Jonathan Chait who recently came aboard The Atlantic magazine from his previous abode at New York magazine has made an important discovery: The recent DNC forum, in which they chose their new leadership team, was so extreme it sounded like fuel for GOP attack ads.
In fact the DNC seemed so far gone that their forum, complete with a singing DNC Chair candidate, appeared to have channeled the much mocked Democratic Socialists convention back in 2019.
Chait came to his sad conclusion about the state of DNC sanity after watching the unintentionally hilarious meeting which he chronicled on Sunday in "The Democrats Show Why They Lost."
The Democratic Party, at least in theory, is an organization dedicated to winning political power through elected office, though this might seem hard to believe on the evidence provided by its official proceedings. The DNC’s meetings included a land acknowledgment, multiple shrieking interruptions by angry protesters, and a general affirmation that its strategy had been sound, except perhaps insufficiently committed to legalistic race and gender essentialism.
...the official party’s influence is so meager, in part because the party has largely ceded it to a collection of progressive activist groups. These groups, funded by liberal donors, seldom have a broad base of support among the voting public but have managed to amass enormous influence over the party. They’ve done so by monopolizing the brand value of various causes.
...The 2020 Democratic primary represented the apogee, to that point, of the groups’ influence. The gigantic field of candidates slogged through a series of debates and interviews in which journalists asked if they would affirm various positions demanded by the groups. That is how large chunks of the field wound up endorsing decriminalization of the border, reparations, and other causes that are hardly consensus positions within the Democratic Party, let alone the broader electorate. It is also how Kamala Harris came out for providing free gender-reassignment surgery to prisoners and migrant detainees, which became the basis of the Trump campaign’s most effective ad against her.
Chait's big worry is that such antics will continue to fuel mocking attack ads by those nasty Republicans.
If Democrats learned from Harris’s campaign that they should try to stop holding events that are easily repurposed as viral Republican attack ads, they showed no sign of it over the weekend. When activists repeatedly interrupted speakers, they were met supportively. “Rather than rebuff the interruptions,” observed the Wall Street Journal reporter Molly Ball, “those onstage largely celebrated them, straining to assure the activists they were actually on the same side and eagerly giving them the platform they broke the rules to demand.”
And now we come to the best and especially most hilarious part of Chait's sad lament. The revelation that a joke he made in passing a few years ago was taken seriously by the person chosen as the new DNC Vice Chair which led to a wave of widespread mockery. Remember the Pillow Boy episode of 2021 which launched at least a thousand memes? Well, Jonathan Chait himself accidentally incited that as he explains:
The most sadly revealing outcome of the meeting may be the elevation of David Hogg as vice chair. Hogg, a 24-year-old activist, rose to prominence as a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, and then quickly assimilated the full range of progressive stances—defund ICE, abolish the police, etc.—into his heavily online persona. And despite the horrific experience he endured, he does not seem to be notably wise beyond his years.
After the far-right activist and pillow peddler Mike Lindell gained prominence as an election denier, I joked online that progressives needed their own pillow company. (The joke, of course, is that there is obviously no need for your pillow company to endorse your political views.) The next month, Hogg went ahead and turned this joke into reality, founding Good Pillow before resigning a few months later.
Just one slight correction here. David Hogg left Good Pillow (he neglected to trademark that name which was quickly taken by someone else) not months later but just a month later. Hogg went into the pillow "business" in February 2021 and left in March 2021.
The good news for Chait is that the DNC isn't so far gone as to require jazz hands applause ...yet.
