Dear Weekend Jolter,
John Puri here, filling in this weekend for Judson Berger.
All was sunshine and rainbows for the Democratic Party’s insurgent socialist wing about a week ago. Their man in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, won his Senate primary against an opponent as establishment as one can get — by a smaller margin than expected, but no matter. DSA-branded House candidates in metro centers had been romping incumbents throughout the summer. Graham Platner may have gone down in flames, but his popularity forced the party to choose a replacement just as radical.
It seemed that seizing wealth, blowing out the budget on new entitlements, dismantling “systems of power,” and — above all else — absolutely despising Israel was the wave of the future in Democratic politics. The DSA, backed by an army of disgruntled young degree-holders, could not stumble.
That is, until Francesca Hong opened her mouth in public.
It’s hard to imagine a candidate more preposterously unsuited for a high-profile campaign — let alone the job she was running for — than Hong. A land acknowledgment come to life, she thoughtlessly parroted every bizarre luxury belief under the ceiling of UW-Madison’s sociology department. NR’s editors recounted Hong’s greatest hits:
It is difficult to convey just how robotically Hong publicly committed herself to her ideology over the years — the most obvious example being her recent inability to decide whether or not she still wanted to “Cancel Thanksgiving,” because settler-colonialism is still “very painful for many people in our communities.” Throughout her elected career, Hong made her views on crime well-known: “Police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.”
Every poll had Hong cruising past her establishmentarian opponents in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin’s governorship. The field was simply too divided, and college towns were poised to push a comical socialist over the top. With the nomination, Hong would have put what ought to be a safe victory in this environment at risk.
That’s when Tony Evers, the Badger State’s retiring 74-year-old governor, saved the day. He dragged a candidate who had already dropped out, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, back into the race and rallied old-school Democrats behind him. Christian Schneider has the story:
Hong was coasting on a socialist momentum within the Democratic Party that had birthed U.S. Senate candidates including Graham Platner in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. And in the past few weeks, Hong’s nomination seemed inevitable.
It was, until Evers stepped in and reversed the race in a way that may never have been seen in modern politics. In order to stop Hong and face down the socialist wing of his party, Evers convinced Crowley, who had dropped out of the race weeks before, to reenter the contest and become the “establishment” candidate. And for weeks, it looked as if the effort was going to fall short, given Hong’s huge polling lead. And yet, on Election Day, it appears that Democrats all over the state decided to side with Evers in preventing Wisconsin from becoming a national laughingstock.
In the end, Hong lost the race by the narrowest of margins, all but ensuring that a Democrat will move into Evers’s office next year. Score one, at last, for the party establishment over the DSA.
To keep the good times rolling into 2028, some democratic socialists have also felt the need to admit past mistakes that drove voters away in the first place. Charlie Cooke writes on how Bernie Sanders’s handpicked heir is all too casually trying to moderate her image:
Seeking to dismiss the record of one of the many kooky political candidates with whom she is now reflexively associated, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughed aloud as if she had been told that she had a speck of mustard on her lip. “I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” she submitted. “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”
Is it? Do we? Why? “Woke 1” was, indeed, “crazy.” But Ocasio-Cortez’s implication is that that “crazy” moment was something that happened to her and her ideological compatriots — like an earthquake or an invasion from the sea — rather than something that was contrived, dispersed, and enforced by her and her ideological compatriots. In this, Ocasio-Cortez seems confused once again by the appropriate pronouns. It wasn’t “crazy.” They were crazy. And that “they” includes her.
John Fund is also unconvinced by socialist candidates’ professed revelations:
The problem with all of these rhetorical retreats is that over at the DSA mother ship, no one is retreating from the group’s national platform. It calls for defunding the Pentagon, abolishing police and prisons, giving asylum to illegal immigrants, and getting rid of the Senate and of public ownership of corporations. . . .
A major question for the upcoming midterm elections will be a simple one: Who will independents and non-leftist Democrats believe — moderate Democrats who warn that the DSA is a Trojan horse for radicalism, or the DSA’s star candidates, who claim there’s nothing dangerous to see here?
