New Deal coalition of the working class, labor and Blacks in favor of Wall Street banks and other large corporate donors, it certainly has never worked for progressives inside the Democratic Party.

            Impotent and hopeless, members of the AOC-led House Squad and left-leaning Senators only have one option left to make a strong political statement: leave the Democratic Party and either join the Greens or form a new progressive party. But that would risk ridicule and marginalization by liberal media outlets like The New York Times and MSNBC, not to mention grassroots organizing, which requires hard work like talking to voters and getting rained upon.

            So the squeaky mice of the inside-the-Beltway progressive left are reduced to issuing sad little whines in response to once again getting the shaft.

            “If budgets are value statements, today’s White House proposal for Pentagon spending shows that we have a lot of work to do,” Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) wrote in a statement in response to Biden’s GOP-inspired budget.

            “It’s a mistake,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said.

            “You know, you want to say ‘fund the police,’ cool. But you also talk about police accountability,” added Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY).

            These quotes appeared in an article headlined “Left Seethes.”

I know from seething. Seething is a friend of mine.

“Work to do” is not seething. “Mistake” is not seething. “Police accountability” is not seething.

“I think this year’s number was too much,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Yes. By about 1000%.

Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure package, which incorporated some progressive priorities, died because the White House and its corporate Democratic allies in Congress didn’t go to the mat for it; in particular, they weren’t willing to punish DINO Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema by threatening to strip the traitors of their committee assignments.

Increasing the national minimum wage to $15 an hour, a progressive priority for the last decade, is dead under President Biden.

There’s been no movement on another key platform plank of Bernie Sanders’ presidential bids student loan forgiveness.

112 million Americans struggle to afford healthcare and we’ve lost nearly 1 million Americans to the COVID-19 pandemic yet Biden, satisfied with his former running mate’s wobbly Affordable Care Act, hasn’t spent a penny of political capital, or cash capital, on Medicare For All.

Besides lessons in humility and patience, what exactly do Congressional progressives gain by working inside the Democratic Party? Mainstream legitimacy. But to paraphrase LBJ, what the hell else is working inside the Democratic for, if it never pays off?

While the self-identified progressive congressional Democrats spin their wheels, their constituents get a defense budget that Donald Trump would be proud of, higher taxes to pay for more police and soaring prices chomping away at a $7.25 national minimum wage last increased in 2009. (Adjusted for inflation, that’s $5.48 today.)

            At this point, progressive voters can only draw one logical conclusion about the decision of AOC, the Squad and other supposedly left-wing congressmen and senators to remain inside the Democratic Party: their sole purpose is to legitimize and prop up an institution that’s working against them, their ideas and their supporters.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Tuesday Never Comes

Congressional progressives held the line for over 100 days, refusing to vote for a bipartisan infrastructure bill unless centrist Democrats agreed to support their progressive social spending legislation, Build Back Better. Finally they caved in exchange for a sketchy promise by five key centrist Democrats to vote for the progressive bill later on.

What Passes for Progressivism

There is no left in the United States. Certainly not in Congress. Even “progressive” Democrats like AOC argue that the rich should pay higher taxes, a stance perfectly aligned with mainstream DNC leadership. No one argues about where those taxes should be going.

Blame He Who Must Be Named

Donald Trump has not been president of United States for well over six months, yet Democrats continue to blame him for everything that goes wrong. How long will they be able to place blame before taking responsibility?

Corporate Democrats Would Rather Lose Than Include Progressives

Image result for alexandria ocasio

When 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset a ten-term incumbent congressman in Queens, New York in a set of Democratic primaries that saw self-proclaimed democratic socialists in the Bernie Sanders mold pick up seats across the country, The New York Times (which, true to its institutional establishmentarianism, didn’t bother to cover her campaign) predicted that her victory would “reverberate across the party and the country.”

That was June 26th.

