Two progressive Democrats were voted out for extremist views. Why that’s a good thing
A lot of people, particularly my fellow Millenials, are angry and disillusioned that another Black progressive member of Congress was defeated at the polls after an unfair election. The latest, Cori Bush, is the second unseated member of “The Squad,” a group of younger progressives and people of color who swept into Washington D. C starting in 2018 with the hope of changing the politics as usual. There were 10 squad members at one point, the most famous member being Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
But now Bush, of St. Louis, is gone on the heels of fellow squad member Jamaal Bowman of New York.
Opinion
“There needs to be a convening among progressives from different organizations, different leaders, to talk about the challenge, because what happened to Jamaal Bowman and what happened to Cori Bush is going to continue to happen,” Joseph Geevarghese, the head of Our Revolution, a progressive group., said to ABC News.
Here is what I think happened: Bush and Bowman lost because have extreme views. They traffic in divisive rhetoric. As members of Congress, they put issues like the war in Gaza over the concerns of their constituents.
A lot of is being made about $8 million spent against Bush by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby. They spent even more against Bowman.
The money given to defeat candidates was excessive and it is important to trace where all of this money came from. However, it doesn’t matter if it was 8 million or 8 cents spent. Voters decide elections.
Bowman and Bush are self–righteous. They seemed to spend their time in office within ideological bubbles, surrounded by people who agreed they should misspend political capital given to them by voters on the conflict between Hamas and Israel.
Progressives and leftists should take a lesson out of this election cycle and learn that the party doesn’t revolve around their thinking.
Elections are not won by alienating
Bush maintained that she was a candidate for the people, but her actions didn’t prove that she was willing to represent every voice.
To her credit, she did take down a longtime incumbent to secure the seat back in 2020 and had an easy victory in 2022. But in the past two years, Bush fell down a political rabbit hole that placed her in a fringe mindset.
Bush decided to be publicly and staunchly pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, willingly throwing herself into a political dumpster fire. And boy did she throw herself in. In an extremist action, she declined to call Hamas a terrorist organization.
“We were called terrorists during Ferguson,” she said of herself and other Black activists who took to the streets after the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, by a white police officer. “Have they hurt people? Absolutely. Has the Israeli military hurt people? Absolutely.”
In January, Bush was one of two Democrats to vote against a resolution to bar members of Hamas and anyone who participated in the attacks against Israel on Oct. 7 from the United States. She was also one of the six Democrats to vote against Biden’s expansive infrastructure plan, a deal that saw $3 billion go to her state of Missouri. Millions are now being spent on infrastructure in St. Louis.
I just don’t get this obsession progressives have with this Mideast conflict to the point of refusing to recognize terrorists. Why is this such an important issue that they’d be willing to sacrifice an office they earned from voters?
Bush even admitted that this issue wasn’t a top concern of her constituents, so why put so much effort into it? The posturing only gave her a target on her back and cost her district a leader who would speak up for them.
Politicians can’t forget their main function
The grand takeaway of the progressive’s political cycle so far is this: extremism doesn’t win elections.
It is true that Palestinians deserve better and should have an established state. A politician trying to rip the generations-long allegiance to Israel, however, will go nowhere, as we’ve seen in past months. There is plenty of room to criticize its leadership while supporting the country’s right to exist.
Bush and Brown prove that extremism in any party will undo the work of improving the lives of voters who elect politicians to office. Leftists and progressives should read the room and back off.
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