A false premise that pervades the entire piece is worked into the title. Progressives have, for years now, offered a critique of the Democratic Establishment that is both specific--meaning in no way "blind"--and based on specific actions of that Establishment--meaning in no way a "smear"--and Cheung, while attempting to dismiss it, never touches it, opting, instead, to set up and knock down a series of strawmen as stand-in.
In her subhead, she wheels out the tired Clinton cult line about progressives being "far-left purists." Talk of "purism" is the cult's stock dismissive description of anyone with any basic standards beyond party affiliation in what policies they want from a political candidate vying to represent them, and Cheung offers it here even as she, herself, clings to the sort of "purism" she makes a show of condemning. I'll get back to that in a moment. The "far left" talk is empty Clintonian triangulation--rhetorically marginalizing progressives in order to present "both sides" as extreme and artificially situate oneself as the sensible center (Cheung refers to this "far-left" as advocates of "utopic ideas and dogged, ideological purity"). The policies tagged by the cult as "far left" are, in fact, supported by huge majorities of Democrats and usually significant majorities of the general public; if they can be dubbed "far left," the designation has no meaning.
Progressives are all about policy--they have, in recent years, organized around a bold and ambitious slate of issues--but large swathes of their agenda, such as single-payer healthcare, a $15/hour minimum wage, conversion to renewable energy, etc., are absolutely anathema to entrenched Big Money interests and, by extension, to the politicians, pundits and political operatives in the pay of those interests. The latter would include the Democratic Establishment. This is an irreconcilable conflict; if progressives want those policies, it means going over, around or through the pols who are paid to oppose them. Moreover, the core conviction of the progressive critique of both the Democratic Establishment and government in general is that the bribery-and-donor-service system itself, the system that dominates American politics at every level, is fundamentally corrupt and must go. This view is an existential threat to pols like the Clintons who have thrived off prostituting their offices via that system and have used it as their power-base. This is the primary, nearly sole, root of the conflict between the progressives and the Establishment but Cheung refuses to even mention it by its name.
She tries, instead, to steer around it with oblique allusions about progressives demonizing "experience and Washington political networking." Her article--a love-letter to career politicians--is filled with paragraph after paragraph in praise of these things, framing the conflict as if they were the source of it. Assiduously avoiding that matter of money, she enters the mind of the political insiders on which she's crushing, assigning them entirely altruistic motives and, in turn, using this self-generated phantom to dismiss the progressive critique without addressing it:
"The idea that those who care enough to forge connections, educate themselves and develop literacy in policymaking and dealmaking, rack up years of experience, and align themselves with party leadership, are somehow unable to understand and work on behalf of 'real Americans' because of this proven dedication is baseless and damaging."Most of these are just basic skills; a legislator will either learn them or he won't, and contra Cheung, progressives have certainly never taken issue with someone being good at what they do if what they do is, itself, good, but therein lies the rub, the one Cheung is trying not to rub. To note the obvious, it isn't the job of legislators to "align themselves with party leadership"; they're elected to represent their constituents. If a legislator isn't dong so, or, as is usually the case, he considers his Big Money donors to be his real constituents and serves them at everyone else's expense, that's a problem. As for "experience," Bernie Sanders, the pol who helped bring the progressive/Establishment dispute to a head, entered his first political race in the early 1970s and has held elective office since 1981--by any estimation, a very experienced pol. Sanders, who has significant political gifts, gained the support of progressives because he advocated the progressive policy agenda.
On this matter, all roads lead back to that. Policy. The rest is just squid's ink.
Cheung writes that Sanders "brought dangerous levels of divisiveness into the fold with his 'us vs. them,' 'anti-establishment vs. establishment' rhetoric," as if that rhetoric appeared in a vacuum as a pernicious alien import into the political discourse and had no basis in fact. The efforts by the party Establishment to tilt the 2016 primary/caucus process in Clinton's favor--everything from manipulating the debate schedule to establishing a major money-laundering scheme using the state parties as fronts for Clinton fundraising to the party Good Ol' Boys Club, with their superdelegate superpowers, lining up behind Clinton--are a matter of public record. The Sanders presidential campaign was a grassroots, issues-driven affair fueled by small-dollar contributions from Sanders' supporters, while Hillary Clinton was paying her bills with massive contributions solicited from entrenched Big Money interests while denigrating and dismissing progressive issues (or offering watered-down-to-nothing versions of them in an effort to undercut them).
