The Real Reason Jamaal Bowman Lost, Conclusion
What Progressives Like Bowman Need To Learn About Politics — But Seem Incapable of Accepting
The story I’m about tell was used in reference to Henry Jackson a very skilled Democrat Senator could never ascend to national prominence. Jackson was a conservative Democrat — the kind the left would never consider being associated with — but the anecdote can easily apply to so many progressives over the years.
The chairman of the board of a well-known dog-food manufacturing company called in his directors, sat them around a long table and, somberly, said to them:
“Gentlemen, we make the best dog food. We use the best ingredients. We have the best container. We have the most attractive label. Why doesn’t it sell?”
There was silence in the board room for several minutes, and then a solitary voice is heard at the far end of the table:
“Dogs don’t like it.”
This basically describes the problem with what the Justice Democrats attempted to do when they were founded in 2018. They were attempting to sell the kind of product they have tried to sell to the voters periodically over America’s history. They were attempting a repackaging of the progressive ideals — which are good ones — with a newer message and a more attractive label. It was certainly a more diverse one, featuring an overwhelming number of female, minority, and LGBTQ+ candidates. And in 2018 the voters basically gave the same message they inevitably give the left whenever they make a concerted effort into electoral politics on their own. They told them, in no uncertain terms, they don’t like the product.
Those on the left constantly refer to politics, usually in regard to Republicans but frequently to the two-party system, as a ‘rigged game’. That very well may be the case. It is also the case that for nearly two centuries whenever the left makes an effort to play the game that is American democracy they invariably lose. And as much as the game may be rigged the fact is the left never wants to play the same game both major parties are — assuming they want to play it at all.
In my lifetime, particularly in this century the Republican party has prioritized victory over principles. Say what you will about that method — and the left has plenty to say — it has helped them to great electoral success in the last half century. The Justice Democrats, the left’s most recent version of it, seem to have decided that their approach was going to be the opposite: principles over victory. For people who constant mock the intelligence of both the Republican politicians and the people who vote for them the attitude held by Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush and those who support both them and the politics they stand for is at best incredibly naïve and at worse, desperately foolish. But it is in keeping with an attitude that the left has had towards electoral politics dating at least as far back as the Radical Republicans.
The Republican Party over the last half century, if nothing else, must be credited with being extremely good as sales. They’ve convinced a significant group of the American people that the policies they have that work against their own interest are in fact the best thing for them. To use the story I gave earlier, they’ve not only convinced these people to buy their dog food but to make it part of their own nutritious breakfast.
Much of this is based in the old talking points the left constantly brings up — the Southern strategy, the Heritage foundation, the rise of cable news — but it also speaks to the Republicans willingness to play the long game to affect their strategy. This is something that the left not only doesn’t seem to want to do but thinks it beneath them to even consider doing. Politics and democracy is based on that, if you want to get something done, you have to get elected to office and convince your colleagues and the voters to get on board. Nearly two centuries since direct democracy began the left is still convinced it is everyone else’s job — not just their colleagues or opposition but America — to come around to their way of thinking without them having to compromise their principles or even if the people want it. Jamaal Bowman and the Squad are just the latest version of this — and the fact that they are the most successful version to this point in American politics speaks less to their own abilities then to the left’s perennial failure to have their ideas enter the political mainstream.
And as I keep repeating Bowman and the Justice Democrats have failed on a nationwide scale to convince all but the smallest fragment of the Democratic primary voter that their vision is the correct one for America. Not the Democratic Party, America. It would be the height of hubris for twelve elected Congressional representatives of deep blue districts in mostly blue states to believe that speak for the entire population. Yet as I have illustrated Jamal Bowman, Cori Bush and so many members of their ilk — successful and failures — not only think they do but know they do. That the Democratic Party has spent so much of the last few years letting them believe that fact has does nothing to help their long-term electoral health as a party.
And it’s not clear its even done much to help those elected to Congress. Those who work in leftist journals and columnists — many of whom write for this blog — genuinely don’t consider even AOC and Bernie true leftists. They cheer people like Jamaal Bowman when they sink Biden’s legislation because he didn’t compromise and excoriate his colleagues like Jaypal when they do for a greater good. They will argue that when Sanders chose to work with the Biden administration to help further the principles he’d campaigned for even in a compromised setting that he’d betrayed his platform. They will berate Republicans as the root of all that is wrong with society and will tell you in the same breath that the Democrats, by not agreeing to their principles, are just as bad. They’ll argue the game is rigged and the people who try to play it — even the ones who agree with them — are suckers.
