From a podium in New York on August 15, Andrew Cuomo took what he no doubt thought was a clever shot at Donald Trump: “We’re not going to make America great again,” he intoned; “it was never that great.” The governor’s deeply stupid remark came from his need to sound leftier than his primary challenger, actress Cynthia Nixon. That was a tall order, even for Cuomo. Nixon promised to double New York’s spending in her first year. The state budget, she believes, is “as much a moral document as a fiscal statement.” Yet the fact that Cuomo felt he needed to flirt with soft anti-Americanism in order to earn credibility with his party suggests that something has gone badly wrong.
Something has.
Consider Keith Ellison, the No. 2 at the Democratic National Committee. Ellison, a six-term member of the House of Representatives has proved himself unfit for office time and again, but nonetheless recently won the Democratic primary for attorney general of Minnesota. He has a long history of hobnobbing with arch-racist Louis Farrakhan and then pretending he didn’t. He defends and praises cop killers and terrorists. He’s entangled in allegations of sexual harassment and domestic abuse. The man campaigning to be Minnesota’s chief law enforcement officer was recently seen in a T-shirt bearing the words “Yo No Creo En Fronteras”—I don’t believe in borders—but it’s hard to see how this minor disgrace can hurt such a successful charlatan.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a proponent of democratic socialism who defeated 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th-district primary in June, will almost certainly take a seat in Congress in January. Her unlikely primary victory and youth (she’s 28) have made her a celebrity on the left and in the media. But she is a constant source of rhetorical and ideological folly. She associates herself with the progressive cause of abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (#AbolishICE); believes college education, health care, and housing are “rights”; and has a special talent for claiming obviously wrong things—“unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs,” “one of the biggest problems that we have is 200 million Americans make less than $20,000 a year,” and on.
Just as appalling are the Democrats’ most talked-about presidential contenders. New Jersey senator Cory Booker shamed himself during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings when he claimed to have broken Senate rules deliberately in releasing confidential documents. He called the stunt his “I am Spartacus moment” when in fact the documents had been cleared for release already. Booker simply doesn’t care whether what he’s saying at one moment matches what he’d said at another: In 2016, for instance, he remarked that he was “blessed and honored” to work with then-Senate colleague Jeff Sessions. Less than a year later, Booker testified against Sessions in the latter’s confirmation hearings for attorney general because the Alabama senator had a “decades-long record” of “deny[ing] citizens voting rights” and “fail[ing] to defend the civil rights of women, minorities, and LGBT Americans.”
California senator Kamala Harris, another party leader with an eye on 2020, similarly made herself odious during the Kavanaugh hearings by badgering the nominee with unbelievably tendentious lines of questioning. Her nonsensical accusation that Kavanaugh had deliberately confused “abortion-inducing drugs” with birth control because he intends to “go after birth control” has been debunked by the Washington Post and even Politifact. These refutations didn’t stop the Hillary Clinton from repeating Harris’s claims on Twitter.
Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, widely assumed to be running for president in 2020, believes companies with revenues (not profits, revenues) of more than $1 billion should be “chartered” by the federal government and forced, among other things, to let employees elect 40 percent of their boards. We won’t burden readers with an explanation of Warren’s flawed premises. It’s sufficient to point out that one of the Democratic party’s best known presidential hopefuls actively promotes a kind of Fabian socialism. She is the heir, in that sense, of Bernie Sanders, but unlike Sanders she’s not an independent, but a Democrat in good standing.
This magazine has over the last three years lamented the unlovely state of the Republican party, led as it now is by a man who shares few of the GOP’s traditional ideals and is unfit by temperament and character for the presidency. But the Democrats aren’t in any better shape. The origins of the party’s disorder lie further back than 2016, but Trump’s victory drove Democrats into a state of delirium. The president’s awfulness has somehow given them license to indulge their most radical and reckless impulses. On September 11, Jimmy Carter, of all people, warned the faithful about the sudden veer toward a “very liberal program.” “Independents,” he noted, “need to know they can invest their vote in the Democratic Party.”
It’s less than two months to the midterm election. In a saner world, the Democrats would be presenting themselves as the safe alternative, the party of reasonableness and middle-class values. Instead they are the party of scoundrels and know-nothing ideologues who believe a loathing of Donald Trump is enough to gain the favor of voters. Cuomo had it half right, anyway: Today’s Democrats aren’t going to make America great.