That same situation is presently repeating itself all over the U.S. in the 2018 cycle. Sanders-inspired crowdfunded progressives have jumped into political races at all levels of government and the reaction of the Democratic Establishment has been to interfere in local primaries in an effort to defeat the grassroots candidates or bully them out of the various races in favor of corporate-backed rightist "Democrats" centrally chosen by the Establishment clique in the Capitol. In a political environment in which all the enthusiasm and activist energy in the party is with the progressives, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) announced in the Summer it was officially entering into what had, up to then, been a silent and unofficial alliance with the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of right-wing "Democrats" who are barely distinguishable from Republicans.[1] These are the kinds of anti-inspiring candidates the DCCC recruits, the ones behind which it throws nearly all of its support and resources. If one accepts the premise that it should be Democratic voters, not the D.C. Establishment, that choose their own Democratic candidates, the interference in these primaries by orgs like the DCCC is entirely inappropriate.
Cheung even mentions one of the races in which this has been an issue, Berniecrat Marie Newman's recent effort to unseat long-running Democratic incumbent Dan Lipinski in Illinois' 3rd District, though she declines to provide the context I just have. That's not all she leaves out either. The full extent of her take on that race:
"...none of this is to say that Democrats should never embrace change of any sort. In cases like the race of incumbent, notably anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski against progressive, liberal and notably female challenger Marie Newman, there are times when Democrats with dated, damaging values threatening to democracy and human rights simply have to go.The bolding on that dishonest strawman is Cheung's own, and at least shows that she's aware of her own hypocrisy in repeatedly damning "purists" while arguing against Lipinski from a purely "purist" perspective. Dan Lipinski, it's also worth noting, is an example of a pol with plenty of experience and Washington connections. He is, for example, one of the chairmen of the Blue Dog Coalition. And how did the Democratic Establishment handle this race? The DCCC endorsed Lipinski, throwing its money behind his ultimately successful effort to defeat his progressive rival. Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic Whip, and Joe Crowley, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, "contributed thousands of dollars to Lipinski’s campaign." House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was there for Lipinski too,[2] which is hardly surprising given that the DCCC is Pelosi's creature, but the actions of the party leaders here speak directly to both Cheung's reflexive defense of pols who line up behind the party leadership and her rather ludicrous citation of Pelosi, elsewhere in the piece, as an example of "strong, highly capable female leadership." Though everything I've just outlined directly impacts on everything else Cheung writes, Cheung declines to share any of it with her readers.
"But there is a significant difference between upholding basic standards of decency for our lawmakers and ruling out and smearing Democrats solely for their experience and connections."
Cheung's piece wouldn't be a Clinton cult screed without the boilerplate appeal to weaponized faux-identity politics and the ugly implication that progressives are sexists.[3] "I would be remiss," she writes, "to conclude without acknowledging how this phenomenon"--progressive opposition to misdeeds by the party Establishment--"disproportionately affects women in positions of power." She frets that "generations could be deprived of strong, highly capable female leadership because of the lasting attitudes of the Sanders insurgency," a complaint instantly undercut by the fact that her examples of that great "leadership" include wretched political refuse like Clinton, Pelosi and California Sen. Dinosaur Feinstein (rather than keepers like, say, Elizabeth Warren, Pramila Jayapal or Nina Turner). I'd be remiss if, in the face of that identity rubbish, I failed to point out that the army of Sanders-inspired crowdfunded progressives currently running for office, the candidates Cheung relentlessly disparages and tries to render marginal and radioactive, is disproportionately made up of women and people of color (another subset of the populace Cheung makes a rhetorical show of defending), and that the Democratic Establishment Cheung is rhapsodizing is, in race after race, trying to defeat them. Marie Newman is only one example. In Texas' 7th District, Pelosi's DCCC conducted a very public smear-campaign against progressive Laura Moser, trying to push her out of the race. In Washington's 9th District, Sarah Smith is challenging incumbent "Democrat" Adam Smith and the party is trying to monkeywrench her campaign. Tanzie Youngblood, a black former teacher, jumped into the race for New Jersey's 2nd District seat only to have the DCCC endorse, instead, anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-death penalty state senator Jeff Van Drew, one of the most conservative Democratic elected officials in the state. The DCCC "Red To Blue" program hasn't endorsed a single black candidate in the 2018 cycle. And so on.
That's Cheung's Democratic Establishment. And in evaluating same, none of this merits so much as a mention from her.
