Quo Vadis, Democrats?

[Zoupa]

On the one hand, new blood is definitely needed. On the other hand, Hogg comes across as the kind of naive class president type that has failed the Democratic party over and over.

Hey Obama got two terms.

Obama has the #1 most important thing in a politician, charisma. Hogg, otoh, is cringe. Imo, of course.

[Admiral Yi]

The Democrats are shuffling chairs around while the country burns? This is not a real controversy and not something that anyone outside of their narrow group cares about.  

This is exactly what Shelf and others have been bitching and bellyaching about ever since Bernie shot his wad.

[Sheilbh]

You keep saying this but I have literally no idea where you got the idea I am/was a Bernie enthusiast

He's not the person I'd necessarily want leading the charge (everyone is right about him and his limitations), but I'm not sure Hogg is wrong.

[Admiral Yi]

You keep saying this but I have literally no idea where you got the idea I am/was a Bernie enthusiast

He's not the person I'd necessarily want leading the charge (everyone is right about him and his limitations), but I'm not sure Hogg is wrong.

I don't recall saying you are a Bernie enthusiast.  I recall you saying Teh Democrats(tm) treated Bernie unfairly.  I recall you saying Teh Democrats(tm) need to kick out their dinosaurs.  I recall you saying Teh Democrats shielded Biden and saddled us with an Alzheimer's executive.

[Sheilbh]

What have I said the Democrats treated Bernie unfairly over - I don't remember that?

I totally stand by the rest - it's right

But I'd add I've always been a very big Biden fan - I wanted him to run in 2016. I think several times here I've said I think he was legislatively a genuinely consequential president and the big question was always if there would be time to see the pay-off (and this is where I have a fair amount of sympathy with the abundance critique).

I don't think he should have run again and that decision profoundly overshadows the historic record of his presidency and raises very serious (I think still unanswered) questions of who had what power when Biden had a bad day. I think everyone close to him and in a position of power should have had the conversation they finally had in June 2024 in June 2023. I don't think the DNC should have enabled that decision and the delusion that Biden should run again by rearranging the primary schedule to prevent challengers. I also don't think they should have rushed into swinging in behind Harris given the only evidence we had of a national campaign from her in 2020 - it didn't seem to me like an open and shut case that she was the right or best candidate. In each case (each a consequence of previous decisions) I think the Democrats' conflict avoidance/prioritising of party unity hurt them.

And I get Valmy's view on this:

However there is nothing really ironic about it. It was fear of the Republicans and Trump that got so many Democrats to just put their blinders on and go along with it. They were afraid that any fuss they raised could help the Republicans and undermine Democratic efforts. I got it, I just thought it was wrong headed and disastrous. Because outside of Democratic loyalists and never Trumpers, who was going to vote for Biden a second time? Especially as many of us had voted for him in 2020 on the agreement that he was going to be a bridge, a stop-gap candidate.

But I think it reads in the opposite way. I think it doesn't come across as so focused on beating Trump so much as at best complacent and arrogant, and at worst not really believing their own rhetoric about Trump. I think that's still playing out in how Congressional Democrats are responding to Trump. I don't think these "will this do?" decisions seem to match the urgency of Democrats' rhetoric - and, in my view, of the moment and threat presented by Trump 2.

[garbon]

Meanwhile...

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/10/how-trump-is-elevating-newsom-00398546

Newsom gains a step in brawl with Trump: 'It'll help Gavin — especially if he gets arrested'

President Donald Trump has catapulted Gavin Newsom to the front of the Democratic resistance.

The California governor had faded from national prominence as public attention shifted to Washington and, in his home state, the deliberations over Kamala Harris' political future. But as Trump and his allies make Newsom their foil in a brawl over immigration unrest in Los Angeles and the president's unilateral deployment of the National Guard and Marines, they are also elevating his stature on the left.