That is why, for much of the 20th century, the left’s grade in the political process has almost always been a mark of ‘absent’. They will write extensive books, yell on their own columns about the right wing’s rise and then say with a straight face it’s everyone’s fault but theirs. Bowman and the Squad are considered by many as iconoclasts for the kind of performative stunts they will in the same breath mock Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert for. And it is clear that this attitude was shared by Justice Democrats, certainly those of Cori Bush. After she was defeated a member of her campaign staff acknowledged that she could have made herself less vulnerable had she more pliable to the Administration. “But those aren’t the kinds of candidates we’re trying to send to Congress,” that staffer said.
How does that make Bush and Bowman any different from the Freedom Caucus? Their defenders will say that the Freedom caucus only has loyalty to a single man who doesn’t return it while AOC and Ilhan Omar are fighting for a greater good. But if the end result means that no legislation gets passed, that the polarization of DC and America continues, that more and more Americans suffer, then what is the difference really?
I know I will be met with condemnation by so many people on this blog for even writing this last paragraph, considered a MAGA extremist myself. I keep saying I agree with the principles of progressives and I want them to succeed. But unlike them, I’m a pragmatist. I know that democracy is about the half-loaf and taking what you can in the short term. Progressives have never seemed to grasp that concept. They want everything now and won’t accept anything less. If that means their district, their state or the country suffer as a consequence, that seems to be a price they’re willing to be pay rather than compromise their principles.
And its worth noting that progressives while they don’t deny the results of elections, are as bad losers as conservatives are. After Paula Jean Swearngin lost the Democratic primary to Joe Manchin as a Justice Democrat in 2018, she managed to win the Democratic nomination to run against Shelly More Capito, West Virginia’s Republican Senator, in 2020. She was destroyed by Capito, only getting 30 percent of the vote. (For the record she got that much against Manchin two years later.) Having been rejected that soundly by the voters of West Virginia Swearengin might have realized that her far left message — which included EPA hearings in a state where the major industry is coal mining — might not be the right one for her state. She might have considered a way to moderate her views going forward.
Instead less than one year later, she chose to leave the Democratic Pary. She wrote in July of 2021 that ‘she couldn’t support racism or them ignoring Appalachian children dying or suffering.” In other words, it wasn’t her fault the voters had rejected her or her message soundly, it was ‘the system.”
That year she joined the Movement for a People’s Party, which had tried to get Bernie Sanders to run in 2020 after he lost the Democratic nomination. He had declined because he considered beating Trump more important then his principles. Members of the party expressed distaste for both candidates but chose not endorse a candidate. The People’s Party has yet to achieve any of his professed goals, not running any candidates in either the 2022 midterms or this year. The most they have accomplished is an organization in Maine, which was designed to focus on pushing Congressional officials into supporting a floor vote for Medicare for All, a key principle of the Squad and Justice Democrats. They haven’t achieved that in four years. In four years they have yet to even manage to get a single elected official to accept their backing or run with their endorsement. They have ballot access in Florida but it is September and they don’t have a candidate on the ballot. They have many Sanders’s supporters but as with the Justice Democrats, Sanders has ignored them. Swearingin was the only Justice Democrat candidate who was part of their organization and she left in February of 2022. Nick Brana, the man who founded in 2017 was accused of sexual harassment in 2022. He denied those claims and forced out several members.
In June of 2023 Cornel West announced his candidacy to run for President. The last of access forced West to first seek the endorsement of the Green Party and then eventually run as an independent. Brana left the party later that year to work for Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s. Presidential campaign and as of May of 2024, served as their ballot access director.
Both Brana and West’s action really make the point clear at the end of the day, the principles claim to have are stage dressing for people who are mirror images for their equivalent on the far right. They know they can’t stand on their own, they know their message is outside the mainstream. But they won’t accept that. No matter how many times they are rejected by the public, no matter how many elections they lose, they will claim they just have to change the labels or the ingredients or the packaging and then, finally, the voters will buy what they’re selling. The rise and fall of Bowman and Bush make it very clear that this is a product the voters will only take in small doses and not very long. The question is, can they realize they have to do more than cosmetic changes or will they just keep eating their own food, not able to understand why no one else likes the flavor?
I do have ideas as to an antidote but I’ll save them for a different series.