Now the Times’ fellow elitist rag The Washington Post is reacting to another round of Democratic primaries. This time it Hillary Clinton-like centrist-corporatists did well. “Signs of a Tea-Party-like movement in the Democratic Party that would throw winnable races to far-left candidates appear to be fading,” concluded David Weigel on August 8th.

Has the political world changed that much in six weeks? Of course not.

As Donald Trump said about something else entirely: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

What we’re reading and what is really happening is a big wet dollop of the freakouts we see from American pundits incapable of placing current events within a historical context. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the czar in Russia, many Americans experienced “a mounting fear and anxiety that a Bolshevik revolution in America was imminent — a revolution that would change Church, home, marriage, civility, and the American way of Life,” Murray Levin remembers in his book “Political Hysteria in America.” After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Francis Fukuyama made bank selling his book “The End of History,” arguing that neither communism nor any other alternative to capitalism would ever be viable again. He said we had arrived at “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Both were alarmist and wrong: both capitalism and the communist ideal remain and will survive into the foreseeable future.

Then there’s my editor at Time magazine who, following 9/11, informed me that no one in America would ever be interested in humor or satire in any form ever again.

It’s OK to be shocked by big events. But things usually get back to normal.

For decades the normal within the Democratic Party has been a schism between left progressives (George McGovern, Howard Dean when he ran for president, Bernie Sanders) and centrist-corporatists (Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton). As I wrote in my essay for the Wall Street Journal, “Civil War in the Democratic Party”: “DNC-approved ‘mainstream’ presidential prospects have adopted left-leaning positions on a variety of issues. Yet the populist left doesn’t trust them, and for good reason. [Kamala] Harris was caught fundraising in the Hamptons; [Cory] Booker is too close to bankers; [Kirsten] Gillibrand may have vested too much in #MeToo; [Oprah] Winfrey is a billionaire arriviste. They’re all silent on the working class.”

The same dynamic is taking place in local races, where corporate Democratic candidates are adding some Bernie-like policy promises to their campaigns in order to attract the party’s leftist base. “The party’s establishment has embraced ideas like expanding the Affordable Care Act, shrinking the space between its leaders and its disrupters,” Weigel wrote. He quoted Washington Governor Jay Inslee: “Trump has been the great doctor, stitching up our scars and healing us organically.”

I doubt it. The evil Trump can’t heal what ails the Democratic Party. Though I noted in a different Journal piece the possibility that outsider attacks against the left by Republicans like Trump and James Comey might prompt centrists to defend them, leading to Democratic détente, what Weigel is describing is not coming together under a big left-leaning tent but rather the old 1960s conceptual tactic of co-option.

What the DNC and the centrist-corporatists who control it still refuse to accept is that anti-Republicanism — even anti-Trumpism — is not now, nor will it ever be, enough to lure the progressive populist left to the polls. Against history, against the 2016 election results, they assume that the default mode of a left-leaning voter is Democratic.

In fact, the natural state of a left voter — and of all American voters — is not voting. Most Americans do not vote. Most registered voters do not show up to most elections.

Voters go to the polls when they have an affirmative reason to do so: something to believe in. Someone to hate leaves them cold and they stay home. Centrist-corporatists liked what they saw in Hillary so they showed up in November 2016. Leftists and progressives did not so between three and four million Democrats who voted for Bernie in the primaries stayed home rather than vote for Hillary. Remember, primary voters are fanatics!

When they don’t vote, they mean it.

The cure for the Democratic civil war is simple: get behind and consistently push for, major progressive policies.

Jail the banksters. Restore Glass-Steagall. Bring home the troops. A $20/hour minimum wage. Free college tuition. Interest-free college loans. Medicare for all.

The DNC hires pollsters. They conduct focus groups. They analyze social media. They read exit polls. They must know why progressives aren’t that into them.

The fact that corporatist Democrats refuse to give progressives what they want leads me to an uncomfortable conclusion: they’d rather lose to the Republicans than govern as partners with progressives.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

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