Nancy Pelosi. That'd be someone who has actually accomplished stuff. The ones who haven't accomplished anything responded by stating that Nancy Pelosi must be racist and sexist. Pramila Jayapal, Chair of the House Progressive Caucus, even gave us this gloriously Trump-like attack on Pelosi-- she said that Pelosi is unaccustomed to dealing with people who have bigger twitter followings. Yes, that really was the Chair of the House "Progressive" Caucus, not Trump.
I have been writing recently that the "asymmetry" in party polarization is vanishing, and that the Democratic Party is in the process of reaching Republican levels of extremism in both policy positioning and disposition. The Chair of the House Progressive Caucus now speaks and acts like Donald Trump. Whatever one thinks of policy, the anti-intellectualism of challenging someone on the basis of their twitter follower count... that pretty much makes my point for me.
So let's untangle the rest of this. The best description of the modern GOP comes from Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein. You should read their series of books, but at least, here's their famous WaPo Op-Ed To-Read.
And here's the most famous quote.
Yeah, that's about right. Before Mann & Ornstein wrote that, they were considered neutral political scientists in the think tank world (Mann is at Brookings, and Ornstein is at AEI). But, reflecting (and to some degree, inspiring) what I wrote in a paper called "The Journalists' Dilemma," by writing that, they got labeled partisan hacks. Nope. They just pointed out the truth.The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
Now, let's deal with the Ocasio-Cortez problem.
She is an outlier. Don't give me the Bernie Sanders line. In 2016, the standard defense that Bernie-bros would offer when anyone pointed out how out of the mainstream he is was that in Denmark or some other Scandinavian country, he'd be mainstream. Well, I didn't have lutefisk for breakfast, and neither did you because we aren't in a Scandinavian country, much to the chagrin of those brothers from other mothers-- Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who have far more in common than just their hatred of the concept of free trade. (See, also, their paranoia about everything being "rigged" against them, for example!)
In this country, Ocasio-Cortez is very, very, very ideologically extreme. She is an outlier. As are her compatriots, Ilhan Omar, Pramila Jayapal, and Rashida Tlaib. They are not, in any way, mainstream within American politics. The Bernie Sanders rule applies. What is mainstream in another country doesn't matter because mainstream is a relative term. They are, by definition, then, outliers.
And they see themselves as insurgents.
Next up? Compromise. Why is this dust-up happening? Immigration. The Democrats didn't have the votes on that last immigration bill. So Nancy Pelosi cut the deal she could with Mitch McConnell. Democrats don't have the Senate or the White House. Now, remember back in 2011? When the Republican wackos thought that they could use control of the House, but not the Senate and White House to control policy outcomes if they just held strong, or whatever? Remember how that worked? That was the Tea Party. Those were the people John Boehner politely called the "knuckleheads." Actually, he called them worse than that. He called Jim Jordan a "legislative terrorist." Why? Because people like Jordan decided that they never wanted to compromise or accept the limitations of being the party that only held the House, so they wanted to play stupid, dangerous games.
If you only have the House, you can't get everything. You have to compromise. The mathematics of American politics. If you don't get that, and try to push back against the basic mathematics of American politics, then you're Jim Jordan.
Guess who is Jim Jordan? (Presumably without enabling sexual assault... I hate Ocasio-Cortez, but I won't go that far.)
Next up on the hit parade?
Unmoved by conventional understanding of facts. This is really more about Ocasio-Cortez than the rest of her group, but... the woman never does her research. Now, I wouldn't say she has gotten her facts wrong 21 trillion times... (zing!), but she is sloppy as hell, and claimed that she is more concerned with being "morally" right than "factually" right.
Um... Liberals? Y'all got a problem here, and y'all need to stop looking for excuses for her. Remember those signs about "facts" at the March for Science rally a few years back?
OK, now. Science?
This one is a little messy. Science is a method, not a subject, and not a body of findings.
And that means you don't get to claim ownership of science simply by taking the side of the scientists on a (the) key issue, like climate change. According to our best scientific evidence and best models, climate change is real, and a serious threat to the future of civilization as we know it. Will it wipe out humanity? No, but it will fundamentally challenge social organization as we know it, and kill a lot of people through droughts, floods, etc. Food production in areas where it is already difficult will be challenged, instability will be the result, and badness follows.
This is real, by all of our best evidence, and this is, by any objective measure, the most important policy issue to address. Unless, you know, you don't give a rat's rectum about human life.
Why do Republicans reject this? Because accepting it requires accepting a regulation-based solution. Premise: regulation of business is axiomatically bad. If climate change were real, regulation of business would not be bad. Therefore, climate change must not be real.
