Leftist congressladies will not campaign for Bernie 2020, reverting from socialism back to social justice-ism

This week Ilhan Omar, a Congressional freshman, decried the influence of the Israel lobby in DC, and predictably got smeared as an anti-semite by the shills for Zionism.

What was not predicted was her supposed leftist comrade, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, joining in the pile-on against her -- not only amplifying the consensus smear, but going further to police dissent from the Left, by scolding non-Jews against telling Jews what they can and cannot be offended by.

I.e., if you thought about telling Zionist shills to not equate the state of Israel and the Jewish people, you're just goy-splaining their feelings of ethnic victimhood. So, only Jews are allowed to debate the issue of AIPAC's role in DC, rather than the entire American citizenry whose government they are blowing millions of dollars trying to influence.

Ocasio-Cortez could have simply stayed quiet on the sidelines, for strategic reasons. Instead she lept off the sidelines to help Omar's attackers drive the shiv further into her back. With revolutionary friends like these, who needs status quo enemies?

All politics is coalitional, and if one of these "new faces for a new party" cannot even rely on others from their cohort for solidarity, then there goes their attempt to realign the party. Again, staying silent is one thing -- actively joining an attack on a friend is quite another.

And because the betrayal was public, everyone else now knows that this group of freshmen would-be realigners should not be taken seriously, if they can't even stick together. Why would anyone in the great big Establishment give them anything against the Establishment's interest, if the would-be realigners have no cohesion, and therefore no collective action potential to throw their weight around? Those who are divided, get conquered.

A different option from taking on the Establishment head-on is to throw in with some other figure or faction that has greater political capital, while still inclined toward realignment. Then it wouldn't matter that the newcomers have minimal political capital of their own to withstand attacks from the Establishment.

If the goal is wealth redistribution from rich to poor -- broadly construed, from taxation to re-writing trade deals to breaking up monopolies -- and keeping out of multiple global military interventions and occupations, there is only one faction for them to join -- Bernie Sanders'. None of the other declared or potential candidates is even close. That is, other than Tulsi Gabbard, but I think she's running just to raise issues, then drop out before voting begins, when she'll enthusiastically endorse and campaign for Bernie.

Can the same be said for the Three Amigas backed by the Democratic Socialists of America -- Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Rashida Tlaib? In recent interviews, all three have more or less openly stated that they will not get involved in the 2020 election on Bernie's behalf. With the rate things are going, maybe they'll go further and campaign against him. See the Appendix at the end of this post for the quotations.

Even though Bernie has not officially declared his candidacy, it's pretty clear that he will, and in any case endorsements could be stated conditionally. ("Assuming he does run, of course I'd love to do whatever I can to help him win the primary!")

For now, the rationalization they're giving is along the lines of, "Well, he was a good candidate at the time, and we appreciate that campaign, but that was then and this is now, so we need someone new." In practice, they mean someone with Bernie's commitment to economic populism and de-militarization of foreign policy, but who also checks off a bunch of masturbatory identity boxes -- not a heterosexual old white guy.

And gee, these new badass Congressladies are all branding themselves as equally populist as Bernie, but with higher diversity scores. It's not necessarily self-serving -- "Vote for me, I'm like Bernie only more diverse" -- but propping up the larger collective of like-identifying people ("populist feminists of color").

If they were working on his campaign in 2016, when he faced a greater uphill challenge in the primary, as a total unknown at the outset, let alone in the general when his party had been incumbent for two terms and no longer popular -- why aren't they willing to work on his campaign in 2020, when he's a nationally known and trusted figure, who faces a divided and weakened Establishment field, and who would face a deeply unpopular president of the rival party?

Their evasions reveal that the supposed socialist turn within the Democrat party, or the Left overall, has in fact been a reversion toward social justice-ism, in which material matters of economics and empire are given partial weight, while airy-fairy issues of social-cultural identity have de facto veto power.

As I detailed in a historical parallel here, the coming realignment will not resemble the New Deal but the Gilded Age.

The robber barons who controlled the Lincoln-era GOP had their own woke rationalizations -- "We're importing millions of foreigners to be wage slaves, not chattel slaves, and we're enslaving our fellow white people via Ellis Island, not racistly stealing more blacks out of Africa." On the foreign policy front, it was the White Man's Burden -- "Only greedy ethnocentric white racists would want to isolate themselves and withhold all of the white man's goodies from the Third World."

So, too, will the newly ascendant Democrat coalition become the party of woke capitalism and woke imperialism.

Appendix: Social justice-ists against Bernie

Ocasio-Cortez

I am a horse-race hater. I hate them. I’m like, I’m like don’t ask me until the day before the New York primary is like, how I feel!

But I do think that obviously from — maybe not obviously but I think it’s pretty obvious like what we’re trying to do is is frame the debate and the conversation that are going to be happening in the next, that we’re going to be having in the next two years regardless of what that candidate is.

So, she might endorse Bernie when it's too late to affect her own state's important primary, which itself comes late in the primary calendar, dooming any chance that she could affect the bulk of the voting schedule. I wonder if she'll issue a proper tweet of her own, or just passively re-tweet someone else's endorsement, 30 minutes before the polls close?

Ilhan Omar

MH: OK, and on Bernie Sanders, are you team Bernie for 2020 if he decides to run again? Do you think he should run again?

IO: I actually believe that ship might have sailed.

MH: OK. You think there’ll be other progressive blood in 2020? Obviously, you think there should be someone with his platform running in 2020, at least?

IO: Yes, I do. I think there is an opportunity for new leaders to emerge.

MH: Is it Elizabeth Warren, that person, because that’s what it comes down to now, people say — any time you talk to lefties, it’s “Who is going to run in 2010 on the left? Is it going to be Warren or Sanders?”

IO: There are a lot of people that I’m excited about. I think I would be excited about a Warren candidacy. I’ve always thought of myself as part of the Warren wing of the party. I would be excited about Senator Kamala Harris running. I could see Senator Cory Booker thinking about it.

So, Bernie's ship might have sailed, but not the sturdy and sea-tested ship of freshman Senator Kamala Harris? As we've discovered this week, it is Omar's ship that has sailed.

Rashida Tlaib

MH: Fair enough. One last question: A growing number of Democrats are now launching presidential bids, a record number of women too. Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand just this week. Do you have a favorite candidate yet?

RT: No, I’m really focused on the shutdown...

MH: But it’s important. It’s not unimportant, obviously, who the candidate of your party to take on Trump.

RT: Of course it’s important but think about it, right now, there’s like more federal workers going to pawn shops to pawn off their goods because they’ve got to be able to make some sort of living. I don’t know. I’m so focused on that right now, and to be honest —

MH: But you were a Bernie supporter in 2016.

RT: Yes, but I —

MH: Would you encourage him to run this time? Even if you’re not coming out in favor of someone.

RT: I can tell you this is a man that has a tremendous amount of courage. He started talking about universal healthcare and supporting the right to boycott and the understanding that women deserve equal pay and all of those things and that’s something that I’m very passionate about. He has moved our country more and more towards these issues. That to me is real leadership and I support any of my colleagues who want to run but I hope they use that national stage, right now, at this moment, to get our government back up and running.

I notice this use of the past tense or present perfect tense in describing Bernie's noble role -- in the past. He "started talking about" this, and he "has moved" the country toward that. Not "is (still) moving" this, or "will do" that into the future. He was the John the Baptist to whoever will be the socialist Jesus -- and apparently Tlaib thinks that could be "any of" her colleagues. Who knows, any of them could be wealth redistributing Jesus, including Wall Street puppets like Corey Booker.