This week’s remarks by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) that he has no intention of adopting the agenda of the crazy “socialist” wing of the Democratic Party—those calling for stacking the Supreme Court, defunding the police, and the Green New Deal—have provoked hysteria among the proponents of those policies: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Rashida Tlaib (MI), and Omar Ilhan (MN) among others. They shriek that their policies had nothing to do with the Democrats’ poor showing in the elections, charging instead that the moderate Democrats just didn’t run effective campaigns. Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib defended the “progressive” agenda of defunding the police and supporting Black Lives Matter, and accused centrist Democrats of only being interested in white constituencies, and of accepting the GOP’s “divide and conquer racism.”
However, House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), who is hardly a paragon of virtue, admitted over the weekend to several TV talk show hosts that the “defund the police” slogan really hurt the Democrats in the election, and warned that such “sloganeering” could really “derail the Back Lives Matter Movement.” It was that “defund the police” rhetoric that caused Sen. Lindsey Graham’s Democratic challenger, Jaime Harrison, the election, Clyburn complained.
