Are House Democrats bent on extending the Trump stranglehold?

On July 15, Tara Golshan and Ella Nilsen wrote:

AOC, Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley are demanding that moderate House Democrats, including “veteran black lawmakers who have worked their way into the inner circle of House leadership,” conform to their own concept of radical wokeness. “Chakrabarti [AOC’s chief of staff] commented as well, with his tweet comparing current moderate Democrats to the Southern Democrats who enabled segregationist policies in the 1940s.”

 The issue was the border funding vote, the best option available to the Democrats at the time. AOC, Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley, freshman House members, are adopting a hard line which leaves veteran, experienced House members no choice. A minority of four are attempting to dictate to a much larger majority having generations of experience.

First, this is not democracy. Second, this sort of intolerance is abhorrent to the American voting public, both Democrats and Republicans. There could be no better way of extending the Trump stranglehold for four more years.

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Tara Golshan:

Late Friday night, the official Twitter account for House Democrats, managed by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) — fired off an incendiary tweet about Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, accusing him of “singling out out a Native American woman of color,” Rep. Sharice Davids (D-KS).
[Jeffries wrote:]

Who is this guy and why is he explicitly singling out a Native American woman of color?
Her name is Congresswoman Davids, not Sharice.
She is a phenomenal new member who flipped a red seat blue.

At the time, [Saikat] Chakrabarti [AOC’s chief of staff] referred to moderate Democrats who advocated for the Senate plan [as] the “New Southern Democrats,” and said they were “hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s.” (Southern Democrats in the 1940s were on the whole conservative, and were opponents of civil rights efforts, including early attempts at desegregation.) Chakrabarti … [saw those members] as enablers of a racist system.

Tensions between House Democratic leadership and progressive lawmakers have been escalating in recent weeks, as progressives see leadership as dismissive of their demands and influence in the party. Chakrabarti sits at an interesting intersection of this dynamic. He works for Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist member whose viral internet presence has helped her platform to dominate conversation at the national level in a manner that has struck the ire of entrenched House members. And he founded Justice Democrats, a progressive group working to unseat ideologically moderate Democrats, some of which are veteran black lawmakers who have worked their way into the inner circle of House leadership. 

Until now, Pelosi has publicly dismissed progressives’ influence and privately told the House majority to maintain a spirit of unity. But the internal strife within her party keeps boiling over into the public.

Since then, Chakrabarti and another AOC staff member, communications director Corbin Trent, have been dismissed.

The AOC four have been referred to as the progressive, left, or even most liberal part of the Democratic Party. This is a category mistake. AOC belongs to a separate tradition not compatible with the fundamental values of the Party, which trace back to two Enlightenment documents, the Declaration and the Constitution. Those values, originating in western Europe, constitute Enlightenment liberalism, and they are centered on equality; the rights, dignity, and autonomy of the single person; universalism; cooperation; toleration; and a passion for optimum outcomes for everybody.

The AOC group's values come from a dark central European mindset which produced Marxism, Freudianism, and fascism. Behind the scenes, they assume that humanity is afflicted by original sin, and they assume that human existence is a zero sum game: when one group gains something, another group loses something. The AOC group's values imply conflict.

The Democratic Party comes from a heritage which imagines win-win solutions and speaks of "enlightened self-interest," in which voluntary service to the public good makes one's own life better. Democratic values imply cooperation and voluntary association; AOC values imply that life is a war of all against all, and favor obligatory membership in a collective in which the group is all and the individual is nothing.

AOC's left is inherently backward and reactionary, not progressive. The modern world, by contrast, is liberal. Democracy is liberal, science is liberal, justice is liberal, and true intellectuality is liberal. All favor openness, cooperation, free communication and freedom of thought, the conviction that no gender or ethnicity is better than another, and complete equality of opportunity for everyone regardless of background. There is no overlap between the AOC outlook and the outlook of the Democratic Party, between an oppositional, adversarial, subversive outlook and an outlook whose most famous three words is “We the People.”

Caitlin Flanagan’s acerbic remarks about ‘justice critics’

‘Truth stands independently of social opinion,’ Robert Pirsig wrote: and that’s one reason ‘social justice’ is an oxymoron.

Caitlin Flanagan: 

The justice critics, the ones who want to count up every movie’s sins against approved sensibilities, say that the film is nostalgic, a term intended to damage it. Only another artist would understand the way that Tarantino has deployed that potent force. Guillermo del Toro tweeted that the movie was “[chock-full] of yearning,” that it was “a tale of another time that probably never was but feels like a memory.”

The justice critics aren’t interested in fictions that feel like memories. They want movies that adhere to their vision of the way the world should be. To them, the movie is too white, too violent toward women, and too uninterested in Margot Robbie, whose Sharon Tate has few lines. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody reviled the picture, calling it “ridiculously white.” But Charles Manson was a white supremacist, a fact that does tend to put a lot of white people in a movie.

The justice critics want to subject art to ‘constraints and considerations extraneous’ to it. [The phrase comes from Classicist Mary Lefkowitz, who once declared, “Academic freedom is the freedom to profess a discipline according to its recognized content and procedures, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to that discipline.”]

Unaesthetic philistines telling art what to do is nothing new, from the boy-meets-tractor diktat of Soviet Commissars to Plato’s condemnation of Graeco-Roman mythology for showing the gods chasing each other’s wives.

Kudos to Flanagan for daring to critique puritanical dictatorship-of-virtue justice critics and the boring bowdlerized didactic art they would foist on us. Ars grātiā artis