That is a properly constructed syllogism. The reason it is bullshit is that the premise is false. You wind up with problems in the other direction if you treat any particular kind of regulation as intrinsically good because you intrinsically hate business and "corporations." You may find yourself coincidentally on the side of science with respect to climate change, but that is not based on any attachment to the method. It is based on negative affect towards "corporations."
And this is where we see symmetry with the extreme left as opposed to the pragmatists.
So let's get into method. And the Pelosi/Ocasio-Cortez dust-up.
Pelosi excoriated the twitter caucus for their Tea Party-esque attempt to purify the Democratic Party, attacking members of their own party when they are insufficiently pure to satisfy the twitter caucus. Pelosi, who unlike the twitter caucus, has actually accomplished things, understands that party unity is required to get things done in Congress.
The twitter caucus's response? Nancy Pelosi must be racist and sexist.
Let's actually apply some science here. There's a little thing called "social science." I do it for a living. When I'm not spending my Sunday mornings guzzling coffee and typing into the void to vent at the spiraling of American politics into heretofore unheard of depths of lunacy.
Here's how social science works. You have a "dependent variable," which is the end result you are trying to explain. In this case, does Nancy Pelosi treat you well, or poorly? Then, you have a set of "independent variables." The things that could explain your dependent variable. Race, sex, party, ideology, intellect, level of responsibility, accomplishments, and so forth.
So, whom does Nancy Pelosi excoriate, and whom does she treat well? First, obviously, she trash-talks Republicans. She's Speaker, and she's a Democrat. Finding Republicans about whom she speaks kindly will be hard. Ideology gets tricky. There isn't a whole lot of variation in the House, but what there is will make her job hard. She can't talk too much trash about the moderates in public because she needs their votes, so, kid-gloves. Behind closed doors... we don't know, but I have long hypothesized that she plays very hard behind closed doors with the moderates.
Race and sex. Look at the Democratic caucus. Lots of women, lots of people of color. Most of them don't get any trash-talking from Pelosi. You've got the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (these are basically Democratic organizations) and while less than 50% of the Democratic caucus is female, a lot of them are. Most of them don't get into any scuffles at all with Pelosi.
So what's different between, say, Marcia Fudge (the Representative for the district containing Case Western Reserve University) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? A lot. Marcia Fudge isn't attacking Democrats on twitter for recognizing that they don't control the Senate or White House.
See? Science! Was that so hard? I could go through the rest of the Democratic caucus using the same process, and that's really what social science is about. If you examine Nancy Pelosi's behavior, coming to the conclusion that she is racist or sexist requires a fundamentally anti-scientific approach to examining the world.
What kind of approach does it require? A sense of perpetual identity-based paranoia completely divorced from evidence.
Now, racism and sexism are both very real. The Tea Party's obsession with white grievance and that whole men's rights thing... that's all based on taking a small number of outlying events, some of which are real, many of which are not, and losing all perspective on society based on that. However, when people like Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Omar and Jayapal go so far into identity politics that getting into a scuffle with Nancy Pelosi results in them accusing her of racism and sexism, that indicates that the accusation has become such a default for them that they no longer think about whether or not it makes sense.
That means there is symmetry to the mentalities used by these politicians and the Tea Party. There is no consideration about the realism of the accusation. Just make it because identity is everything.
The Tea Party began after Barack Obama became President, and while its leaders regularly insisted that they were concerned with debt and spending, that never made any empirical sense. It is worth your time to consider Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson's analysis of the underlying issues, but race (and immigration!) played a big part. It was centrally about white identity politics and white grievance, regardless of how little empirical basis those fears had in the broad sense.
There is a liberal response here, stating that the existence of racism and sexism, and in particular, structural racism make any claims of symmetry inappropriate. A default to accusations of racism or sexism is less wrong for the left because racism and sexism are as pervasive as they are.
In Bayesian terms, yes. If you make that accusation in response to any situation, you are less likely to be wrong in any one case. But your mentality is just as anti-intellectual. You become the mirror image of the Tea Party. Symmetry. The disappearance of asymmetric polarization.
Moreover, the result is the empowerment of the worst villain in modern American political history-- Donald Trump. Here's how.
In social science, we differentiate between two types of errors: the false negative, and the false positive. A false negative means claiming a trait does not exist, when it does. A false positive means claiming a trait exists when it does not.
If you make racism your default accusation, you create false positives. Potentially a lot of them, as with Nancy Pelosi. That gives you Trump by creating a backlash against the accusation.
When you make identity the basis of your argument, even when it wasn't the basis of the discussion, or logically related in any way, you turn social conflict into something that is inextricably based in race/sex/whatever. Some things are. A lot. But not everything. And when you make everything about race/sex/whatever, there's no room for reason.
And that's what went wrong with the GOP. The abandonment of reason.
For what it's worth, Kamala Harris pushed back against the ridiculous attacks on Pelosi. So, there's that.