Cheung doesn't tell her readers about any of that either. While she complains that progressives aren't supporting Dinosaur and seeks to make a case for the long-running senator, her analysis of Feinstein is, like the rest of her article, almost entirely content-free insofar as policy substance is concerned, as if she believes one can do politics without the politics. Her talk of policy is almost entirely limited to the need to defend past accomplishments.
It's a particularly tired cliche of this dismal literature to melodramatically fear-monger about how past accomplishments could be rolled back if Republicans are given power.[4] From the worst of it, one would conclude that women, poor folks, people of color, those who are LGBTQ, etc. could be shipped to death camps at any moment. Clintonite pols use this in place of any positive platform as an argument for their own election. It's not only preposterously hyperbolic and utterly reactionary but a profoundly offensive inversion of reality in another way; it is and always has been progressives, not mushy "moderate" rightists, who fight for vulnerable communities. Cheung dives into the swamp anyway. "In the current national political landscape," she writes, "what we’re witnessing is an existential battle for the bare necessities" (bolding mine). But Cheung departs from the standard script and manages to offer an even more appalling--and even more reactionary--variant:
"President Donald Trump and his increasingly extremist party are not the only threats to marginalized peoples' rights in this country. Regardless of their well-meaning ideas and colorful visions for the future, electing people who lack the fundamental experiences and skill sets to fight for the basics place already vulnerable Americans further at risk."This notion--that both votes for progressives and progressives themselves are a threat to "marginalized peoples" and that only the Democratic Establishment and those who cling to it are suited to saving the day[5]--is the central theme of Cheung's article. She restates it over and over again, doling out irrational fear in order to dismiss those progressives candidates[6] struggling to build movements to finally give their long-neglected communities a voice in government. Keeping them out of government denies them experience; their alleged lack of experience is then advanced as a rationale for keeping them out of government--a perfect exercise in reactionary circular "reasoning":
"If we fail to fight for the basics, today, by electing people who lack the requisite experiences and skills to fight for them, we could not only forfeit these basics but also lose even more ground."Cheung even advances this ending of democracy in the name of democracy:
"When there is as much to lose--particularly for people of color, immigrants, women, low-income people, disabled people and LGBTQ people--as there is, taking chances on people with new ideas and little else backing them up is a risk our democracy may not be able to afford."For a political party, what Cheung is peddling is the ultimate recipe for stagnation and death, and in an environment where people are so desperately clamoring for change that they turn to the likes of Donald Trump because they have some little hope he will provide it when the other side isn't offering any, it's a quick death too.
Cheung concludes by writing, "with basic decency, competency, progress and foundational Democratic values at stake, the onus is on us to make both the right choice, and the smart choice." Both the right choice and the smart choice--and the wise one--is to chuck in the nearest waste-basket everything Cheung has written here, and never think on it again.
--j.
---
[1] It's impossible to regard this move as anything other than breathtakingly tone-deaf and out of touch but it reflects the priorities and proclivities of the larger Democratic Establishment (and its financiers).
[2] In a man-bites-dog move, some elements of the larger Democratic Establishment lined up behind Newman but the elected leadership--Cheung's focus--was a monolith in supporting Lipinski.
[3] Among Rantt writers, the full litany of tired, mostly fictional Clinton cult talking-points seem to be treated as revealed gospel. Some of the others Cheung uncritically repeats include the idea that Hillary Clinton was "the most qualified candidate in U.S. history," that "we should recognize the role of [Sanders'] rhetorical talking points in helping to doom Clinton in the general election," that Sanders was "sidelining identity-based issues as purported distractions from 'real,' hard economic issues." I suppose Cheung deserves at least some credit for sparing us another rendition of "Bernie Sanders isn't even a Democrat."
[4] And given Cheung's steadfast defense of the party Establishment and her assertion in her subhead that "far-left purists will only keep Republicans in power," it's worth noting that Establishment has a terrible record when it comes to picking winners. In a progressive party, the rightists it recruits in nearly every race in which it involves itself brutally slay voter enthusiasm; in the 2016 cycle, the DCCC and the House Majority PAC spent over a million dollars in each of 30 races and lost all but 7 of them to the Republicans.
[5] This is like a steroid-infused variant on one of Hillary Clinton's 2016 smears of Bernie Sanders. Sanders advocated a single-payer healthcare system; Clinton insisted this meant Sanders wanted to repeal Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid--everything--leaving people with nothing while he tried to pass an all-new system.
[6] Again, since Cheung played the identity card, mostly women and minority candidates.
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