Thread by @jonathansmucker

Senator @kyrstensinema’s history and psychology is as fascinating as it is depressing. She seems motivated by a somewhat personal resentment of “the Left” and her own experience of its ineffectiveness and naval-gazing (in a particular time period)…

She and I are roughly the same age. I also came of age with the same backdrop of a weak, dysfunctional Left. It often felt like we didn't have anything big enough to really accurately call a "movement"; it might sound harsh, but we had residue from when there had been a movement.

I too became disillusioned with the pathologies of what I too often experienced as a small and insular Left—a little clubhouse that often seemed completely uninterested in building or wielding real political power. I've written a lot about this experience in @hegemonyhowto

I don't know where I'm going with this thread. My point isn't to make excuses for her behavior, or to psychologize a situation that is fundamentally about social structure. And yet I find myself wanting to understand how someone who started as a progressive idealist became this.

The structural factors for why 8 Democratic senators, Sinema included, would vote against raising the minimum wage are clear enough. In a nutshell, today too many Dems are more oriented to the donor class than to working class voters who were once the cornerstone of their base.

But there are related psychological and dispositional factors that are worth looking at. I don't think it's of no consequence that most of the current leadership of both parties was formatively shaped by the 'common sense' of the Reagan Era.

Under (and after) Reagan, Republicans were emboldened and awarded a lasting sense that their ideas were majoritarian, and that it was their opponents, the Democrats, who had gone too far and were out of touch with everyday Americans.

Democrats, on the other hand, were understandably traumatized by Reagan’s unexpected rise and consolidation, not only of power, but of the cultural narrative / the 'common sense'.

Prior to Reagan, the decades-long hegemony of the New Deal Coalition had instilled many Democrats with a sense of historical optimism, as if there were an almost inevitable long march of progress.

What New Deal reforms did not achieve, the social movements of “the ‘60s”—Civil Rights and racial justice, feminism and gay rights, antiwar, environmental, etc.—seemed to be on a path to correcting.

The extraordinarily successful cultural backlash symbolized and embodied by Reagan’s presidency demoralized and traumatized an entire generation (or two) of Democrats, and set in a kind of pavlovian reaction against “going too far” with a progressive agenda.

In the wake of Reaganism, Democratic politicians and operatives advanced their careers by styling themselves as “realistic” and “pragmatic”—“very serious people” who did not suffer from the excesses and optimistic delusions of ‘60s radicalism.

NEWS FLASH: We're no longer living in the 1980s!

The social order that Reagan inaugurated is in total crisis.

Neoliberalism surpassed its advocates' wildest dreams—in terms of radically remaking the economic and political order—and the results today are chaos and a crisis of inequality.

People want change.

On most major issues, progressive positions have come to enjoy majority support. From regulating Wall Street to progressive taxation to healthcare, from criminal justice reform to marijuana legalization to gay marriage, the nation’s majority has become progressive.

The demographics and culture of the country have dramatically changed. A profound shift has been underway over the past two decades. But the political class of both parties—profoundly class-insular—has neglected to glance down to notice the ground shifting beneath its feet.

What's fascinating to me about @SenatorSinema is that she's younger than most of these people. She's on the younger end of Generation X—almost an older Millennial (like me). This is a relatively "missing generation" in politics.

When we arrived on the scene, the Left was embarrassingly small and powerless. Speaking for myself, I felt like something of a "political orphan"—not knowing where to turn for political development and guidance, especially when it came to questions of power and strategy.

But then this incredible thing started happening over roughly the past decade.

10 years ago, our 'outsider' social justice movements started to grow and to develop a new cadre of leaders.

5 years ago, we started similarly gaining ground on the terrain of electoral politics.

There is, at long last, the start of something powerful in 'Left' politics.

There is the start of something that has the real potential to become a powerful—even hegemonic—long-term political alignment, whose base of power is an activated and organized multiracial working class.

And here in this long-anticipated moment of shifting, of expanding potentials—when hope is finally finding its way from our far-flung dreams into the real world of power politics—who should step proudly into the role of spoiler? None other than @SenatorSinema.

Whatever the explanation, the path is clear enough:

It is up to us to organize a political force that is powerful enough to force politicians who do not want to do what we want them to do to do it anyway.

Oops I forgot to talk about the role of the rise of the PMC in all this... for another day!