No longer is Newsom responding to criticism, often from fellow Democrats, over aligning with Republicans on transgender athletes or proposing to scale back health insurance for undocumented immigrants. Instead, as Trump turns California into a test of his power to impose his will on blue states, Newsom is the Democrat standing in his way.



"We're at an inflection point in the country's history," said South Carolina state Rep. JA Moore, a lawmaker who has been deeply involved in his state's early presidential primary politics. "I see in this moment that the governor is fighting like hell, not just for the people of LA or the people of California or even the country. He's fighting for democracy itself."

In the span of several days, Newsom has become a ubiquitous antagonist, excoriating Trump administration officials on social media and on television. He has personalized the conflict by daring the administration to follow through on a threat by Trump's border czar Tom Homan to arrest him. (On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he should be "tarred and feathered" as an alternative). He is forcing a legal reckoning by suing to block Trump's deployment of the National Guard and Marines.

On Tuesday, Newsom's press office mocked Trump with an X post casting Trump as a Star Wars villain. The governor's response to his threatened arrest — "come and get me, tough guy" — turned into a rallying cry that's getting noticed by Democrats nationally and in states that will be key to his potential 2028 prospects.

In an address Tuesday night, Newsom lit into Trump's deportation agenda and his decision to use the military to quell unrest.

"California may be first — but it clearly will not end here," he said. "Other states are next."

Democrats have united behind Newsom, with top party officials echoing his warnings that Trump is unnecessarily thrusting the nation into crisis. The party's official social media account posted a glam shot of a stoic-looking Newsom emblazoned with his "come and get me" quote. Democratic governors began reaching out over the weekend to see how they could assist, according to multiple people with knowledge of the developments granted anonymity to speak about private discussions, producing a statement lambasting the Trump administration.

...

[Sophie Scholl]

I just hope that him getting his moment now means he'll fade away by the time the Primary arrives. 

[garbon]

I just hope that him getting his moment now means he'll fade away by the time the Primary arrives. 

[HisMajestyBOB]

On the one hand, new blood is definitely needed. On the other hand, Hogg comes across as the kind of naive class president type that has failed the Democratic party over and over.

Hey Obama got two terms.

Two terms of failing to counter Republican obstructionism and Russian disinformation campaigns.   

[Razgovory]

Are Liberals to Blame for the New McCarthyism?


https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/are-liberals-to-blame-for-the-new-mccarthyism/ar-AA1GwJfW?ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&cvid=f3fcf83764964076a135e7046e656717&ei=8

The Trump administration is carrying out a brazen crackdown on academic freedom: deporting students for writing op-eds, withholding funds from colleges that defy his control, and justifying it all as a response to anti-Semitism. Who is to blame for this? According to one popular theory on the left, the answer is liberals who have consistently supported free speech and opposed Donald Trump.

The logic of this diagnosis has a certain superficial appeal. Many of President Trump's authoritarian moves have been justified in terms of arguments that originated on the center-left. Liberals condemned the far left for fostering an intolerant atmosphere in academia. They criticized the message and methods of some pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Trump has seized on these complaints as a pretext to extort universities and target student demonstrators for deportation.

According to many left-wing critics, this sequence of events shows that, as David Klion writes in The Nation, "erstwhile free speech champions" have "helped lay the groundwork for Trump's second term." An April article in Liberal Currents directs contempt toward "the infamous Harper's letter," an open letter defending free speech from threats on the left and the right, and blames mainstream Democrats for having "laid the groundwork for where we are now." These are just two examples of a very well-developed genre.


The implication of these arguments is that Trump would not have won, or would now be having a harder time carrying out his neo-McCarthyite campaign of repression, if liberals had only refrained from denouncing left-wing cancel culture and the excesses of the post–October 7 protests. But to the extent that these events are connected, the responsibility runs the other way. It was the left's tactics and rhetoric that helped enable Trump's return to power as well as his abuse of it. The liberal critics of those tactics deserve credit for anticipating the backlash and trying to stop it.

