Card-carrying DSA members: more Michigan news
I’ve previously written about the quandary faced by far-leftist DSA members/supporters in the general election. After winning the primary as radicals, how do they convincingly tack at least a bit towards the middle?
Here’s how one candidate for the US House of Representatives from Michigan’s 7th District, William Lawrence, dealt with it (the clip is about two and a half minutes long):
William Lawrence’s life story resembles so many other DSA member profiles, although it doesn’t include immigrant parents or having been born in another country. Lawrence was born in Madison, Wisconsin, a deep blue university community, but was raised in East Lansing, Michigan (another university community), son of two law professors at Michigan State University. He graduated from Swarthmore (sociology and anthropolgy degree) – a deeply leftist college – and was a climate activist there and ever since, as well as having been trained in community organizing. And of course, he says Israel has committed genocide.
In that clip of Lawrence explaining his DSA membership lapse, he looks a bit like a deer in the headlights. And yet he managed, in a fairly purple district, to defeat two formidable (and fairly moderate) rival Democrats: Ambassador Bridget Brink and former Navy SEAL Matt Maasdam. Brink was an ambassador to Ukraine appointed by Biden, and in her mid-50s as opposed to Lawrence’s 36.
If you look at the primary results, you can see a familiar pattern. Lawrence got less than half: 43.7%, to be exact. But his two opponents split the difference fairly evenly: 28.8% for Brink and 27.6% for Maasdam. What would have happened had one of them dropped out? I can’t say, but there’s certainly a good chance the remaining candidate might have gotten nearly all the other’s votes and beaten Lawrence.
That didn’t happen. Lawrence will go up against Tom Barrett, the GOP incumbent, but it’s considered a swing district.
Jeffries is going to have fun dealing with these people. And in 2028, there will be a lot more. To the determent of the US.
If only Republicans would cooperate, Jeffries could easily expel them. But of course, pubs voting to expel them would end the fun of watching the democrat party go the way of the Whig party…
“Under Article I, Section 5, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, the Senate can permanently expel a member for disorderly behavior with the concurrence of a two-thirds supermajority of the members present and voting. It is an internal legislative action separate from criminal trials or executive impeachment.”
And, being an “internal legislative action” the definition of “disorderly behavior” can be whatever each Senator thinks it is, just like the SC’s view of pornography; ‘we know it, when we see it!’
PS: If out of desperation, Jeffries or Schumer do expel them, the democrat’s delusional base will desert them en masse.
Addendum: I wondered if the 2/3rds supermajority vote had to be with all 100 Senators present?
Nope.
“Parliamentary precedent and legal interpretation treat this as two-thirds of those members who are physically present and casting a vote on the matter, not the total possible membership or fixed roster of 100.”
So, there should never be too few republicans present to prevent Jeffries from getting the 2/3rds majority needed to remove his ‘troublemakers’.
Prepare to break out the popcorn! Really, it’s going to be glorious watching the democrat party destroy itself.
Ruthless hosts: Yeah, people will really be convinced that he WAS a communist but now he’s not a card-carrying communist.
Like John Brennan was not a card-carrying communist when accepted by the CIA, and later made its director: he just voted for the Communist candidate that one time in 1976, when he was young.
https://api.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/jul/19/ron-desantis/was-john-brennan-once-member-communist-party/
Why wouldn’t the DSA think they have a chance to run the election tables?
In their beliefs there is not even a chink of light between establishment Dems and DSA.
Please don’t be lulled by this sock-puppet meme.
There are differences in approach and timing – and of course, raw personal power plays.
But NO differences in hatred of America or the goals of weakening the Constitution from within.
Hilary it-takes-a-village Clinton’ s doctoral thesis was unabashedly Marxist… such are the “grand old statesmen” of the Democratic party… which include hoary-maned terrorists like Bernadine Dohrn and aging Black Panthers. The DSA kids are their star students.
They all thought their Long Gramscian March through the culture would be crowned by NObama socializing medicine…. and dropped their masks too soon.
The only difference is that the old folks have the self-control to pull back and bide their time… they are unable to control the young monsters they have created.
Do not be fooled. Do not let your vision be clouded by wishful thinking that *some* of these people – the cultural tastemakers for most of our lives! – were/are normal patriots.
Perhaps friends and neighbors can be excused as useful idiots, but not the pols, poobahs, and pundits.
They are all finger puppets on one (Left!) hand…
If no one gets 50 percent of the vote, then there needs to be a runoff between the top two vote getters. That is the best way to keep extremists out of office.
What would Lincoln do? These assholes plan mass seizure of private property.
Trump can nip this in bud. Declare by presidential proclamation the DSA is an existential threat to the US Constitution, declare their assets forfeit and arrest their leaders for conspiracy to overthrow the constitution. Declare the leaders are “deemed to have renounced” the constitution and they therefore get none of its protections.
Arrest without benefit of a grand jury indictment
Prosecution by military tribunal without benefit of trail by jury
No protection against self incrimination
Etc.
