Democrats, let progressives lead

Unaccountable for losses: Chuck Schumer in Washington on Wednesday. Picture: AFP

Will there ever be accountability for Democrats? The establishment wing of the party blew one election to Donald Trump and came to the precipice of blowing another. Were there any lessons learned from 2016? Nope. Same guys, same mistakes. The band marches on.

Start with Chuck Schumer in the Senate. With more coronavirus cases and deaths than anywhere else in the world and a buffoonish Republican president, he couldn’t find a way to pick up three seats. That means Republicans can block any progressive legislation. Will Schumer face accountability? Of course not.

Nancy Pelosi lost seats in the House of Representatives when every Democrat in the country thinks we have the worst president in history. There’s got to be some accountability for that, right? Nope. Not a chance. There is no more revered person in Washington than Pelosi. The rest of the country sees her as a feckless elitist, but Washington sees her as a master legislator. She’s passed one major piece of legislation in her career: a healthcare law whose central provision was conceived by the Heritage Foundation.

This is the same leadership that lost almost 1000 state legislative seats nationwide to Republicans during the Obama era. That’s a large village in Kazakhstan. Was there any accountability after those failures? Nope. Still the same folks in charge.

Those losses came at a time when Democrats had major advantages on almost every issue, according to national polling. They had a significant demographic advantage and a popular president. If you can’t win then, when can you ever win? It turns out the answer is hardly ever.

The national media has seen all of this unfold but rarely commented on it. There was no reckoning after Hillary Clinton’s historic loss. It was blamed on James Comey, the Russians, the Bernie Bros, the weather, the dog that ate our votes. A question for the Democrats: Did you ever consider that maybe, just maybe, it was actually you? But the media didn’t ask. They’re all in the same establishment together. Criticising the corporate wing of the Democratic Party would feel like criticising themselves.

Democratic leaders have been outclassed by Republican politicians, whom I loathe, for their entire careers. How many losses can the Democrats pile up, how many easy elections can they bungle, before someone asks: Hey, are we sure these are the right guys?

Will it happen now? Very unlikely. The members of this establishment all know and like each other. Most important, they have the same interest in protecting the status quo, which has empowered and enriched them. That’s why they’ll continue to pretend there is no problem and that the Democratic Party was always supposed to serve corporate donors and lose easy elections.

Progressives have a message for establishment Democrats: Get out of the way. We know how to fight Republicans. We know how to make our case. We know how to fight for our voters. You obviously can’t do the job, so let us do it!

Cenk Uygur is CEO, founder and host of The Young Turks