Well, that didn’t last long.
Establishment Democrats and their assorted hacks have spent the entire past year incessantly insisting that wokeness, elitism, and language policing were out, and that white guys, working-class politics, and speaking your mind were in. The year wasn’t even up by the time they reversed themselves on all of it so they could stop the rise of a working-class, left-populist candidate and try to clear the way for a septuagenarian establishment insider to have her turn in Congress.
I’m talking about the Democratic Senate primary campaign of Graham Platner, the veteran and oyster farmer running in Maine to unseat its nearly thirty-year-long Republican incumbent Susan Collins. Until last week, Platner was looking more and more like a shoo-in. Then Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, threw her hat into the ring, and Platner was hit with a wave of what looked like opposition research that somehow made its way into the press.
But let’s rewind for a moment and think about how we got here. After November’s disastrous loss, the Democratic Party establishment, as part of its regular quest to deflect blame for its own failures, once more took aim at the spinning wheel of excuses in front of it and threw a dart. In previous years, that dart hit squares labeled “Green Party,” “sexism,” “white voters,” and “Bernie Sanders.” But this time, the party’s leading excuse was not going to be that Americans are too backward and ignorant for the Democrats, but that Democrats are, if anything, too tolerant and enlightened for America.
This has more or less been the official party line for the past year, hammered home without end at every tier of the Democratic establishment, from the centrist politicians eager that Congress remain their stepping stone to lobbying careers as their pockets bulge with corporate cash, to the gaggle of consultants kneeling below them with cupped hands, hoping some of the spare…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