The answer to that question may determine whether the DSA remains a one-trick pony, winning only seats in deep-blue urban enclaves, or a serious movement with actual capacity to govern. With newfound prominence comes scrutiny, and Michigan’s Senate race is shaping up to be the faction’s big test. Either a dyed-in-the-wool radical proves he can win in a swing state typically known for electing moderates, or traditional Democrats get to tell the naïve insurgents, “We told you so.”
The former outcome would seed new dangers. If El-Sayed wins over the Rust Belt on a tide of anti-Trump backlash, the congresswoman from New York may think she can do the same in two short years.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The political argument over the cost of living is far from over: Republicans Can Win on Affordability
Francesca Hong goes down by just a hair: Democratic Socialists Hit a Wall in Wisconsin
Some legal advice for the Second Amendment: A Better Approach to the Firearms Law Dispute
ARTICLES
Christine Rosen: The Unwelcome Return of Sentimental Socialism
Ahmad Sharawi & Bridget Toomey: Iran Is Rewiring Its Terrorist Network
Becket Adams: Media and Academia: Increasingly Irrelevant, Increasingly Distrusted
Charles C. W. Cooke: Will the Woke Own Up to Their Lunacy?
Gary Winslett: How to Fail at Public Order
John Fund: Democratic Socialism’s Stars Try to Flee from Their Radicalism
Noah Rothman: Who Is Behind North Korea’s Expeditionary Force in Europe?
Brittany Bernstein: No, Fauci’s Texts Are Not Proof of a Conspiracy to Hide Vaccine Risks to Pregnant Women
Rich Lowry: Don’t Malign the U.S. Economy
Christian Schneider: Tony Evers, Electoral Gangster
Abigail Anthony: How Far Can America’s Free Speech Protections Reach?
Jeff Blehar: Scott Wiener Faces a Roadblock on the Way to Washington: Nancy Pelosi
Charles Hilu: Trump and Senate Republicans Struggle to Get on the Same Page as Midterms Loom
CAPITAL MATTERS
Adam Thierer, on what we should want AI to look like: An AI Future Built on Resilience, Not Restraint
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White, on Marvel’s latest spider trap: Spider-Man’s Web of Deceit
Brian Allen, on peculiarities West and East: Rising Tides, Covered Bridges, and ‘Envy, Thy Name Is Trot’
EXCERPTS: THE TLDR, AS WE YOUNGSTERS SAY
Christine Rosen recognizes something lamentable in the wide-eyed hopes of young socialists. Discontented with the real, constrained world around them, they wish to trade it for a theory of utopia:
This would not be the first generation of youth to revel in such abstractions. The current iteration of socialism resembles an earlier movement: sentimental socialism. Described by British socialist Ernest Belfort Bax in 1884 as adherents of a type of “unscientific” socialism, 19th-century sentimental socialists share some similarities with their modern counterparts. Bax described them as “the young people of the well-to-do middle class” who “think human nature susceptible of higher aims than the current ones, and meet in drawing rooms for the apparent purpose of passing resolutions to that effect.” He found that “the sentimental Socialist desires above all things to be broad and comprehensive.”
Like today’s DSA supporters, sentimental socialists were motivated not by concerns for the working class, but by their own ennui: “The young men and women of our blasé middle-class civilization require a stimulus; this stimulus may be aesthetic, philanthropic, or social,” Bax noted. “It may consist in languishing vapouring on art, on improved dwellings, on social reconstruction.” Bax was a bit impatient with their navel-gazing complaints: “The whole movement is born of the morbid self-consciousness of our Christian and Bourgeois civilisation run to seed.”
Like sentimental socialists of old, the current crop of socialist youth, surrounded by others exactly like themselves and marinating in resentment about their circumstances, risks falling prey to what William James called the “sentimentalist fallacy,” or the tendency to “shed tears over abstract justice and generosity, beauty, etc. and never to know these qualities when you meet them in the street.” His example was “the weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside.” Today’s equivalent might be the Sey Coffee barista with a Ph.D. in post-colonial studies who is invested in seeing herself as downtrodden (while ignoring the genuinely struggling working-class people who surround her).