A similar dynamic is playing out now, as liberals warn about the danger of violent infiltrators disrupting immigration protests while some leftists demand unconditional solidarity with the movement. The debate, as ever, is whether the left is discredited by its own excesses or by criticism of those excesses.


The bitter divide between liberals and leftists over Trump's neo-McCarthyism has deep historical roots. The two camps fought over the same set of ideas, making many of the same arguments, in response to the original McCarthyism of the 1950s. The lessons of that period, properly understood, offer helpful guidance for defeating the Trumpian iteration.

What made liberals vulnerable to McCarthyism was the fact that some communists really did insinuate themselves into the government during the New Deal. Communists accounted for a tiny share of the population, but they had a visible presence among intellectuals, artists, and political activists. The American Communist Party enthusiastically cooperated with Moscow. It managed to plant Soviet spies in the State Department, the Manhattan Project, and other important government institutions. The 1950 perjury trial of Alger Hiss, a high-ranking diplomat who spied on Roosevelt's administration for the Soviet Union, was a national spectacle vividly illustrating the Soviet spy network's reach. (Many American leftists maintained Hiss's innocence for decades, until the opening of the Soviet archives conclusively proved his guilt.)

In the face of this espionage threat, most liberals severed all ties with American communists. The AFL-CIO expelled communists from its ranks. "I have never seen any reason to admire men who, under the pretense of liberalism, continued to justify and whitewash the realities of Soviet Communism," the prominent intellectual Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote at the time.

The synthesis these liberal anti-communists arrived at was to oppose McCarthyism and communism simultaneously. They would defend the free-speech rights of accused communists (though not their right to hold sensitive government jobs) while denouncing communist ideas.

But they found themselves squeezed in a vise. The right was trying to use communist espionage to discredit the entire New Deal. Many leftists, meanwhile, bitterly castigated their former allies for their betrayal, and adopted a posture of anti-anti-communism—not endorsing communism per se, but instead directing all their criticism at the excesses of anti-communism, so as to avoid a rupture on the left. Still, as difficult as their position might have seemed, liberals managed to beat back McCarthyism and retain public confidence in their ability to handle the Cold War.

Many on the American left never surrendered their resentment of the center-left's anti-communist posture. In their eyes, liberals empowered McCarthy by validating the notion that communists were an enemy in the first place. And now they see the same thing happening again. By denouncing the illiberal left, they argue, the center-left has opened the door to right-wing repression.


To be fair, some free-speech advocates who criticized the left for shutting down debate have revealed themselves to be hypocritical when it comes to anti-Israel speech. An especially ugly episode transpired in late 2023, when the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT refused to crack down broadly on anti-Zionist speech on campus, only for members of Congress in both parties to smear them as anti-Semitic. But the complaints on the left are not limited to liberals who betray their commitment to free-speech norms. Their critique is aimed at liberals who uphold those values. And that is because they oppose liberal values themselves.

When the Harvard psychologist and Harper's-letter signatory Steven Pinker wrote a long New York Times essay assailing the Trump administration's campaign against academic freedom, online leftists castigated him for having supposedly cleared the way for Trump by critiquing groupthink in the academy. "Lot of good push back here from Pinker but at the same time his critiques of higher ed helped open the door for the attacks on the university he now dreads, and especially those directed at where he works," wrote Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a social-studies professor at Wesleyan. Pinker has never endorsed Trump or Trumpism. But the mere fact of his having opposed left-wing illiberalism supposedly makes him complicit in the right-wing version.

Likewise, many leftists consider it self-evident that criticizing campus protesters' use of violent pro-Hamas messages, such as "Globalize the Intifada," was akin to fascism. Liberals of course had good reason to worry about violent, apocalyptic rhetoric, and the ideas inspiring it, which more recently has contributed to a spate of terror attacks on domestic Jewish targets. But to some leftist critics, raising those concerns was functionally a vote for Trump.

