Progressive Wins

Hopefully a sign of things to come--Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of Democratic Socialists of America, defeated the number four House Democrat in the New York primary.

It doesn't help swing control of Congress, but it shows big money has limits. And now every incumbent needs to be afraid.

Also, former NAACP President Ben Jealous won the nomination to run against Maryland's Republican Governor Larry Hogan.

Update (June 28):  Several articles about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's story. And FOX News is freaking out. Sean Hannity calls her agenda "downright scary".

Support seniors? She's a monster!

Hannity went on to say the only difference between Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Democrats is that she's more honest. So let's own it--anything to the left of Reagan is socialism in their view. So, yes, this is want socialists want--please explain to the voters why Republicans oppose this platform. Let's have a real debate.

Update (July 1):  Andrew O'Hehir says Democrats are "a political party that has spent 30 years or more running away from big ideas and refusing to clarify what it stood for or whom it represented". They have a lesson to learn.

I don’t think it’s true that any young and energetic Latina candidate with an appealing life story could have beaten a 10-term congressman who also leads the once-formidable Queens County Democratic machine. It had to be someone with something to say.

Also, her win is more than "demographics" and don't mess with her. Finally, Mexico elects the left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Update (July 3):  David Swanson praises Ocasio-Cortez's platform (Hannity left out her support for a peace economy). She summed up democratic socialism concisely on the Late Show.

No person in America should be too poor to live.

Update (July 4):  Progressive candidates around the country are fired up.

Democratic strategists believe an email signed by Ocasio-Cortez would be an instant moneymaker, and that her endorsements and campaign stops could help drive progressives to the polls in November.

And Paul Rosenberg says it's not inconceivable that an American form of socialism may be ready to emerge.

Progressives can win arguments by focusing on meeting specific needs, not by arguing in the abstract. When they frame politics that way, even a majority of conservatives tend to agree.

Issues matter and Rosenberg quotes Matt Taibbi on whether we're just seeing a left-wing mirror of right-wing populism.

Attempts to paint victories by people like Ocasio-Cortez and Jealous as being anything like the rise of [Fuckface von Clownstick] are nuts, of course. A xenophobic, reactionary, science-denying white-power movement has nothing in common with a campaign to give people health care and clean energy. If anything, they're complete opposites. It's asinine.

The only thing the two movements have in common is that both are dangerous to the very tiny group of ineffectual politicians who've been running both parties for decades now.

Update (July 7):  "We have people. They have money."

Update (July 13):  Although he says he supports the Democratic nominee, Joe Crowley remains on the ballot as the Working Families Party nominee.

Update (July 15):  Paul Rosenberg argues Democrats need to stand for something if they want to win.

[D]espite not articulating it, Democrats do have an implicit shared ideology that would greatly strengthen them if they openly embraced: That being the principle that government exists to be a positive force for good, to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty,” in the words of the United States Constitution.

A restatement of values is needed to combat Republican machinations that keep those representing a minority of Americans in power.

It cannot be an ideology that ignores the coalitional nature of the existing Democratic Party. That’s clearly a non-starter. But it can rearticulate that coalition much more forcefully as a matter of shared values reflected in specific policies — as Bernie Sanders did in 2016, and as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has done this year — rather than transactionally-mediated interests, which is the de facto model for how the party functions today under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

Rosenberg quotes Ocasio-Cortez who "doesn’t flaunt the label [socialism] nor does she shy away from it. She knows that the power of what she stands for lies in the specifics, in values made concrete."

I always go back to how we won this race. And we didn't win this race with labels. We ran this race with our goals and our issues in mind. ... At the end of the day most people want to make sure that everyone has health care, most people want to make sure that every child has access to equitable education, to college. And that's really what we’re talking about.

Update (July 18):  Asshole Joe Lieberman calls Ocasio-Cortez bad for the Democrats and the country and supports voting for Joe Crowley instead.

Update (July 24):  Conservative reporter Virginia Kruta attended a rally at which Ocasio-Cortez spoke and was alarmed to discover she talks about "things that everybody wants".

I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education. I saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a 'living wage' was a human right. Above all, I saw how easy it would be to accept the notion that it was the government’s job to make sure that those things were provided.

If you’re not really going to pay attention to how you’re going to pay for it or the rest of that, it’s easy to fall into the trap of, 'My kids deserve this' and 'maybe the government should be responsible for helping me with that'.

And tax cuts for the rich--no need to worry about how we're going to pay for that.

Update (July 25):  In considering whether democratic socialism can find support in deep red parts of the country, Conor Lynch points out that the Midwest and Great Plains have a populist history. That changed when Republicans separated "class" from economics for their own reactionary purposes. Lynch quotes Thomas Frank.