Brittany Bernstein dispels the furious hype around Covid vaccinations for pregnant women, ignited by the release of Anthony Fauci’s text messages during the pandemic:
Prominent right-wing politicians, commentators, and media outlets insist that the messages — sent in January 2021 in a group chat that included then–CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Dr. Vivek Murthy — constitute evidence of a disconnect between Fauci’s public and private posture. . . .
But the text thread, released by Paul and Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), actually shows Fauci hewing privately to the same points he often made in public: Namely, that while further study was needed, the existing data did not show that vaccination posed any risk to pregnant women.
Fauci does include one caveat in his private communications, which he did not express in public, and for good reason. He acknowledges that many people experience a significant immune response that results in a fever after receiving a second dose of the vaccine and says that reaction “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester” — but again, there was no evidence of that at the time. As a government official leading the nation’s public-health response, Fauci presumably didn’t air this speculation publicly because he had no evidence to substantiate it.
And at the time Fauci sent those texts, the CDC was not yet recommending vaccination for pregnant women; the agency would not begin explicitly recommending that course until three months later, in April 2021, after more evidence emerged showing the vaccine was safe and effective for pregnant women.
We may soon have to say goodbye to a familiar face who is trying to take Nancy Pelosi’s seat in Congress, Jeff Blehar reports. Fools may come and go, but the carnival staggers on:
No one has been waiting longer, or more eagerly, than San Francisco’s current state senator, Scott Wiener. If his name is already familiar to you, then that is a comment in itself on how successful Wiener has been as a mere state-level politician at capturing national attention — most of it negative, and driven by Fox News–type outrage clips over the years — for his strident LGBTQ activism in the California legislature. (Among his greatest hits: SB 239, reducing the penalties for knowingly exposing a sexual partner to HIV without his knowledge and consent.) But as they say, any publicity is good publicity, just so long as they spell your name right (it’s Wiener, not Weiner).
And ever since Pelosi announced her retirement, Wiener has aimed straight for Washington, D.C. Getting into the race almost instantly, Wiener immediately began using his connections with the pro-development community in San Francisco, as well as his LGBT celebrity, to amass an enormous $4.5 million war chest in the race to replace Pelosi in California’s eleventh. Most conservatives I speak to, aware only vaguely that their hated culture-war bogeyman “won” his primary in early June, think he’s headed to Washington already as a political celebrity.
And I am increasingly certain he’s going to lose. California has a top-two primary, and this year Wiener won’t be facing the sorts of cream-puff Republican candidates that Pelosi used to draw in her reelection campaigns; he will be facing Connie Chan, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, whom he defeated in round one with only 41 percent of the vote to her 30 percent. Third-place candidate Saikat Chakrabati (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff, to give you some sense of his factional sympathies) has thrown his endorsement behind Chan — and presumably a significant portion of his 18 percent share of the vote as well.
Several different forces within the Democratic Party are converging upon Wiener, combining to deny him victory in November. As odd as it must seem to conservatives, Wiener has consistently been portrayed as the “right-leaning” candidate in this race because of his support for YIMBY policies. But perhaps the most powerful force of all behind his troubles is Nancy Pelosi herself.
CODA
While driving roughly 90 hours in a giant sideways S across America, I enlisted ChatGPT to help soundtrack different stretches of my road trip with appropriate albums.
Some recommendations were obvious: The lush chamber folk of Fleet Foxes’ Helplessness Blues for the California redwoods, Bruce Springsteen’s desolate Nebraska in the state of the same name, and a Second Helping from Lynyrd Skynyrd right as we rolled into Alabama.
Others seared new associations between certain music and places into my brain: TNT’s Tortoise for Idaho’s otherworldly Craters of the Moon, U2’s Joshua Tree for barreling toward the red rocks of Utah (the streets were, in fact, numbered rather than named by the Bureau of Land Management), and Beach House’s Bloom driving past actual beach houses on the Carolina coast. Glimmering new age in western Colorado, classic country in rural Tennessee, jangle pop in Chapel Hill. Maybe those AI data centers are good for something, after all.
Thanks for reading. Back to the inimitable (though I tried) Judson Berger next weekend.