On July 12, Cohen asked CNN “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter, “Why does it matter?” when Stelter pressed him on Trump’s claim to have drawn a crowd of 20,000 to a venue in Phoenix that holds only 4,000. And on July 13, Cohen insisted to a deeply annoyed CNN weekday morning host Chris Cuomo that Trump “never made any derogatory or disparaging remarks about Mexican immigrants.”
and
When New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a fraud suit against Trump’s for-profit college in 2013, Cohen threatened Trump’s vengeance: “The damage to the attorney general is going to be very significant,” Cohen told The New Yorker. “So significant that he will possibly have to resign.” (Schneiderman has not resigned. The case is ongoing.)
I worry that the “new” party might instead keep the Democratic name, thus relegating progressives/liberals to something else: small, unpopular, looked-on with suspicion, and unsuccessful.
Well, in general, the groups that made up the New Left are, essentially, the sources for many of the negative stereotypes of radicalized leftists that still culturally persist now:
the “cares more for animals than people” environmentalist
the “radical animal rights” activist
the “economy destroyer” environmentalist
the “elitist suburbian who doesn’t know anything about nature” environmentalist (and etc. in environmentalist stereotypes)
the “spits on soldiers and calls them babykillers” war protester
the “man-hating” radical feminist
the violent radicalized student (the Weather Underground bombings in particular)
the well-meaning but ultimately ignorant, elitist, and privileged social reformer
and other such negative stereotypes of liberals cherished by many American right-wingers at present.
However, while not even a large minority, let alone a majority, of New Lefters actually fulfilled such stereotypes, the minority that did embrace such extremism ended up getting their associates painted with the same brushes, typically via media attention (journalists looking for singular extreme examples to scare people with, and such). It only took one overenthusiastic idiot breaking into a lab and destroying research, or throwing bombs, or spiking unmarked nails into trees, or [insert radicalized activity] to taint the rest by association, and there were more than singular idiots.
This is one of the ways in which the New Left parallels the Tea Party, actually. While not all Tea Partiers actually fulfill the cherished stereotype of racist, short-sighted, personally selfish, reactionary authoritarians (although certainly enough of them do), the actions of the most vocal and radicalized members of that group taint the rest by association. However, the parallel breaks in how there has not been a wholesale rejection of their attitudes and tactics by the Republican Party in general; this stands in contrast to the general rejection of the New Left by the Democratic Party of the 1970s (2nd Wave Feminism actually formed in reaction to the systemic sexism in the New Left, to give an example).
And that’s another weird thing. Some of the surrogates are paid by the networks, some by the campaigns. At the very least, they need a disclaimer at the start of each segment with these people stating who’s paying them to shill for whom.
(and should we split this off as a separate thread?)