"Even those [Democrats] issuing mild statements of concern can't help but front-load their polite chiding of the White House with pointless, preening condemnations of the target of Trump's arrests and harassment regime," Adam Johnson and Sarah Lazare write in the left-wing In These Times. Jeet Heer, writing in The Nation, likewise argues, "Biden's slander of pro-Palestinian activists helped splinter the Democratic coalition during the 2024 election" and, yes, "laid the groundwork for the current crackdown on dissent."

The left is not alone in seeking to erase the liberal middle ground between the political extremes. The dynamic is identical to that of the 1950s, when the right tried to paint all opponents of McCarthyism as communists (just as the left wished to paint all anti-communists as McCarthyists). Trump's allies are attacking pro-free-speech liberals for having supposedly enabled radicalism. When Harvard faculty signed a letter denouncing Trump's threats against academic freedom, conservatives sneered that professors had only themselves to blame. "Many of these signatories have been entirely silent for years as departments purged their ranks of conservatives to create one of the most perfectly sealed-off echo chambers in all of higher education," wrote the pro-Trump law professor Jonathan Turley.

Both the far right and far left have a good reason to erase the liberal center: If the only alternative to their position is an equally extreme alternative, then their argument doesn't look so out-there. The liberal answer is to resist this pressure from both sides.

A decade ago, illiberal discourse norms around race and gender began to dominate progressive spaces, leaving a pockmarked landscape of cancellations and social-media-driven panics. Even as many skeptics on the left insisted that no such phenomenon was occurring—or that it was merely the harmless antics of college students—those norms quickly spread into progressive politics and the Democratic Party.

The 2020 Democratic presidential campaign took place in an atmosphere in which staffers, progressive organizations, journalists, and even the candidates themselves feared that speaking out against unpopular or impractical ideas would cause them to be labeled racist or sexist. That was the identity-obsessed climate in which Joe Biden first promised to nominate a female vice president, and then committed to specifically choosing a Black one. This set of overlapping criteria narrowed the field of candidates who had the traditional qualification of holding statewide office to a single choice whose own campaign had collapsed under the weight of a string of promises to left-wing groups who were out of touch with the constituencies they claimed to represent, as well as her limited political instincts. Kamala Harris herself was cornered into endorsing taxpayer-financed gender-reassignment surgery for prisoners and detained migrants, a promise that Trump blared on endless loop in 2024. Her own ad firm found that Trump's ad moved 2.7 percent of voters who watched it toward Trump, more than enough to swing the outcome by itself.

Trump's election had many causes. One of them was very clearly a backlash against social-justice fads, and the Democratic ecosystem's failure, under fear of cancellation, to resist those fads. If either party to this internal debate should be apologizing, it's not the liberals who presciently warned that the left risked going off the rails and enabling Trump to win.


The political gravity of the campus debate after October 7 tilts in the same direction. Some progressives decided that the plight of Palestinians was so urgent and singular as to blot out every other political cause. The effect was to elevate the salience of an issue that split the Democratic coalition: Both the most pro-Israel constituents and the most anti-Israel constituents in the Democratic coalition moved heavily toward Trump's camp. Many pro-Palestine activists openly argued that the stakes were high enough to justify risking Trump's election. That is precisely the direction in which their actions pushed.

Trump's election, and his subsequent campaign to crush demonstrations, is precisely the scenario that liberal critics warned would occur. That this outcome is being used to discredit those same liberals is perverse, yet oddly familiar.

[viper37]

I just hope that him getting his moment now means he'll fade away by the time the Primary arrives. 

He's your next President.  Search your feelings.  You know it to be true.  



Ironically, he's now taking a stand against deportation, while a few weeks ago, he was telling his fellow Democrats that they were letting themselves be distracted by such issues while they should concentrate on the  much more important tariff issue.


I don't disagree that that issue of tariff is important, but the violation of human rights and standoff against the courts on immigration is equally important, imho.

