The irony of the Squad’s fame contributing to Democrats’ losses is that their party’s weakness now empowers them even more.
The irony of the Squad’s fame contributing to Democrats’ losses is that their party’s weakness now empowers them even more.
T hey came to Washington “to shake things up,” Reuters recalled last fall, but the lawmakers known as “the Squad” — New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Massachusetts’s Ayanna Pressley, Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, and Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar — soon learned that the “political fast-lane can be perilous.”
Is it, though? Without any accomplishments to speak of, the Squad nonetheless has received widespread obsequious media coverage. Only last week, 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl asked Nancy Pelosi, “Why does AOC complain that you have not been grooming younger people for leadership?” It’s not often a prestigious journalist asks the speaker of the House to explain the grousing of a third-year backbencher.
Fringe representatives of course are nothing new. But leaders of both parties have typically isolated them, mitigating the damage they do to the party and the country.
Not so the Squad.
As Joe Biden assumes the presidency Wednesday, he and the Democrats ostensibly controlling Washington from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue will swiftly be forced to reckon with this growing and empowered contingent, one that has been aided at every step by an enraptured media. And the political realities of the Democrats’ slim majority in the House could give the Squad even more sway. The question is whether Biden has anything close to the backbone — or the ideological compass — to tell them no. I’m not hopeful.
On occasion, Pelosi has tamped down the group’s aspirations when they threatened her power — once dinging AOC by pointing out that a “large number of Twitter followers” isn’t as important as “large numbers of votes on the floor of the House” — but she’s far more likely to placate or boost their prestige. It was Pelosi who appeared on magazine covers celebrating the Squad’s ascendancy. It was Pelosi who shielded Omar, despite the protestations of a number of Democratic congressmen, from House consequences related to her anti-Semitic rhetoric. It was Pelosi who assigned two self-styled socialists, Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib, to the House’s powerful Financial Services Committee. Both are also members of the House Oversight Committee. Backbenchers no more.
Indeed, Biden and nearly every other Democratic Party presidential candidate embraced the lunacy of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, a proposal that would eliminate efficient and affordable energy sources in ten years, necessitating a giant coercive government project that would not only bring unprecedented intrusions into American life but also make everything incredibly expensive.
A compliant press might have allowed Biden to get away with saying the Green New Deal was “not my plan,” despite, on numerous occasions, having supported it. But Biden’s “Plan for Climate Change and Environmental Justice” — even the nomenclature sounds like it was written by . . . well, the nomenklatura — notes that Ocasio-Cortez’s ideas are “crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.”
It’s important to remember that most intraparty debates among contemporary Democrats revolve around the political practicality and speed with which ideas can implemented — as opposed to, say, Republicans, whose intraparty debates reveal fundamental internal ideological disagreements over immigration or trade. How many Democrats oppose student-loan forgiveness or socialized medicine as bad policy rather than for merely being politically unfeasible?
“I think Republicans did get some traction trying to scare people on this ‘socialist narrative,’” Representative Jared Huffman (D., Calif.), a member of the House Progressive Caucus, said after the Democrats took a beating in House races this fall. “That was a shrewd play from them,” he went on. “These labels do distract us and divide us in unfortunate ways. . . . What’s the point of embracing a phrase like that? All you do is feed into these fears and bogus narratives.”
There is sadly nothing bogus about the socialist goals of legislators arguing for the effective nationalization of major industries such as energy and health care, or for the stripping of individual rights, whether it be the First or Second Amendments. And there is nothing particularly “shrewd” about pointing this reality out.
Populist Republicans have often lectured me about the archaic and ineffective nature of accusing Democrats of being “socialists.” They’d be right, if it weren’t true. The issue mattered enough for a significant number of Latino and South Asian Americans with personal or generational experiences with collectivist ideas to give the GOP significant gains in the House.
The irony of the Squad’s fame contributing to Democrats’ losses is that their party’s weakness empowers them. As the moderate wing of the Democratic Party has thinned, the progressive contingent has grown in strength. Of the 15 incoming Democratic freshmen, eight are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and two — Cori Bush from Missouri, a “racial justice activist” who wants to “defund the military,” and socialist Jamaal Bowman from New York, who claims America has moved from “physical chattel enslavement” to a “plantation economic system” — are new members of the Squad.
The center of the modern Democratic Party isn’t moving toward moderation. Pelosi was able to bypass the Squad when it didn’t matter, but with a slim majority that may no longer be the case. Nor will Biden, whose unprincipled malleability is going strong into his fifth decade, be able to dismiss their presence. The Squad might have been useful for Biden in moving the Overton window left, but there will be a price to pay for mollifying extremists and normalizing their rhetoric and goals.