Democratic Socialists Just Aren’t Very Popular
– By Howard Sierer –
This observation, a dash of cold water in the face of woke progressives, comes from one of their own and in the New York Times no less. Despite election results over the last five years, many of today’s progressive leaders refuse to recognize that the progressive emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.
Fredrik DeBoer is a Marxist education researcher, a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers, and author of “The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice.” While his Times article may not be welcomed or even believed by those who limit themselves only to leftwing media, it is patently obvious not only to conservatives but also to the moderate majority of the Democratic Party and to independents.
As a New Yorker, DeBoer uses Buffalo’s Democratic mayor Byron Brown’s write-in vote victory over avowed democratic socialist candidate India Walton as an example. Walton won the city’s primary in June but Brown turned the tables with almost 60% of the vote in November despite endorsements for Walton from New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand.
DeBoer writes: “It’s time for young socialists and progressive Democrats to recognize that our beliefs just might not be popular enough to win elections consistently. It does us no favors to pretend otherwise.”
How many Americans want the socialist policies that DeBoer and his fellow travelers advocate? Clearly, there are pockets of the electorate that have elected avowed socialists. Sen. Bernie Sanders has represented Vermont for 30 years, first as its only congressional representative and then as senator since 2007. Six young radical leftists, known as “The Squad,” were elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as their outspoken poster child.
With the Squad’s every pronouncement publicized by the leftist mainstream media, this small group has exercised a dramatically outsized influence on the country’s political discourse. They’ve been quick to call foul and blame “the system” and fellow Democrats when their proposals are not adopted. These zealous progressives believe that despite the imagined popularity of their ideas, they are held back by reactionaries.
DeBoer sums up this narrow-minded attitude: “So many on the radical left whom I know have convinced themselves that their politics and policies are in fact quite popular on a national level, despite the mounting evidence otherwise.”
The “mounting evidence” is best illustrated by Bernie Sanders’ quixotic quests for the presidency. In 2016 and again in 2020, he had a core of enthusiastic supporters for the Democratic presidential nomination and received a massive amount of media coverage. His followers were dubbed “Sandernistas” and campaign rallies around the country were heavily attended.
But just as student pep rallies – no matter how rabidly supported – don’t win football games for weak teams, Sanders failed to get more than 30% of Democratic primary votes in 2016. Party professionals read the tea leaves and engineered Hillary Clinton’s nomination, realizing that if Sanders couldn’t attract Democratic voters in the primaries, he had no chance in the general election.
Sanders fared no better in the 2020 primaries. He led in early primaries when running against a grab bag of Democratic hopefuls. Not wanting to fall short again, party leaders finally fell in behind Joe Biden giving moderates what they thought at the time was an alternative to socialism. Democratic voters jumped on Biden’s bandwagon showing an unmistakable dislike of socialist policies.
Democratic socialists refuse to see the obvious; instead, they offer excuses and double down.
Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee calls the party’s recent defeats “a wake-up call that we’re not getting the job done on messaging.” Blame the messenger, not the message.
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez disagrees. She says it’s not that Democrats haven’t sold their accomplishments well enough but rather that the party has been too timid to push the envelope legislatively in ways that get the party’s base excited and engaged. Ignoring reality, she advocates, even more, a lot more, of the very policies that have alienated voters across the country.
In Ocasio-Castro’s mind, why only increase college funding instead of offering tuition-free college for all? Why stop short of offering anything less than free pre-school for all? Socialized medical care for everyone in the country has more cachet than merely expanding Medicaid.
Ocasio-Castro herself is an example of George Orwell’s observation that nothing makes a leftist more nervous than someone farther left. Both Pres. Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have embraced her progressive agenda out of fear that moderation will be blasted by progressives in the leftist media, fracturing the party.
As a result, moderate Congressional Democrats find themselves swept along by the progressive tide. If they balk, they are threatened with progressive challengers in their next primary election. And Pelosi’s iron fist controlling committee assignments and other perks force moderates to toe the line.
DeBoer concludes: “The idea that most Americans quietly agree with our positions is dangerous because it leads to the kind of complacency that has dogged Democrats since the ‘emerging Democratic majority’ myth became mainstream.”
He continues: “Too much of this energy seems to stem from the echo-chamber quality of social media, as young socialists look at the world through Twitter and TikTok and see only the smiling faces of their own beliefs reflected back at them.”
To DeBoer and all so-called democratic socialists, I say keep smiling at each other on TikTok. Let the moderates from both parties who get elected hammer out a compassionate society with a heavy dose of personal freedom.
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