I liked him at first for his apparent fierce resistance to Trump.  Then there were these podcasts with Bannon and other far right figures. 

I understand why some politicians should try to reach across the aisle, and I don't disagree that confrontation for the sake of confrontation is bad, but there are limits.

[Bauer]

I haven't really followed Newsomes career but he seems ok to me from a distance.  I know right wing media hates on him a lot, but what's the knock on him anyways?

[Valmy]

I haven't really followed Newsomes career but he seems ok to me from a distance.  I know right wing media hates on him a lot, but what's the knock on him anyways?

He lies. He tells Californians he is going to do these progressive things but when elected he just tends to do whatever the rich donors of California tell him to do. So he ends up slashing programs and so forth. I don't know for sure, that is just my understanding.

He seems to create similar feelings as Starmer over in the UK.

But opposing Republicans is something he is ok with doing.

[Sheilbh]

Probably worth an update on David Hogg.

He was removed in a 294 - 99 vote. The bureaucratic justification:

The DNC had voted hours earlier to accept a recommendation from its Credentials Committee that the party hold two new vice chair elections because it found the DNC mistakenly created an advantage for the two male candidates, Hogg and Kenyatta, as it managed the internal elections at the end of a marathon February party meeting in Washington.

[...]

Because DNC rules require equal gender representation on its executive committee, not including the party chair, the results of elections in February meant the DNC had to elect at least one man to its final two vice chair slots. But instead of holding individual votes for each position, one to be filled by a man and one by a candidate of any gender, the party decided to hold one vote to decide who took the final two slots.

The challenge to this was then used by Martin and his supporters to remove Hogg's position. Kenyatta critcised Hogg for distracting from the parties work, and is expected to be re-elected as the only candidate for the male vice chair slot.

As I said earlier in the thread I don't think the split within the Democrats - including on diversity rules or things like that - is between a left and a centre but between an establishment and insurgents. There are people of all backgrounds and politics within those camps.

I'm not a massive fan of David Hogg and think people's comments here are (sadly) a little fair about him. But again the side that's won is the side that just wants things to go as they are, that prioritises conflict avoidance and party unity. They're also the side of the party looking to re-build relationships with Silicon Valley and wanting to keep working with "good billionaires". I think the problem isn't their politics but how they think you should do politics which I think still seems stuck in a permanent 1990s. It's an old guard that is incapable or unwilling to change.

Hogg's statement on Twitter:

