I understand the impetus of Dem voters of a certain mindset and age and economic comfort level to automatically defer to authority qua authority in regard to Pelosi and the party establishment. For a time I was myself willing to give them the benefit of the doubt to a certain degree and give them credit based mainly on tenure and age, but that time is years past.
Increasingly, what I see from the Dem establishment in general isn’t so much political calculation as it is fear. Pelosi’s reluctance to issue even a broadly definitive leadership statement on impeachment is, in this way, of a piece with the Dem establishment’s refusal to permit a debate dedicated to climate change, with its antipathy or studied indifference to any progressive politician in the caucus who dares to offer a remedy for inequality, and with its refusal to condemn Biden’s recent comments regarding being able to work and compromise with virulent racists in Congress.
What the party establishment fears, and understandably so, is that in discussing these issues in the open its own complicity in creating the problems – sometimes deliberately, sometimes through incompetence or complacency – will be called out by the progressive wing of the party.
It doesn’t take a political grandmaster to see the consequences of this in the context of the generational shift in the electorate, nor does it take an expertise in political calculation to understand that trying to sweep these issues under the rug or pretend that new ideas were yours all along (as Clinton did in 2016 and as Biden undoubtely will if he gets the nomination) doesn’t fool people facing economic ruin and existential threats for very long.
If one thinks that climate change, economic inequality, and compromise with bigots and fascists are serious real-world problems, it’s just increasingly hard to support Dem leaders who continue to deny or downplay them, even (or especially) if they’ve been in office a long time.
