There Is No Pretense Anymore

Taken together, the endorsements, the donor overlap, and the party ties of the allegedly independent committees show there is no real separation between the Democratic leadership and the “outside” spending. This is one large party-sanctioned operation aimed at the Left, even when corporatists are undermining the party’s agenda and its own president. Indeed, rather than amping up potential progressive primary pressure on Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), Biden’s political machine actually ran ads touting her as she was killing his signature economic legislation and driving down his approval ratings.

This lack of pretense, where the leadership isn’t even pretending to be impartial or progressive, represents a significant break from the past.

Once upon a time (read: up to the mid 2000s), Democratic leaders typically stayed officially neutral in intraparty battles. These weren’t exactly halcyon days — the power brokers still quietly encouraged donor support for preferred candidates. However, that kind of rigging was hidden in the shadows, so as to not publicly violate the once-sacrosanct idea that Democratic voters should be trusted to choose nominees and — by extension — the party’s ideological complexion.

That tradition began to change in 2006 after Rahm Emanuel bought a Chicago-area congressional seat and began handpicking House Democratic nominees through the party’s campaign apparatus. Later, the party’s political machine went all in against Sanders’s 2020 presidential primary campaign and then went in even stronger for corporate candidates in contested Senate primaries in Iowa, Maine, Kentucky, North Carolina, Texas and Colorado — and in the latter case, even progressives like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) participated in the scale-thumbing.

All of this escalated to the DCCC literally blacklisting political consultants who worked for unapproved Democratic candidates.

For their part, Democratic operatives don’t ever admit they are trying to help business donors pulverize rank-and-file voters and perform a hostile takeover of the party. Instead, they often make the “pragmatism” argument, asserting (with few facts) their primary interventions are designed to help corporate candidates who are allegedly the most “electable” in tough general elections.

The existence of reasonably progressive red- and purple-state senators like Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin should debunk such assumptions, but also: many of the party leadership’s interventions were and continue to happen in Democratic-leaning locales whose general elections inherently favor the eventual Democratic nominees, regardless of their ideological moorings.

Meanwhile, in purple states, many of those corporate-friendly candidates picked by party bosses for their alleged “electability” last cycle were summarily crushed in their general elections.

None of those losses prompted accountability or change — it’s still the same gerontocracy and consultants calling the shots, which spotlights an important truth.

Democratic leaders are bad at defeating Republicans in competitive races, bad at passing meaningful legislation, bad at coming up with a coherent message, and — according to new polling data — bad at convincing most voters to like their party. The new redistricting maps in New York show they are even bad at protecting their own representation in blue states.

But they are extremely good at two things: preserving their own power inside their party and destroying the American left.

Movements Cannot Be Built With Unicorns

Of course, there are always exceptions.

In 2018, the exception was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeating lobbyist favorite and Biff Tannen doppleganger Joe Crowley in a New York City Democratic primary.

In 2020, it was Cori Bush defeating the William Lacy Clay machine in a St. Louis Democratic primary.

This year, with a little luck it could be Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman defeating corporate-bankrolled, establishment-backed representative Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania’s Senate Democratic primary.

The problem is that so far, such victories — laudable as they are — seem to be unicorn stories rather than reflections of a systemic power shift in primary politics that can be reliably replicated.

Ocasio-Cortez snuck up on a lazy Democratic incumbent who was both ideologically and demographically out of touch with his district.

Bush had run once before and then won a low-turnout primary against an incumbent who was so preposterously corrupt and loyal to bankers that he was portrayed as at odds even with Wall Street favorite Barack Obama — an electoral death sentence in a Democratic primary in a majority African-American district.

As for Fetterman, he may be the closest to creating a replicable model, but there are caveats.

He’s been running for a Senate seat for seven straight years and vaulted himself into a statewide office by winning a primary against a scandal-plagued incumbent. In that interim, he has used sartorial iconoclasm and tireless campaigning to develop a quasi-celebrity brand, build a grassroots fundraising base, and deter Senate Democrats from officially intervening in the Pennsylvania primary like they previously had in 2020 primaries.

All of that is to his credit. Fetterman is now in the rare position of being a serious Senate contender with progressive positions that have drawn powerful corporate enemies — and if he wins Tuesday’s primary, it is undoubtedly a major defeat for the Democratic machine.

However, Fetterman’s playbook is difficult to employ further down the ballot in lower-profile House races or state legislative battles where candidates struggle to achieve any name recognition at all. The same goes for many Senate and gubernatorial races.

Sure, if you’ve never worked on a campaign, it’s easy to blame progressive candidates and insist they should all just find a way to pull off miracles like AOC or Bush or (hopefully) Fetterman. But American politics isn’t Moneyball. There’s no way that progressive candidates in most races can be Billy Bean’s Oakland A’s engineering a Cinderella story by finding a glitch in the numbers — at least not consistently.

Yes, the occasional unicorn with a unique brand and notoriety in the exact right situation can win a primary every now and again (and I say that as the spouse of a Democratic legislator who did that). But a national movement up and down the ballot to dethrone a corrupt and decrepit Democratic Party establishment almost certainly will not be successful if it must rely only on once-in-a-blue-moon candidates running in extremely rare conditions.

Put another way: Movements are built not from anomalies, but from the day to day slog of normalcy. A movement’s success can be judged on whether the political infrastructure exists not just to help a rare unicorn win a high-profile office, but to also win primaries for rank-and-file, non-celebrity candidates running for the lowest-tier offices that voters barely know exist.

There are certainly parts of that infrastructure being constructed in fits and starts — from the Working Families Party to the Democratic Socialists of America, the latter of whose slate of successful New York legislative candidates dealt a blow to that state’s corrupt Democratic machine. Justice Democrats has also racked up a few congressional wins.

Those groups, though, still remain largely locked out of power. Indeed, much-touted George W. Bush–era projects like the Democracy Alliance and liberals’ constellation of anti-GOP think tanks have spent nearly twenty years and $2 billion failing to halt the Right, but they did win oligarch control of a crippled Democratic Party.

And so let’s be honest about where things stand: a full-fledged electoral movement for progressive representation in government still doesn’t exist — and now the Democratic leadership and its corporate donors have decided to do everything they can to make sure it never exists.

Big Money corporate interests, with the aid of the House Democratic leadership and corporatist elements in the White House, are coming for the millions of progressive and economically populist voters who joined with center-left corporatists to elect Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress,

Sanders’s longtime top aide Jeff Weaver wrote this week:

The goal of (their) war is to make elected progressives extinct and to extinguish the agenda of higher wages, affordable health care, criminal justice reform, addressing climate change, and putting more economic and political power in the hands of everyday people of all races.

There are no quick fixes here, no single trick that will make everything better. But at least there is no more pretending. Now we know the contours of this war, and as the old G.I. Joe cartoon told every kid my age: knowing is half the battle.