Class, conservatives insist, is not really about money or birth or even occupation. It is primarily a matter of authenticity, that most valuable cultural commodity. Class is about what one drives and where one shops and how one prays, and only secondarily about the work one does or the income one makes.

Where the muckrakers of old faulted capitalism for botching this institution and that, the backlash thinkers simply change the script to blame liberalism.

Lynch argues that Democratic Party centrists offer no vision to voters beyond opposition to the current administration.

It is not a mystery why class politics has become relevant again, decades after the Democratic Party adopted a neoliberal stance on economic issues. Since the 1980s, economic inequality has returned to historic levels not seen since before the Great Depression, while a recent UN report documented the extreme poverty found throughout the United States, noting that “the American dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion.” The democratic socialism promulgated by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez offers an alternative to this status quo, while the single-minded politics of anti-[Fuckfaceism] offers nothing more than a return to the previous status quo.

Update (July 28):  Lauren Sandler explains just how remarkable Ocasio-Cortez's journey has been.

[W]e’re missing the real story about her, as it relates to this country, if we don’t talk about her sheer unlikelihood not just as a victorious candidate but as a Bronx-born Latina with a shot at anything. This is no average bootstraps tale; it’s one of a true outlier in a country that has determined Hispanic women must struggle harder than anyone and be valued less than everyone else.

We need many more like her. And Paul Street makes it clear good candidates are only part of the effort.

There are no short-cuts, electoral or otherwise, to the more serious and urgent politics and difficult, day-to-day nuts and bolts organizing work of building an actual American Left – something that would maintain a healthy distance from the seductive siren songs of the narrow and time-staggered major party electoral extravaganzas that are sold to us as “politics,” the only politics that matters.

Update (July 29):  Mark me as one boomer who has no problem with the s-word. It's a way of prioritizing social needs over the requisites of capital.

Update (August 4):  Ocasio-Cortez brings in the crowds. And Conor Lynch recalls when the ruling class understood the appeal of socialism.

Enlightened conservatives were no radicals, but they recognized that discontent breeds radicalism, which led them to cautiously embrace reforms that would limit popular discontent. Today, many conservatives are shocked at the resurgence of left-wing politics, even though the “democratic socialist” candidates who have emerged from this revival are more reformist than revolutionary (at this point, at least). Enlightened conservatives wouldn’t have been surprised. If anything, they would have been surprised that it took this long for socialists to re-emerge in this age of skyrocketing inequality and corporate power. It is doubtful whether the socialist comeback will remind today’s rigidly dogmatic conservatives of what their predecessors once knew, but if history is any guide, the more reform is resisted from above, the more one can expect radicalism to take hold below.

Update (August 9):  Rashida Tlaib is set to become the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress.

And this headline has a nice ring to it:

THE KOCH BROTHERS COMMISSIONED A SURVEY OF AMERICANS AND FOUND MOST LIKE A $15 MINIMUM WAGE, FREE COLLEGE, AND UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

Update (August 11):  Matt Ferner recounts how activists organized to help Wesley Bell defeat Bob McCulloch--the prosecutor who declined to bring charges in the Michael Brown killing.

Update (August 14):  Ilhan Omar is set to become one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress (along with Rashida Tlaib).

Update (August 29):  More results, including a come-from-behind win for Andrew Gillum in Florida.

Update (August 31):  Justin Anderson finds that mainstream media love to report progressive losses.

Update (September 4):  Ayanna Pressley has defeated an incumbent and will become the first black woman elected to Congress from Massachusetts.

Update (September 14):  Julia Salazar defeated a 16-year incumbent for a New York state Senate seat.

Update (September 15):  Sean McElwee has more about the New York primary.

Thursday’s real story was that more than 1 in 5 New York Democratic state senators were swept out of office, including three-fourths of the turncoat Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) coalition and a machine politician with close ties to developers. It’s a story I’ve written about before: The Democratic Party is changing dramatically down-ballot, and the candidates who won Thursday are part of a wave that will change the party forever. The organizers and activists who beat the IDC are coming to clean up the dirtiest state senate in the country, and they are signs of how the resistance to [Dear Leader] will spill over for years and years to come.

Update (August 9, 2020):  Amid several progressive wins this cycle, Andrew O'Hehir notes that the success is no fluke.

[A] distinctive pattern has become clear since [Sander's 2016 campaign]: When establishment Democrats are paying close attention and have a large canvas to work with — as on Super Tuesday, or in a high-visibility statewide campaign — they can control the media messaging, turn out more moderate voters and generally achieve the desired result. At the more granular, retail-politics level of congressional districts, state legislature seats and local races, establishment candidates are highly vulnerable to grassroots activist campaigns.

O'Hehir sees more going on than just a desire to go "back to normal" as Biden represents.

All the contradictions of 2020 have revealed an immense appetite for change: That is both exciting and dangerous, and offers more reasons for hope than we've had in decades.