I'm not running for the new DNC Vice Chair election:🧵
I started Leaders We Deserve for a simple purpose: to be the Emily's List for progressive young Democrats.
We've sought to find the best of the best of our generation and do everything we can to help them run the best campaigns possible and get the financial support they need to win.
We spent millions last year fighting to elect incredible young people: Molly Cook, Mo Jenkins, Averie Bishop and Kristian Carranza in Texas; Bryce Berry and Ashwin Ramaswami in Georgia;
Dante Pittman in North Carolina, Nadarius Clark in Virginia, Christine Cockley in Ohio, Sarah McBride in Delaware, Nate Douglas in FL, Oscar De Los Santos in Arizona and others
We focused on open blue seats and defeating incumbent Republicans, hoping that these open seats would be space enough to achieve what we wanted.
After seeing a serious lack of vision from Democratic leaders, too many of them asleep at the wheel, and Democrats dying in office that have helped to hand Republicans an expanded majority,
it became clear that Leaders We Deserve had to start primarying incumbents and directly challenging the culture of seniority politics that brought our party to this place to help get our party into fighting shape again.
We have a real challenge ahead of us. We lost voting share with almost every demographic across the board, and despite all that Trump has done, our approvals remain at 27%.
If we don't show our country how we are dramatically changing and provide an alternative vision for the future as a party, we will continue to lose.
Not because we don't have money, but because we don't have a compelling vision for the future and we lack the courage we used to have to take on massive policy fights that have helped millions like the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, the first Assault Weapons ban and more.
Even if we had gained a three seat Congressional majority, the three deaths this session would have once again put millions of Americans on the line.
Let me be clear: this is not solely an issue of age, it's an issue of effectiveness that at times is compounded by age. This is not a call for every older person to leave government.
There are lots of great older people who we need, there's lots of terrible younger people we don't. But it's clear this culture of staying in power until you die or simply fail to do a good job but don't need to worry about a challenge because you are in a safe seat has become an existential threat to the future of this party and nation that must be addressed.
This crisis of competence and complacency has already cost us an election and millions of Americans their rights. Let's not let it cost us the country.
This culture simply will not change by only focusing on open seats or just throwing half a billion dollars into 30 competitive House seats. We must change the culture of our party that has brought us here and if there is anything activism or history teaches us it's that comfortable people, especially comfortable people with power, do not change.
In this moment of crisis, comfort is not an option.
The American people are looking for an answer for how to revive the American Dream that they feel has become more of a fiction than a possibility. We have a crisis of faith in this country, in our elected leaders and in our parties. So far Donald Trump has convinced many people that the answer is to look backward instead of forward.
At this moment of darkness we have a sacred obligation not to this party, but to this country as a party, in his 1960 acceptance speech to the DNC to accept the democratic nomination to become president, John F. Kennedy said: "The times are too grave, the challenge too urgent, and the stakes too high--to permit the customary passions of political debate. We are not here to curse the darkness; we are here to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future."
We relight that candle by providing a new vision for the future and leaders to bring us there. That new vision will come from new leaders. Building a future where voters vote for us not because of who we aren't but because of who we are.
That is why it is important we not only defeat Republicans but we use a healthy competitive primary process to make us a stronger party. The alternative is a continuation of the politics that brought our party to this place. That is unacceptable. We must embrace a healthy culture of competitive primaries to build the strongest party possible.
Being a Democrat means believing in the politics of the possible like we did after Parkland. It's about believing in who we could be not only as a party but as a country. If we put our minds to it and we work hard enough, we can do anything, no matter what stands in our way. That's why I'm a Democrat.
I came into this role to play a positive role in creating the change our party needs. It is clear that there is a fundamental disagreement about the role of a Vice Chair — and it's okay to have disagreements. What isn't okay is allowing this to remain our focus when there is so much more we need to be focused on.
Ultimately, I have decided to not run in this upcoming election so the party can focus on what really matters. I need to do this work with Leaders We Deserve, and it is going to remain my number one mission to build the strongest party possible.
I'm thankful to everyone who has supported me in this role. I'm proud to have travelled to 10 states to do 30+ events, raising money for state parties, organizing with young Democrats, and getting out the vote for special elections in Wisconsin and Florida.

I have nothing but admiration and respect for my fellow officers. Even though we have disagreements, we all are here to build the strongest party possible.

Let me be extremely clear: Yes, we need to defeat Republicans. Leaders We Deserve will have many candidates challenging Republican incumbents.

But we also need to build a party not defined by not being the less bad of two options in voters' eyes. We need to be the best option period at every level of government.

That change can only come through a full embrace of Democracy not only to defeat Republicans but to elect new Democrats to show voters how we are changing and regain their trust by listening to them, doing all we can to give them the best representation possible. Leaders We Deserve exists to do just that.

I think the polling point is really important. Democrats will probably do well in the mid-terms (quite possibly well enough that they stop worrying) - but the approval rating of the Democrats is currently at the lowest rating ever for as long as that question has been asked. And that's a huge part of the problem and it won't just fix itself with more of the same.

[Valmy]

The problem has been that the Republicans are so terrible than even this corrupt, old, and out of touch version of the Democrats can still win. But not do well enough to safe guard the country from danger.

And for these motherfuckers running the party that is good enough. They get upset when somebody insists they do better.