The benefit (drawback?) of running your own news organization is that no one’s going to tell you your reporting is lazy and your story reeks of a conclusion in search of evidence.
And so we have “Squad politics backfire” by Axios’ Mike Allen, an exercise in Smart Brevity™ that blames the recall of school board members in San Francisco on progressive women who don’t live in or represent San Francisco. If you’re scratching your head, here’s an explanation:
“The hard-left politics of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and the so-called ‘Squad,’ once a dominant theme for vast numbers of elected Democrats, is backfiring big-time on the party in power, top Democrats tell us,” Allen writes. “The push to defund the police, rename schools, and tear down statues has created a significant obstacle to Democrats keeping control of the House, the Senate and the party’s overall image.”
To support his theory, Allen interviews a) the leader of the self-styled Problem Solvers Caucus, b) the co-founder of the 1990s throwback group Third Way, and c) borrows an AP quote from former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, who — Allen forgets to mention — takes dark money to lobby against taxing rich people. (Weird how the villains are women of color, while the good guys share Allen’s melanin level.)
The gist: enough of this social justice bullshit.
So, look, San Francisco politics are … unique? The school board devolved into self-parody. It announced plans to rename 44 schools — including those honoring George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein — during the pandemic, when the city’s schools were closed. One member (now recalled) sued her colleagues for $87 million (!) because she was criticized over dumb tweets.
But what sealed the deal was the decision to end merit-based admissions at an elite, Asian-majority high school, which the Chinese community viewed as an attack. That’s a complicated issue that I’ve neither the space nor the expertise to address here; it suffices to say that it was not handled with sensitivity.
In short, the school board embarrassed themselves, pissed the city off, and — at the mayor’s request — the city got rid of three of them. To Allen’s point? Call me when San Francisco replaces them with Republicans who want to ban Maus and rail against critical race theory.
Until then, let’s not force a square peg into the round hole.
That’s not to say Democrats won’t get spanked in November, or that they’re not losing culture war fights. They (probably) will, and they (definitely) are. But that’s not the left’s fault. Democrats are losing the culture war because they’re not fighting it.
Allen’s other “evidence” only proves the point: “Republicans' decisive sweep of statewide offices in Virginia was powered in part by Democrats' failure to appreciate parents' skepticism about public schools' mask mandates, policies on transgender rights and approach to teaching about race.”
Let me rephrase: Virginia Republicans turned the pandemic into a wedge issue and played to people’s bigotry — and, what do you know, it worked! But it’s — checks notes — the Squad’s fault for wanting to keep people alive, keep marginalized and bullied children safe, and teach a version of history that doesn’t treat the “War of Northern Aggression” as a “states’ rights” kerfuffle?
(While we’re on the subject: Does Allen really think that removing statues of treasonous human traffickers reflects poorly on Democrats?)
Here’s the dirty little secret of American politics, the thing everyone who studies it knows but avoids saying: the lowest common denominator works. As a rule, voters aren’t terribly sophisticated. The media once served as a gatekeeper of disinformation, but between the fragmentation of social media, the well-organized, well-funded right-wing propaganda machine, and the mainstream media’s determination to give crackpots and charlatans legitimacy in the name of objectivity, we are awash in bullshit.
In short, people — not just white people, by the way — are susceptible to populism and demagoguery, to authoritarian and racist appeals. If they weren’t, no one would use them.
What the Third Way, Problem Solvers types want is for Democrats to abandon social justice battlefields in search of rural and working-class white voters. Coincidentally, this also seems to be the sage wisdom of the Beltway establishment media. Funny, that.
It would be one thing if the Democratic Party really had gone over a left-wing cliff. But Joseph Robinette Biden is president, not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. The party’s most powerful person is a conservative senator from West Virginia, a state Donald Trump won by 40 points. No one’s talking about defunding the police. They’ll be lucky to get a Supreme Court justice through.
If reality and the public’s perception aren’t aligned, that’s not a Squad problem. Republicans have turned everything — masks, vaccines, school closures, history classes, trans athletes — into an existential culture war, and Democrats never figured out what to do when attacks they first greet with eye rolls gain traction.
The consultant class always wants endangered Dems to pledge undying fealty to the police and promise to personally hunt down asylum seekers. It won’t help. The second Democrats meet rage with quiescence, the game is over. In a polarized era, politics requires giving your base something to care about.
That doesn’t mean every Democrat has to share the same values. (We already have one major party that’s turned into a cult.) It means they need to stop letting themselves get caricatured.
Rule of thumb: If the other guy believes in his lunacy more than you believe in your sanity, you’re going to lose.
There are myriad factors arrayed against Democrats this year. Inflation, of course, but also the Senate’s fecklessness, gerrymandering, the history of being a presidential party in a midterm, and, it seems, pundits with their heads buried in their asses. More than that, angry, radicalized Republicans and Democrats who have already accepted defeat.
If you want to blame that on AOC, perhaps that says more about you than her.
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