AUGUST 28, 2018
JUSTIN ANDERSON
The insurgent left wing of the
Democratic Party, sometimes self-identified as democratic socialists and
exemplified by rising star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and associated with groups
like Bernie Sanders’ Our
Revolution, the Justice
Democrats and the Democratic Socialists of
America (DSA), took some losses in primaries on August 7. These included
high-profile candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate for Michigan governor
and Brent Welder in Kansas’s 2nd district, along with losses by Cori Bush in
Missouri’s 1st district. Following the losses, corporate media outlets were
quick to declare the Democratic left wing dead in the water:
“Bernie and His Army Are
Losing 2018” (Politico, 8/8/18)
“Down Goes Socialism” (Politico, 8/8/18)
“Democratic Party’s Liberal
Insurgency Hits a Wall in Midwest Primaries” (Washington Post, 8/8/18)
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s
Movement Failed to Deliver Any Stunners Tuesday Night” (CNN, 8/8/18)
“The Far Left Is Losing” (US
News & World Report, 8/8/18)
“Most Candidates Backed by
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders Falter” (Wall Street Journal, 8/8/18)
“Socialist Pin-Up Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez Sees Four Candidates FAIL in Tuesday Primary Contests, With One
Coming in Fourth Out of Five” (Daily Mail, 8/8/18)
“Socialist Torchbearers Flame
Out in Key Races, Despite Blitz by Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez” (Fox News, 8/8/18)
“If Democrats Embrace
Socialism to Get Away From Donald Trump, They Can Kiss the Midterms Goodbye” (USA
Today, 8/22/18)
“Why ‘Medicare for All’ Is
Playing Poorly in Democratic Primaries” (Politico, 8/21/18)
Despite these eager
obituaries, there were also plenty of wins for insurgent Democrats on August 7.
Democratic Socialist and Our Revolution candidate Rashida Tlaib won her
primary for the House seat in Michigan’s 13th district; since she is running
unopposed in the general election, she will become the first
Palestinian-American woman in Congress. James Thompson also won the
Democratic nomination in Kansas’s 4th district, and will face Ron Estes in a
tough race in a deep-red district. Sarah Smith came in second in
Washington’s 9th district top-two primary, and will face incumbent Democrat
Adam Smith in the general election. Progressive candidates also earned big wins
in a number of state and local races,
and Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to overturn the
state’s anti-union
right-to-work laws.
More wins for left-leaning
candidates came the following week on August 14. Somali refugee Ilhan Omar,
who won her
primary in Minnesota’s 5th district, will join Rashida Tlaib to become the
first Muslim women to be elected to Congress. Randy Bryce won his
primary to run for Paul Ryan’s soon-to-be-vacant seat in Wisconsin’s 1st
district. Progressive Jahana Hayes won against Mary Glassman (who was
surprisingly supported by a local
Our Revolution chapter) in Connecticut’s 5th district, and will likely become
the state’s first female African-American Democrat in Congress.
Sanders-endorsee Christine Hallquist won the
gubernatorial primary in Vermont, becoming the first trans
woman nominated for a major political office.
There were losses as well as
wins in the August 14 primary, like Kaniela Saito Ing in Hawaii’s 11th
district. Yet the major wins on August 14 made the premature obituaries of
Sanders’s candidates look like wishful reporting.
Many of the articles
downplaying the viability of insurgent candidates point
outthat their victories tend to happen in safe Democratic seats. But
progressive insurgent candidates usually forgo corporate funding and often
fight uphill battles against opponents funded by the DNC and deep-pocketed
corporate PACs. Some
candidates have even been openly
suppressed by the Democratic Party. Given this political terrain, it’s
perhaps unsurprising that candidates endorsed by the Democratic Party and other
establishment groups, like EMILY’s List, have on average been more
successful than candidates backed by more iconoclastic organizations.
Looking at the actual mix of
success and failure by insurgent Democrats, it’s hard not to conclude that they
have received inordinately skeptical treatment by corporate media, particularly
receiving much more negative
press than the 2010 Tea Party insurgency in the Republican Party,
which Sanders’ movement has often been compared to. CBS
News(8/13/18)
even called Ocasio-Cortez the “Sarah Palin of the left.”
But rather than comparing
coverage of the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party to that given the
successful but heavily astroturfed Tea
Party, a more apt contrast might be to the way media have dealt with the
large-scale electoral failures of the establishment wing of the Democratic
Party. The Obama-led Democratic Party leadership has been largely spared media
scrutiny of its electoral record, despite losing more
offices in Obama’s two terms than any president since Eisenhower,
including 69 House seats, 14 Senate seats and nine governorships, not to
mention losing a whopping 968 state
legislature seats, the most of any two-term president. Many pundits in
the corporate media
actually rushed to defend Obama’s
tenure, insisting that it’s normal for two-term presidents to lose
governorships and congressional seats for their party–which is true, though
Obama set records for such losses.
When one takes a historical
look at socialism in the United States, Sanders’ insurgency seems to be doing
remarkably well: The previous high point of socialism in the United States was perhaps
the early 20th century, when the US elected two Socialist Party congressmembers
in 1910 and 1917, and socialist
Eugene V. Debs garnered 6 percent of the popular vote in the 1912 presidential
election. In the wake of the Red Scare crackdowns that followed both world
wars, the US socialist movement has hardly sniffed political power during the
Cold War, and has been pretty much nonexistent on the national level over the
past 30 years, save Bernie Sanders and former DSA vice chair Ron Dellums, who
represented Berkeley in the House of Representatives from 1971–1998.
