Do we know this? Quite a few of the Democratic House pickups seem to have been by moderates who had defeated DSA-leaning candidates in the primaries. Has anyone compiled/published the actual numbers comparing the types of candidates who eventually won?
chances are she’ll either be primaried out
I don’t think this is likely, unless she does something seriously wrong. She’s in about as safely progressive a seat as anyone could hope for. Her opponent was elected as an activist years ago, and hung onto his seat even as his politics moderated by virtue of inertia.
In addition, while all progressive Dem candidates ruuning didn’t win, the overall push for a shift left got out more voters (especially younger ones), benefiting the party as a whole.
Let’s hope the same doesn’t happen with Ocasio-Cortez or the other young candidates (esp. the women). As this story indicates, the Dem establishment is getting an early start on quashing anyone in the House who dares call the party’s big-money donors (and indeed the rotten campaign finance system that enables them) to account.
Pelosi was elected as a progressive. What happens in office is that you prioritize some issues that you consider most important and negotiate on the rest, or stay ideologically pure and don’t accomplish much. If you’re lucky you’ll be able to stay reasonably progressive, help a lot of people, but not have the followers of the pure screaming that you’ve always been in the pockets of billionaires.
What really happens is that certain corporate lobbies get their claws into people like Pelosi or Crowley or Wasserman-Schultz based on donations. And whatever those lobbies’ particular issues, they all have a common secondary objective of making sure that their pet Dems never challenge the broken campaign finance system and never impose term limits on themselves (the better to encourage inertia).
Long ago. Since then she has reliably fought progressive polivies and progressivesand has declared that all change in the right direction must be “slow” and “incremental”.
Well, obviously I disagree on Pelosi, whose voting record indicates that she is still a believer in progressive policies despite also engaging in realpolitik in order to have some genuine power. I expect that Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez will be closely aligned colleagues.
I used to have a congresswoman I loved, Patsy Mink, who was often attacked with the same kind of vague language that people like to trot out against Pelosi and Feinstein. It always seemed fundamentally misogynist to me.
It’s not misogyny to point out that she and other Big Money hacks are Big Money hacks.
Pelosi and Hoyer have been running the Democratic machinery in the House of Representatives since 2003, and they’re experts at combining liberal rhetoric with corporate flackery. Pelosi is frequently an obstacle to advancing progressive proposals. Hoyer is significantly worse as he avidly serves such “constituents” as giant banks, Pentagon contractors and other Wall Street titans. The duo has often functioned as top-drawer power tools in the hands of powerful corporate-military interests.
Progressive social policies, sure. But progressive economic policies? Anyone can look like a raging Marxist in contrast to the GOP and Fox News certainly portrays them that way, but Pelosi and the rest of the Dem establishment are still firmly grounded in the Third-Way version of neoliberalism.
I don’t see why. Crowley and Schumer and plenty of male neoliberal-lite Dems come in for the same criticism.
The problem with articles like this Norman Solomon op-ed is that rather than back up the accusations with evidence they back them up with links to other general attacks (in this case to other opinion pieces by Solomon, who is not a disinterested party).
For sure there are policies (such as medicare-for-all) on which the current Progressive Caucus has a different position than Pelosi, and hopefully their strength will show when they negotiate with her on these policies. (And run as a counter to the strength of all the new bluedogs in the House, including my own new representative.)
The attacks on Pelosi are more frequent and both nastier and gendered. The right paints her as some kind of evil harridan, the left incessantly dwells on every failure to live up to to some imagined archetype. Both are the same kind of stereotypical attacks that have been holding women back forever.
I’m pretty sure the right is trying to transfer Hillary Clinton’s mantle of Evil Liberal Villainess onto Pelosi, since Clinton has (understandably) been out of the limelight ever since the 2016 election, and their control of their base relies increasingly on stirring them up in a frothy rage.
The first is absolutely true, given conservatism’s baked-in sexism. I’m not sure how gender figures into this “imagined archetype”, though. There’s nothing that makes economic progressivism the special province of women, and there are plenty of critics of Pelosi on the left who aren’t brocialists.
The criticism of Third-Way Dems regarding economic policy isn’t limited to the left, either. Many liberals (myself included) just see the party establishment’s continued adherence to 1990s-vintage neoliberal-lite assumptions as an unsustainable basis for the party’s future growth and ability to win.
