“I think that this president has set a racist tone,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said in an interview with Vanity Fair this week. The proud socialist is hardly the first to say this of President Trump. But her remarks are laughably incongruous, coming just days after she fought to defend, embolden, and normalize anti-Semitism.
Last week, House Democratic leaders prepared an unequivocal condemnation of ugly slurs against American Jews by Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. They were prepared to put it on the House floor and vote on it. That is, they were ready to do so until Ocasio-Cortez and others told them not to. Then they obediently caved.
Omar had not merely criticized Israel or lamented injustices against the Palestinian people. Those would be legitimate subjects of debate between people of goodwill. Rather, Omar had asserted that American Jews are dual-loyalists who have secretly bought Congress with their filthy money. These comments are not on the same plane as allegations that AIPAC is too closely tied to the Netanyahu government. They are, rather, ugly smears that could have come The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or a Nazi tract.
This makes Ocasio-Cortez’s complaints about Trump utterly cynical and hypocritical. Decent Democrats, there are a few of them, tried to prevent last week’s debacle. But the party not only failed to call out anti-Semitism in their ranks, but actually praised and emboldened their most outspoken anti-Semite.
Omar’s defenders were so numerous that the party should just come clean and stop pretending to care about racism. Democrats have been exposed as unserious and unprincipled. If they really cared, they’d not have chickened out. They would have imposed consequences on their colleague to make it plain that such slurs are shameful and unacceptable.
But the new era of Democratic thralldom to intersectionality made their cop-out inevitable. According to its tendentious shape-shifting, racism is not a moral failing to be combated and eradicated but a constituency to be cultivated. The party’s message about racism is designed as a fear-filled electoral appeal to people who more often than not look like Omar. That’s why Democrats lack the courage to call her out for spouting ugly slurs about the secret power, wealth, and disloyalty of Jews, even though such fantasies are those that inspired last October’s fatal shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
Democrats have long been useless at calling out white Democrats for racism. The top two Democratic officeholders in Virginia, who crossed what is supposed to be a red line for the woke Left by wearing blackface in the 1980s, are still in office and under decreasing pressure to resign. This is the standard model of how Democrats handle racism within their own ranks. At best, they feebly complain, while diverting, distracting, and shrugging off the problem until it is old news.
It is precisely because Democrats view racism through the lens of electoral appeal to various constituencies, not as a discrete evil, that a resolution to condemn Omar’s flagrant anti-Semitism was sidelined in favor of a vapid resolution paying lip service to everyone.
If Democrats really viewed racism as a moral concern, they’d be able to condemn it.
