Democrats in Disarray

 

Seven factions? That's what I call disarray!

Meanwhile Mike Allen for Axios is gunning for "the Squad":

The hard-left politics of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and the so-called "Squad," once a dominant theme for vast numbers of elected Democrats, is backfiring big-time on the party in power, top Democrats tell us.

Why it matters: The push to defund the police, rename schools and tear down statues has created a significant obstacle to Democrats keeping control of the House, the Senate and the party’s overall image.

"It's what we've been screaming about for a year," said Matt Bennett, c0-founder of center-left Third Way, which launched Shield PAC to defend moderate Democrats.

Siri, how many is a "vast number"? Also, what does "center-left" mean in an organization that rejects leftness in its very name? The total "top Democrats" cited in the article are two, Matt Bennett here and the famously bipartisan Problem Solver Josh Gottheimer, how "top" is that? No actual issue in which Democrats were defeated is mentioned—issues mentioned in the article are in San Francisco and Minneapolis, where Republicans really have no pull at all, and the issue in San Francisco wasn't one of those "woke" ones anyway.

What they're actually talking about a single event in overwhelmingly Democratic San Francisco the recall election last week for three members of the Board of Education (subject of another AP "toxic Democrats" story), where 26% of the city's registered voters (pretty high for a school board turnout) showed up, with an overwhelming majority of that 26% voting to throw them out, for being too "woke" in Mike Allen's opinion, focused on renaming schools instead of making them good. 

In fact it was a competition between two alternative wokenesses. One was the one represented by the one African American and two Latino board members, who had run a push to introduce a lottery system for admission to the city's elite Lowell High School, which has led to a 25% decrease in the number of white and Asian freshmen at the school and a 40% increase in the corresponding number for Black and Latino students. The other was the city's Asian American communities, especially Chinese, crying discrimination and demanding a return to the old more selective system. More important to my mind, the latter were galvanized by almost $2 million in campaign funding, half of it coming not from Chinatown but from Santa Clara County billionaires:

“Neighbors for a Better San Francisco Advocacy,” a political action committee that has previously been funded by Silicon Valley-area tech investors and philanthropists; Arthur Rock, a 95-year-old billionaire who was an early investor in Intel and Apple; and David O. Sacks, a San Francisco-based tech investor and former chief operating officer at PayPal.

It's what one anti-recall campaigner, Julie Roberts-Phung, referred to as 

“part of a national trend of attacking school boards and creating smaller-turnout special elections that are a pathway into politics for candidates who are more conservative and who couldn’t win a general election with a full, diverse electorate.”

“You know it’s a power grab to have that kind of special election that curates a smaller electorate,” 

It should be noted that the Asian American community is also getting mobilized by a very serious issue, that of the wave of hate crimes against people of Asian and particularly of South Asian and Chinese backgrounds, even in San Francisco. That doesn't have much to do with school board elections, but Chinese community feelings of being in conflict with Black communities are aggravated by the false impression, fostered by a tendentious sample of YouTube videos, that the hate crimes are largely committed by Black people, as Jennifer Lee and Tiffany Huang wrote for the Brookings Institution education blog last year:

This is not the first time that the trope has been weaponized. Black-Asian conflict—and Black-Korean conflict more specifically—became the popular frame of the LA riots in 1992.

The trope failed to capture the reality of Black-Korean relations three decades ago, and it fails to capture the reality of anti-Asian bias today. A recent study finds that in fact, Christian nationalism is the strongest predictor of xenophobic views of COVID-19, and the effect of Christian nationalism is greater among white respondents, compared to Black respondents. Moreover, Black Americans have also experienced high levels of racial discrimination since the pandemic began. Hence, not only does the frame of two minoritized groups in conflict ignore the role of white national populism, but it also absolves the history and systems of inequality that positioned them there.

I'm very aware of this in New York, where two Asian women have been murdered in recent weeks, and my own ethnic-Chinese old lady, who does not scare easily, was badly shaken up not long ago by a screaming incident in which the word "Covid" featured.

Anyway, the thing I wanted particularly to say is it was Democrats, reacting to the concerns of the Asian community, who recalled the three members; it was Democrats in Minneapolis, responding especially to the concerns of the African American community (in a recent poll, 75% of Minneapolis Blacks said they need more police, not fewer—but they also need better police), who decided they didn't want to "defund" the force. It was Democrats in New York City (including an overwhelming majority of Black voters) who elected Eric Adams mayor, in the knowledge that he favors increasing funding for the NYPD, restoring some (modified version of) stop-and-frisk, and keeping the test-based admission system for the specialised high schools. If there's really a "wokeness" crisis in the party, it's self-correcting. Or, more likely, it's imagined by hacks like Mike Allen to grab eyeballs for their product.