Like a lepidopteran Charlie Brown drawn to Lucy van Pelt's flaming football, congressional progressives keep falling for corporate Democrats' pathetically predictable, and transparently self-serving, pleas for unity. Support our priorities, the centrists keep urging, and we'll get around to your stuff later.
How much later?We'll tell you later.
"Progressives have grown increasingly accustomed to disappointment with the Biden administration," the Daily Beast reports with the breaking-news tone of "sun rises in east," "and now a proposed increase in Department of Defense and law enforcement spending are causing them to air their grievances anew with just months left before the 2022 election." Insanely -- remember, we just left Afghanistan, so war spending should drop precipitously -- President Joe Biden's latest budget proposes a record high of $813 billion in military spending, an increase of $30 billion from last year. He just sent $13 billion to Ukraine. Plus, he wants $32 billion for cops.
Refund the police.
Whether working inside a system diametrically opposed to your values has ever been effective is historically debatable. Since Bill Clinton ditched the New Deal coalition of the working class, labor and Black voters in favor of Wall Street banks and other large corporate donors, it certainly has never worked for progressives inside the Democratic Party.
Impotent and hopeless, members of the AOC-led House Squad and left-leaning senators only have one option left to make a strong political statement: leave the Democratic Party and either join the Greens or form a new progressive party. But that would risk ridicule and marginalization by liberal media outlets like The New York Times and MSNBC, not to mention grassroots organizing, which requires hard work like talking to voters and getting rained upon.
So the squeaky mice of the inside-the-Beltway progressive left are reduced to issuing sad little whines in response to once again getting the shaft.
"If budgets are value statements, today's White House proposal for Pentagon spending shows that we have a lot of work to do," Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), Reps. Barbara Lee (D-California) and Mark Pocan (D-Wisconsin) wrote in a statement in response to Biden's GOP-inspired budget.
"It's a mistake," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said.
"You know, you want to say 'fund the police,' cool. But you also talk about police accountability," added Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York).
These quotes appeared in an article headlined "Left Seethes at Biden's Big Defense Budget."
I know seething. Seething is a friend of mine.
"Work to do" is not seething. "Mistake" is not seething. "Police accountability" is not seething.
"I think this year's number was too much," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts). Yes -- by about 1,000%.
Biden's Build Back Better infrastructure package, which incorporated some progressive priorities, died because the White House and its corporate Democratic allies in Congress didn't go to the mat for it; in particular, they weren't willing to punish DINO Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema by threatening to strip the traitors of their committee assignments.
Increasing the national minimum wage to $15 an hour, a progressive priority for the last decade, is dead under Biden.
There's been no movement on another key platform plank of Bernie Sanders' presidential bids: student loan forgiveness.
About 112 million Americans struggle to afford health care, and we've lost nearly 1 million Americans to the COVID-19 pandemic, yet Biden, satisfied with his former running mate's wobbly Affordable Care Act, hasn't spent a penny of political capital, or cash capital, on Medicare For All.
Besides lessons in humility and patience, what exactly do congressional progressives gain by working inside the Democratic Party? Mainstream legitimacy. But to paraphrase Lyndon B. Johnson, what the hell else is working inside the Democratic Party for if it never pays off?
While the self-identified progressive congressional Democrats spin their wheels, their constituents get a defense budget that Donald Trump would be proud of, higher taxes to pay for more police and soaring prices chomping away at a $7.25 national minimum wage last increased in 2009. (Adjusted for inflation, that's $5.48 today.)
At this point, progressive voters can only draw one logical conclusion about the decision of AOC, the Squad and other supposedly left-wing congressmen and senators to remain inside the Democratic Party: Their sole purpose is to legitimize and prop up an institution that's working against them, their ideas and their supporters.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, "The Stringer." Order one today. You can support Ted's hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.
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9 comments:
Dear Ted,
Biden never claimed to be a progressive and Sanders lost in 2016. As for "AOC," she's a first-term rep with zero clout outside of social media fame.
The fact that Rall and his ilk will not simply announce themselves aligned with the party that has been established for years and clearly represents their aspirations, the Socialist Party, demonstrates his own desire to move within establishment circles. He's really afraid of his own unrealistic dogma and won't take the inevitable bite when their idealistic dreams fall apart. These fools will send society into the deep water but they will stay close to shore and watch.
Progressive Democrats do not need Joe Biden to look like fools. They can both manage just fine by themselves.
Rall-munism just does not sell. Or work either. Ted Rall resents prosperity achieved by free, achievement oriented individuals and, like most leftists, has a proclivity toward Statism and slavish Group ID.
Unless the left can continue to subvert media, digital access to news and history defeats the layers of deceit and dependency upon which socialism depends.
Elon Musk, a capitalist achiever, has spent nearly $10B to own a controlling interest in Twitter not for profit (it's a poor performing stock), but to promote free speech as a key to democracy and liberty.
The sustaining nourishment for socialism is a starving populace. Starving meaning a serious lack of the basic needs of life. Your neighbor living in a better house or eating better food is not "starving". Unless the liberal media can convince a large portion of the populace that they are starving while chewing a mouth full of food the left fringe of the Democratic Party will never be more than a small, vocal, eccentric base represented by clown politicians clawing for power. Not that the left has any exclusive claim to clowns.
7:14 I could not agree more. But the media and political opportunists have done a fantastic job of convincing much of our young population that they can't live without certain things that in years past would be luxuries. They are desperate to have things they can't afford unless they are granted by government. Unless these things are given to them, they will insure their possession by force if necessary. Look around, their ranks are growing.
775 words on the contents of a ping-pong ball...
I know how you feel, Ted.
The corporatists in both parties mess up everything as a result of their craven protection racket for multinational corporates which outsource much of their business activities
8:58 : A working cell phone and some chicken nuggets is all they seem to need.
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