Well, of course they did. They certainly do not want to admit they lost a net-8 seats in the House because their agenda scares people, right?
Progressives blame ‘divide-and-conquer racism’ for Democrats’ House losses
Progressive House Democrats are shifting the blame for last week’s dismal House showing.
As it became clear Democrats wouldn’t expand their majority in the House this year, moderate Democrats began blaming their party’s left wing, including in a testy post-election caucus call where Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) profanely decried any mention of “socialism” within the party. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) quickly told the party to stop “pointing fingers,” and on Tuesday, a memo began circulating among progressive representatives that tried to break down just went wrong.
While the memo did reflect Ocasio-Cortez’s plea to stop “placing blame” before a campaign post-mortem was conducted, it did lay out progressive strategies to drive future House gains. Instead of playing into President Trump’s “racist appeals against immigrants and Black Lives Matter,” Democrats should “take on the Republican party’s divide-and-conquer racism head-on,” the memo says. Democrats should “invest in organizing the base,” “connect economic justice to racial justice,” and “drive an economic message that connects with all working people” as well, the memo details. As Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)Â put it, Democrats need to “really respect every single voice,” namely those of marginalized people, instead of “silencing” them like Spanberger suggested.
Everything is raaaaacism in their world, so, conversely, nothing can actually be racist anymore.
The economy was voters’ top concern in this election. When Democratic leaders make unforced errors like showing off two sub-zero freezers full of ice cream on national television or cozy up with Wall Street executives and corporate lobbyists while Trump tells voters we are the party of the swamp, it is not surprising that we lose. We need a new generation of leadership grounded in a multiracial, working class experience and background.
Pelosi may have lost quite a bit of power due to the losses, but, she will still control a lot of power, and, a lot of money.
The document spends quite a bit of time on Black Lives Matter, arguing that Democrats should have gone in whole hog in supporting them, which, they kind of did. But, the nutters in the Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement (yeah, they’re supposed to be about solving ‘climate change’, aren’t they?), and a few others aren’t happy they didn’t go in, I guess, whole elephant.
Republican attacks levied at Democrats this cycle based on terms like “defund the police†or “socialism†have become scapegoats for Representatives like Abigail Spanberger, Conor Lamb, and other senior Democrats. Not a single Democrat — progressive or otherwise — argued that Democrats should run primarily on these themes. Moreover, these attacks will never go away, nor will demands for reform from social movements. The attacks are designed to stoke racial resentment, which is core to the GOP’s election strategy. Our party should not feed into it.
Those two terms are not popular, yet, most Democrats did not decry those things.
This election, the Black youth leading the Black Lives Matter movement have turned their power in the streets into votes and have helped secure Biden’s victory in key cities. As the country faced one of its darkest and ugliest realites this summer, the continued violence and murder of Black people by the police, Black-led youth orgnizations in Minnesota, Georgia, and Wisconsin took to the streets to change a system that continues to say Black lives don’t matter. This sparked a national reckoning and conversation about what it means to reimagine public safety and the allocation of resources. Solidarity marches and protests sprang up in big cities and rural small towns. According to an analysis by Tom Bonier of TargetSmart, the protests drove up voter registration, with the earliest signs coming from Georgia, and helped close the enthusiasm gap that plagued Biden into the summer.
And white progressives/Antifa helped the black youth riot, loot, commit arson and assault in the streets, live on our TVs. I certainly didn’t help the Democrats to support this. But, you know, it was raaaaacism from Republicans.
