“I am talking about the radical conservatives in the Democratic Party,” said Saikat Chakrabarti. “That’s who we need to counter. It’s the same across any number of issues—pay-as-you-go, free college, “Medicare for all.” These are all enormously popular in the party, but they don’t pass because of the radical conservatives who are holding the party hostage.”So far their ambitions have mostly failed, even compared to the TEA Party's initial moments. However, in the young Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, they have an extraordinary platform to draw attention to their movement.
Not long ago, this would have been an outlier position even among American liberals. Today, it’s the organizing principle of a newly empowered segment of the Democratic Party, one with a foothold in the new Congress.
Chakrabarti is chief of staff to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez... Although it’s Ocasio-Cortez who gets all the headlines, she arguably wouldn’t be in Congress in the first place without the group Chakrabarti founded: Justice Democrats, a new, central player in the ongoing war for the soul of the Democratic Party. It was the Justice Democrats who recruited her in a quixotic campaign early on, providing a neophyte candidate with enough infrastructure to take down a party leader. And it is the Justice Democrats who see Ocasio-Cortez as just the opening act in an astonishingly ambitious plan to do nothing less than re-imagine liberal politics in America—and do it by whatever means necessary.
If that requires knocking out well-known elected officials and replacing them with more radical newcomers, so be it. And if it ends up ripping apart the Democratic Party in the process—well, that might be the idea.
“There is going to be a war within the party. We are going to lean into it,” said Waleed Shahid, the group’s spokesman.
A Tea Party of Their Own
This is such a familiar complaint, except that it's normally a complaint by insurgent right-wingers against "Establishment Republicans" rather than "radical conservative" Democrats. The left is having its own moment along those lines.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
"Radical Conservative" Democrats.........I think of JFK, Harry Truman, Bobby Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson.........
How would the bug-eyed, big-boobed, brainless Bolshevik from New York categorize THEM?
Like they did Jim Webb, I guess: as someone they wanted to turn into a joke, but didn't understand well enough to make a joke about.
When will they drop the "Dem" label and just call themselves what they are?
Communists.
More like Progressive-Democrats. There's less space between the current Party (capital 'P') and the Progressivism of Herb Croly, Woodrow Wilson, TRoosevelt, and modern Party MFWICs like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, et al., than there is between Party and communism. Or Communism.
That close alignment is reflected both in policy and in contempt for the average American individual.
Eric Hines
@ raven - the day it gets them one more vote than the old way. It's about power, not honesty.
I don't know if this is a good development or not. It certainly can't be good that such radicals have more institutional power, but added clarity can only be a benefit to the republic as a whole. Such reconfigurations have unpredictable effects.
Post a Comment