Now that the Democrats are the party of the rich and, appropriately, collect the lion’s share of Wall Street’s campaign donations, it’s only natural that they should suffer from some of the same perils that afflict their donor class. I’m thinking of that uncomfortable phenomenon, the hostile takeover. The finance industry knows that corporate predation only too well, but now it’s suddenly being replicated in the party of the Left.
The Democrat leaders, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, Reps. Steny Hoyer of Maryland and Hakeem Jeffries of New York et al., had no time to bask in the afterglow of midterm election victory. After less than a nanosecond happily flexing their majority muscles in preparation for two years harassing President Trump, they were suddenly faced with a boardroom coup by the most junior members of their caucus.
What’s worse, and most humiliating, is that the coup leaders didn’t even bother to attack their bosses. They simply ignored them, brushed them aside, and started making party policy without reference to their elders and betters. Who are these young revolutionaries? Our cover story takes a look.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is the most prominent and sees her primary destruction of speaker-in-waiting Rep. Joe Crowley as a template for taking down Jeffries and others who aren’t radical enough. She is also, amongst other things, framing the party’s tax debate by proposing a 70 percent top rate for those she thinks too rich. When former Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., expressed the hope that she wasn’t the future of the party, she contemptuously responded, “Who dis?”
Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan are pushing the Democratic Party into greater and greater anti-Semitic hostility toward Israel. Tlaib is also trumpeting a subject Pelosi and other leaders want to avoid, saying of Trump, “We’re going to impeach the motherfucker.” Meanwhile, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii has launched a presidential bid with denunciations of her senior colleagues’ religious bigotry; it’s well-deserved but hardly allows leadership to set the agenda.
Elsewhere, we profile Richard Grenell, the American ambassador to Germany, who has defied the jeering disbelief and deprecation that greeted his nomination and is bending Europe to American will, despite complaints that he is behaving like “an occupying officer.” The brash former Fox News commentator has become the president’s effective go-to diplomat in Europe.
In Life & Arts, James Poulos examines the appeal and lack of it of Marie Kondo’s ascetic aesthetic, Eric Felten rediscovers the luxurious joys of analog technology in the digital age, and Jamie Dettmer does essential research in a gritty London pub.
Walter Olsen pays tribute to Nathan Glazer, one of the seminal thinkers of neoconservatism, who has died, aged 95.
