SCALING WOKEBACK MOUNTAIN
WASHINGTON — I was feeling on edge. Writing a column that sparks an internecine fight among the highest-profile women in the Democratic Party is nerve wracking.
So I went to the gym. Alex Toussaint, the digital Peloton instructor inside
the little screen on my spinning bike, had some wisdom for me — the kind of New
Age bromide dispensed in spin classes everywhere:
You climb the
mountain to see the world. You don’t climb the mountain so the world can see
you.
I only wished A.O.C.
was cycling alongside me to hear it as well.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ensorcelled me from the start. I loved the bartender-makes-good Cinderella story, the
shake-up-the-capital idealistic dreams, the bravado about how the plutocrat
president from Queens wouldn’t know how to deal with a Puerto Rican girl from
the Bronx.
And I imagined the most potent feminist partnership in
American history: Nancy Pelosi as sensei, bringing her inside game, and A.O.C.,
the Karate Kid with a wicked Twitter game.
But instead, the
79-year-old speaker and the 29-year-old freshman are trapped in a generational
and ideological tangle that poses a real threat to the Democrats’ ability to
beat Donald Trump next year.
Pelosi told me, after
the A.O.C. Squad voted against the House’s version of the border bill and
trashed the moderates — the very people who provided the Democrats the majority
— that the Squad was four people with four votes. She was talking about a
legislative reality. If it was a knock, it was for abandoning the party.
A.O.C. should consider the possibility that people who
disagree with her do not disagree with her color.
The young lawmaker
went further, implying that the speaker was putting the Squad in danger, asking
why Pelosi would criticize them, “knowing the amount of death threats” and
attention they get. Huh?
A.O.C. pulled back
and said she wasn’t calling Pelosi a racist. But once you start that ball
rolling, it’s hard to stop. (You know how topsy-turvy the fight is when the
biggest defenders of Pelosi, who has endured being a caricature of extreme
liberalism for decades, are Trump and the Wall Street Journal editorial board.)
The A.O.C. crew threw down the gauntlet in a recent opinion piece
in The Washington Post by The Intercept’s Ryan Grim. He wrote that when Pelosi
and other Democratic mandarins try to keep the image of the party centrist,
they are crouching in “the defensive posture” they’ve been in since the Reagan
revolution.
Corbin Trent, a
spokesman for A.O.C. and co-founder of Justice Democrats, the progressive group
that helped propel her, told Grim: “The greatest threat to mankind is the
cowardice of the Democratic Party,” with the older generation “driven by fear”
and “unable to lead.”
Message: Pelosi is
past her prime.
Except she’s not.
And then there’s the
real instigator, Saikat Chakrabarti, A.O.C.’s 33-year-old chief of staff, who
co-founded Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, both of which recruited
progressives — including A.O.C. — to run against moderates in Democratic
primaries. The former Silicon Valley Bernie Bro assumed he could apply
Facebook’s mantra, “Move fast and break things,” to one of the oldest
institutions in the country.
But Congress is not a
place where you achieve radical progress — certainly not in divided government.
It’s a place where you work at it and work at it and don’t get everything you
want.
The progressives act
as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad. Not wrong, but bad,
guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a moral evil that justifies
their venom.
Chakrabarti sent
shock waves through the Democratic caucus when he posted a tweet about the
border bill comparing moderate and Blue Dog Democrats — some of whom are black
— to Southern segregationists in the ’40s.
Rahm Emanuel told me
Chakrabarti is “a snot-nosed punk” who has no idea about the battle scars
Pelosi bears from the liberal fights she has led.
“What votes did you
get?” Emanuel said, rhetorically challenging A.O.C.’s chief of staff. “You
should only be so lucky to learn from somebody like Nancy who has shown
incredible courage and who has twice returned the Democratic Party to power.
“We fought for years
to create the majorities to get a Democratic president elected and re-elected,
and they’re going to dither it away. They have not decided what’s more
important: Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and
centrists out of the party? You really think weakening the speaker is the right
strategy to try to get rid of Donald Trump and everything he stands for?”
In the age of Trump,
there is no more stupid proposition than that Nancy Pelosi is the problem. If
A.O.C. and her Pygmalions and acolytes decide that burning down the House is
more important than deposing Trump, they will be left with a racist backward
president and the emotional satisfaction of their own purity.