Stop me if you’ve heard this one:
You’re a politician, and you have two opponents, one more extreme than the other. They have to go through a primary to see which will run against you in the general election. Who would you prefer to win the primary? At a glance, one might think that the safest thing for the general public is to have an election contest between you and your less extreme opponent, so that you don’t have to risk the more extreme candidate getting in. On the other hand, what if the more extreme candidate is too extreme? What if they’re so extreme that people who would have supported the more moderate opponent, will now vote for you? Worse, what if you’re not sure you can actually beat your more moderate opponent? Well, for the good of you, and for the good of all those voters who you’ll definitely help when you win, you have a responsibility to try to get the more extreme opponent to win their primary, so you’ll have an easier victory.
Seems pretty straightforward, right? Polling says the voters are pretty moderate overall, so if you’re the only moderate candidate, you’re pretty much guaranteed a win!
Well, sometimes.
Sometimes, you just lose because it turns out that you didn’t understand the voters as well as you thought.
Sometimes you end up helping fascism to advance.
The thing is, it is a logical and valid tactic… if and only if the electorate are not mainly horrible, stupid fascists. But it’s the USA, so…
You would think, though, that after 2016 the Dems would have learned this lesson. Fool me once, shame on you – fool me repeatedly, after global humiliation lasting years…
In 2016, there were far too many brainwashed idiots who believed 30 years of rightwing lies, or their PURITY was at stake–and don’t forget the “I’ll happily vote for a woman, but not THAT woman. Warren? Nope, can’t vote for her–I’d vote for a woman, just not THAT woman. Klobuchar? Nope. I’d vote for a woman, just not THAT woman! Harris? No, not her, but I’d TOTALLY vote fora woman, just not THAT woman.” Lather, rinse, repeat.
It is a tactic that is very useful for the Democrats, because it means they never have to deliver on promises made to the left of their base – they just guarantee their opponent is more extreme.
It’s also the tactic that, at least partly, gave us Hamas. Israel supported the people who became that organization, in order to undermine the more moderate Palestinian Authority.
It also probably doesn’t help that pretty much everyone in leadership in both parties has a long history of funding, working with, and in other ways supporting fascists and other authoritarians and extremists who are actively carrying out mass murder and the like. That’s got to breed some level of comfort with that sort of thing.
The tactic makes some sort of sense — once you realize that the Democratic Party establishment is ideologically (and morally) bankrupt. They stand for nothing and are doing their best to sabotage Democratic candidates who do (e.g., their attempt to sink AOC.) All they have to offer voters is “well, we’re not quite as bad as the Republicans,” And the only way “we’re not as bad …” makes sense is if the Republicans are really, really bad.
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The problem is that the Republican Party does stand for something: hate and “might makes right.” The way things are has got the population of the USA worried and they’re looking for answers/solutions, and the Republican Party has them, and the Democratic Party has none.
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It turns out that the chairman of this idiotic policy (Sean Patrick Maloney) is the congresscritter for the district we got redistricted into, and he has a primary challenger in the mould of AOC. With any luck, she will win. All we need to do is to do the same in the rest of the districts represented by establishment Democrats.