What is maddening to me is that we already have a party in an overt panic over demographic change and it’s the Republican Party, and we don’t need the Democrats engaging in some sort of Lite version through centrism or civility or whatever it is House Democrats have been up to this week (although I guess it obviously hasn’t been “civility”).
When they with the imprimatur of the Speaker are out there denigrating Justice Democrats and the so-called “Squad”, what I see is the power and privilege within the Democratic Party regressively lashing out at the black and brown women that are its future. When we wake up to find Donald Trump coming to Pelosi’s defense, we are seeing power defend power. First and foremost, Trump defends his own power. Then he defends the power of those around him. Then he will even defend the power of his political opponents, so long as it serves to disempower his enemies.
(Let me be clear: when Pelosi out one side of her mouth lectures her caucus about keeping things off Twitter and addressing issues amongst themselves in private but runs the other side of her mouth off to Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, that is power and privilege projecting and protecting itself.)
Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic caucus need to grasp that when they position themselves against the expansion of democratic power within the Democratic Party, and against the expression of that expansion, they actually are serving both the Republican and the Trumpist narratives.