But what will Republicans say?
by Tom Sullivan
It's a kind of Vietnam Syndrome. Democrats here with enough tenure to have lived through the electoral bloodbath of 1994 still flinch at the prospect of another big loss to Republicans. Like family members trapped in an abusive relationship, they shy from taking positions that might earn a metaphorical back of the hand from their Republican counterparts. Wouldn't want to provoke another beat-down from Daddy. Fear of backlash keeps Democrats from taking a stand on what they supposedly stand for.
The syndrome is largely generational, Ryan Grim explains in the Washington Post. Or else not an affliction shared by politicians such as Elizabeth Warren. She did not become engaged in national politics until after 2000. Or Bernie Sanders. He was mayor of Burlington, Vermont during the Reagan years.
For Democrats with even more tenure, the syndrome dates not from 1994 but from the year Ronald Reagan (with an assist from John Anderson) swept Democrats from power for over a decade. Sens. George McGovern, Frank Church, and Birch Bayh lost their seats, and nine others. "When these leaders plead for their party to stay in the middle," the D.C. bureau chief at The Intercept writes, "they’re crouching into the defensive posture they’ve been used to since November 1980, afraid that if they come across as harebrained liberals, voters will turn them out again."
The lesson survivors took from 1980, Grim believes, is the Reagan Revolution was payback for liberal activism of the late 1960s and beyond.
The insurgent class of new Democrats on the Hill find their elders' reflexive crouch as frustrating as it is puzzling. On issue after issue, leadership shies from taking a stand on points that progressive activists see as matters of principle and justice:
For people under a certain age, this slinking in the corner is deeply strange behavior. Young people in the 1990s watched Bill Clinton work with Republicans — to overhaul welfare, try to cut Social Security, deregulate Wall Street — only to see them turn around and impeach him. In the 2000s, they watched Democrats halfheartedly support a war they opposed. Then Obama tried to compromise with Republicans on the size of a post-crash stimulus and the nature of the Affordable Care Act.Speaker Nancy Pelosi has urged her House caucus to hew to the middle and “not engage in some of the other exuberances that exist in our party.”
None of it calmed Republicans, as younger lawmakers see it, so why not try something else? “The older members really cling to the idea that things are going to go ‘back to normal’ ” after Trump, Ocasio-Cortez told me. “For us, it’s never been normal, and before that the bipartisanship was s—ty anyway and gave us the War on Drugs, DOMA” — the Defense of Marriage Act, which barred federal recognition or benefits for same-sex couples — “and stripping the leg[islative] branch of everything.”
For the newcomers, this is completely foreign. To them, Republicans shouldn’t be feared, they should be beaten. Ocasio-Cortez told me that she treats Republicans like buffoons because that’s how they’ve behaved for as long as she can remember. “Even before I was of voting age, I saw Republicans accuse the Obamas of doing a ‘terrorist fist bump,’ so they’ve been clowns since I was a teen,” she said.The hope and change Obama promised did not pan out as young progressives hoped. He had taught them to engage. They stayed engaged. Now they must push a party living in fear of the past to snap out of it.
Ocasio-Cortez said she has seen how fear shapes senior members of her caucus and their approach to politics. “When it comes to defending why we don’t . . . push visionary legislation, I hear the line so frequently from senior members, ‘I want to win,’ ” she said. “But what they mean by that is, ‘I only want to introduce bills that have a 100 percent chance of passing almost unanimously.’ But for new members, what’s important isn’t just winning but fighting. I don’t care about losing in the short term, because we know we’re fighting for the long term.”It is the difference between investing for quarterly profits versus gains over the long haul. It is the difference between repeating year after year that this is the most important election of our lifetimes and the decades-long project movement conservatives undertook to pack the courts and gerrymander legislatures and Congress.
I used to love when the small liberal arts school I attended played football against bigger teams like Clemson. They had nothing to prove. They were expected to lose. Yet they would play their hearts out, use their heads, rise to the challenge, and play above their usual level. Sometimes against opponents a full head taller. It was as glorious as cheering for Rocky that very first time. That's what American voters want to see. That's who they want to vote for. Recklessness is a fault, but always playing it safe is not what leadership and heart looks like. And it is not what the times call for now. Legacy Democrats who call themselves "yellow dogs" risk being seen as just yellow.No guts, no glory.