Scaling Wokeback Mountain
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion Columnist
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could become Republicans’ not-so-secret weapon in 2020.CreditAnna Moneymaker/The New York Times
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WASHINGTON — I was feeling on edge. Writing a column that sparks an internecine fight among the highest-profile women in the Democratic Party is nerve wracking.
So I went to the gym. Alex Toussaint,
the digital Peloton instructor inside the little screen on my spinning
bike, had some wisdom for me — the kind of New Age bromide dispensed in
spin classes everywhere:
You climb the mountain to see the world. You don’t climb the mountain so the world can see you.
I only wished A.O.C. was cycling alongside me to hear it as well.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ensorcelled me from the start. I loved
the bartender-makes-good Cinderella story, the shake-up-the-capital
idealistic dreams, the bravado about how the plutocrat president from
Queens wouldn’t know how to deal with a Puerto Rican girl from the
Bronx.
And I imagined
the most potent feminist partnership in American history: Nancy Pelosi
as sensei, bringing her inside game, and A.O.C., the Karate Kid with a
wicked Twitter game.
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But
instead, the 79-year-old speaker and the 29-year-old freshman are
trapped in a generational and ideological tangle that poses a real
threat to the Democrats’ ability to beat Donald Trump next year.
Pelosi
told me, after the A.O.C. Squad voted against the House’s version of
the border bill and trashed the moderates — the very people who provided
the Democrats the majority — that the Squad was four people with four
votes. She was talking about a legislative reality. If it was a knock,
it was for abandoning the party.
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That did not merit A.O.C.’s outrageous accusation
that Pelosi was targeting “newly elected women of color.” She slimed
the speaker, who has spent her life fighting for the downtrodden and who
was instrumental in getting the first African-American president
elected and passing his agenda against all odds, as a sexist and a
racist.
A.O.C. should consider the possibility that people who disagree with her do not disagree with her color.
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The
young lawmaker went further, implying that the speaker was putting the
Squad in danger, asking why Pelosi would criticize them, “knowing the
amount of death threats” and attention they get. Huh?
A.O.C.
pulled back and said she wasn’t calling Pelosi a racist. But once you
start that ball rolling, it’s hard to stop. (You know how topsy-turvy
the fight is when the biggest defenders of Pelosi, who has endured being
a caricature of extreme liberalism for decades, are Trump and the Wall
Street Journal editorial board.)
The A.O.C. crew threw down the gauntlet in a recent opinion piece
in The Washington Post by The Intercept’s Ryan Grim. He wrote that when
Pelosi and other Democratic mandarins try to keep the image of the
party centrist, they are crouching in “the defensive posture” they’ve
been in since the Reagan revolution.
Corbin
Trent, a spokesman for A.O.C. and co-founder of Justice Democrats, the
progressive group that helped propel her, told Grim: “The greatest
threat to mankind is the cowardice of the Democratic Party,” with the
older generation “driven by fear” and “unable to lead.”
Message: Pelosi is past her prime.
Except she’s not.
And
then there’s the real instigator, Saikat Chakrabarti, A.O.C.’s
33-year-old chief of staff, who co-founded Justice Democrats and Brand
New Congress, both of which recruited progressives — including A.O.C. —
to run against moderates in Democratic primaries. The former Silicon
Valley Bernie Bro assumed he could apply Facebook’s mantra, “Move fast
and break things,” to one of the oldest institutions in the country.
But
Congress is not a place where you achieve radical progress — certainly
not in divided government. It’s a place where you work at it and work at
it and don’t get everything you want.
The
progressives act as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad.
Not wrong, but bad, guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a
moral evil that justifies their venom.
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Chakrabarti
sent shock waves through the Democratic caucus when he posted a tweet
about the border bill comparing moderate and Blue Dog Democrats — some
of whom are black — to Southern segregationists in the ’40s.
Rahm
Emanuel told me Chakrabarti is “a snot-nosed punk” who has no idea
about the battle scars Pelosi bears from the liberal fights she has led.
“What
votes did you get?” Emanuel said, rhetorically challenging A.O.C.’s
chief of staff. “You should only be so lucky to learn from somebody like
Nancy who has shown incredible courage and who has twice returned the
Democratic Party to power.
“We fought
for years to create the majorities to get a Democratic president elected
and re-elected, and they’re going to dither it away. They have not
decided what’s more important: Do they want to beat Trump or do they
want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party? You really
think weakening the speaker is the right strategy to try to get rid of
Donald Trump and everything he stands for?”
In
the age of Trump, there is no more stupid proposition than that Nancy
Pelosi is the problem. If A.O.C. and her Pygmalions and acolytes decide
that burning down the House is more important than deposing Trump, they
will be left with a racist backward president and the emotional
satisfaction of their own purity.
I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@MaureenDowd) and join me on Facebook.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
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A version of this article appears in print on , Section SR, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Scaling Wokeback Mountain. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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