Even if today’s socialist wing
of the Democratic Party hasn’t won every underdog primary race against
better-funded centrist opponents, it is apparent that progressives are winning
the battle of ideas within the party. Policies such as Medicare
for All, free college, student loan forgiveness and jobs guarantees, all
formerly considered radical positions, are now expected to be litmus
tests in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. Even more
importantly, they are becoming quite
popular with voters: A recent Reuters poll showed
that Medicare for All has support from 70 percent of the US electorate,
including 52 percent of Republicans, while another 60 percent of the
electorate supports free college tuition.
Support for democratic
socialism in general is on the rise as well. A recent Gallup poll revealed
that 57 percent of Democrats have a positive view of socialism, compared to 47
percent who view capitalism favorably; socialism gets the approval of a
majority of millennial voters. It’s not necessarily clear what “socialism”
means to those who like it, with possibilities ranging from New Deal–style
social programs to worker-controlled production. Still, it’s safe to say that a
majority of Democratic voters want an anti-corporate party that represents the
interests of the working class and minorities against the rich, despite
whatever the media say about the electoral success or failure of the politicians
that embody such policies.
With this recent ideological
shift, the specter of a socialist bogeyman has jolted the media into
crisis-management mode. Conservative news stations like Fox News scream on
the daily about how scary democratic
socialism is, while print outlets continue to churn out anti-socialist hit
pieces:
“Democratic Socialism Is Dem
Doom” (New York Times, 7/6/18)
“Venezuela’s Inflation Will
Hit 1 Million Percent. Thanks, Socialism.” (Washington Post, 7/27/18)
“Democrats Embracing Socialism
Is Dangerous for America” (The Hill, 8/12/18)
“Bernie Sanders and the Misery
of Socialism” (Wall Street Journal, 6/25/18)
“Sorry, Democratic
Socialists—You’re Still Pushing Poison” (New York Post, 8/5/18)
“They Call Themselves
Socialists, but They Don’t Know the Meaning of the Word” (Miami Herald, 7/26/18)
“It’s the Spoiled Children of
America Who Are Drawn to Socialism” (Chicago Tribune, 7/26/18)
“Democratic Socialism
Threatens Minorities” (The Atlantic, 8/9/18)
“Democratic Socialism: Who
Knew That ‘Free’ Could Cost So Much?” (Investor’s Business Daily, 8/8/18)
“Socialism Returns: An Old
Adversary” (Commentary, 8/14/18)
“Democratic Socialism Breaks
the Bank” (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 8/16/18)
The most common argument in
these pieces is to yell that the US can’t afford social programs like Medicare
for All or free college, evidenced by pieces such as “Democrats’ ‘Socialism’
Will Bury Us in Debt We Won’t Be Able to Get Out From Under” (MarketWatch, 7/11/18).
For her part, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to such critiques by calling
out the hypocrisy of whining about costs for universal healthcare in a CNN interview
(8/9/18):
“When it comes to bills for tax cuts and unlimited war, we seem to invent that
money very easily.”
Yet CNN’s coverage of
her comments parroted the same old line: that Medicare for All would cost an
eye-popping $37 trillion, at least according to research by the Koch
brothers–funded Mercatus Center. However, like most outlets afraid of big
spending that doesn’t involve tax cuts for billionaires or bloated military
budgets, CNN failed to even mention that the $37 trillion figure is
the cost estimate for Medicare for All over a 10-year period, and that this
figure is actually $2 trillion less than projected US healthcare costs under
the current system over the same period (FAIR.org, 7/31/18).
Of course, this isn’t the
first time Sanders or his socialist allies have received irrational opposition
from corporate media. As FAIR’s Adam Johnson (3/8/16)
reported during the 2016 presidential primaries, the Washington Post at
one point ran 16 negative articles about Sanders in a 16-hour period. Sanders’
plans for Medicare for All have also been subject to disingenuous and incorrect “factchecks”
by outlets like CNN and
the Washington
Post. During her primary run against high-ranking New York Democratic Rep.
Joseph Crowley, Ocasio-Cortez at first received barely a
peep in the mainstream press, but after her surprise victory was subject to
endless profiles and a flurry of attacks by
the media,
and is now being subjected to demands for public debates from hyper-sensitive
right-wing pundits.
Michelle Goldberg of the New
York Times (8/9/18),
perhaps the only person in the right-leaning Times op-ed
lineup who could be considered sympathetic to Sanders’ politics, noted that
while insurgent candidates might not have won every primary, the left wing of
the Democratic party was nonetheless winning hard-fought victories on the
strength of its ideology and electoral pragmatism. Whether left-leaning
Democrats fall flat in the midterms or not, their ideas have persuaded America
that socialism is a legitimate and popular political movement, and will likely
be a strong voting bloc in the next Congress. Whether corporate media choose to
acknowledge its relevance or continue its fear-mongering remains to be seen.
*Correction: This piece
initially stated that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez endorsee Sarah Smith lost her
primary in Washington’s 9th district. Washington’s primary system mandates that
the top two vote recipients in the primary face off in the general election. Smith
came in second, and will face incumbent Adam Smith in the general.
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