William Lawrence’s life story described above — Swarthmore grad, son of two law professors at Michigan State — reminds me of Turchin’s “Elite overproduction”:
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Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin that describes the condition of a society that has an excess supply of potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin#Elite_overproduction
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Which makes sense and we seem to be seeing it before our eyes. However, Turchin goes further into advanced modeling:
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He is one of the founders of cliodynamics, the scientific discipline at the intersection of historical macrosociology, cliometrics, and mathematical modeling of social processes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin
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Hari Seldon, move over!
Chases Eagles:
Trump can nip this in bud. Declare by presidential proclamation the DSA is an existential threat to the US Constitution, declare their assets forfeit and arrest their leaders for conspiracy to overthrow the constitution.
———————–
Oooo that sounds lovely. Just one teensy little problem: a significant segment of the population identifies with DSA in some way – even if they never thought it through, would rather it remain a hazy romantic fantasy version of La Revolution, and are a little aghast at how fast things are moving….
Many young people actually are True Believers, and for decades their parents have defined themselves by their sneering at flyover folk and traditional patriotism for several generations.
A significant chunk of the population would view the actions you describe as confirmation of the worst slanders they have heard about Trump and MAGA… completely undoing the carefully cultivated Preference Cascade that is Trump’s major legacy, and which is the real solution: changing minds.
These people are reeling and desperate. They have no cards left, and must press forward with a program that was launched prematurely.
We like to fill in the blanks with our own experience – or assume everyone has had the same epiphany we have – but many of us are older, change is gradual, and we really don’t know how the beliefs of the “Silent Majority” have shifted over the past 70 years. There is a reason the MAGA machine is not resting on its laurels and continues to fight in as many races as it can (doing the work the GOPe won’t do).
— Ben David
This^^^.
The struggle within the Democratic Party is not about its soul, or its ideology (oh, I’ll grant a few individual Democrats fall into that category, but not the overall organization). It’s a power struggle between internal factions. The goals are mostly the same, but the ‘moderates’ know they can push too hard and cause a cave in, the hardliners don’t believe it. Ideologically, it’s a struggle between a faction that wants to go 90% of the way over ten or fifteen years and a faction that wants 95% today and 5% next week.
That’s why I’m not unduly sympathetic to Carville. Dude, you may hate this but you’ve spent decades laying the groundwork for it.
The real intensity of the struggle is who will be in charge. Will it be the familiar Establishment faces, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Carville types, or the Mamdami etc. crowd. Same reason so many Republicans want Trump destroyed and fight him even when he’s doing stuff they have advocated for in the past. They don’t want to give up their power and status to an outsider.
— Ben David
Again, this^^^.
I can still remember major Dems like Pelosi responding to questions about whether they could do what they were trying do with ‘we won’. If you listened to them, it was clear they didn’t just mean they had won in 2008, they thought they had won the culture war, won the power struggle, it was over. They soon discovered otherwise, but they revealed their real goals before they had secured their final victory.
— Chases Eagles
Trump can’t do that. It doesn’t matter if he has the legal authority or not (debatable), what matters is that he doesn’t have the political capital, and thus the power, to actually do it. If he tried that, he would be stopped hard.
Trump is not Lincoln, nor is he FDR. They could do things Trump simply cannot do, at least not yet.
— huxley
I agree that this is a lot of what is driving this, and it’s a lot why most of the support for the DSA comes from highly-credentialed upper class ‘limousine liberals’ and their middle-class kin.
There just aren’t enough high-status jobs for all the degrees. Income matters too, of course, there aren’t currently enough high-paying jobs for the degrees that they were told their degrees would entitle them to have, either. There’s more to it than money, though. A lot of these people would still be angry and dissatisfied if they had a job paying six figures but that was low social status. They thought they were training to be part of the ruling class, and there are too many of them for that.
This is esp. true of the ones whose degrees are particularly suited to that aspiration.
Of course their anger is not 100% unjustified. Uncontrolled immigration and H1x visas enable employers to undercut wages and replace Americans with foreigners at all status and income levels. But it’s also about social status.
I seriously doubt that the jobs that H1b immigrants took are the high status elite life track to the ruling class that entitled (in their own estimation) US citizens (not to be confused with Americans, since they are global, not parachoial) were pursuing with their educational credentials.
So now they are bitter with a mountain of student debt and the NGO gravy train is running dry and DEI won’t save them? They chose poorly it seems. Life is like that.
@Hc68:That’s why I’m not unduly sympathetic to Carville. Dude, you may hate this but you’ve spent decades laying the groundwork for it.
The very most that could be said for Carville is that he wants to stay in place on the slippery slope he built. There’s a lot of that going around the Dems.
But I’m pretty sure he isn’t principled or genuine, that he believes a lot more in DSA’s goals than he wants to let on at the moment, and that if they start to win elections he’s going to suck right up to them because fundamentally he worships power.
The Democratic Party eventually trends toward socialism , whereby the government owns and controls the major means of production, such as factories, land, and resources, instead of private individuals. Can you say kleptocracy? The only thing I know for certain is that socialist governments often submit to communist takeovers where communism is for the elite and socialism is for the workers.