The big current Beltway debate is whether the Democratic Party has gone off the deep end and is destroying the country because a couple of democratic socialists in New York City unseated two incumbents. Apparently, it’s just been too long since party elders and the media establishment had a hand-wringing party over alleged left-wing extremism ruining everything, so this was their invitation to hold one. Democratic strategist James Carville says he’s done with the party over this. Donald Trump is screaming about communists running rampant, and the mainstream media is sighing with relief that they have a storyline to prove they aren’t biased against Trump after all. And so it goes.
Some of us who weren’t born yesterday remember that it was just eight years ago when the same thing happened. Recall that a young upstart by the name of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated New York Rep. Joseph Crowley, a powerful 10-term incumbent and chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. Ocasio-Cortez’s win was seen as a crisis for the ages when she and a group of young “woke” women of color, dubbed “the Squad,” were feared to be taking a wrecking ball to everything we hold dear because they were just too extreme for the regular folks.
