The Left And The Democrats: The Van-guard Of The Revolution

There’s been so much written about the past, present, and passing of Van Jones that I hesitate to add to it, but I think this is, as someone else said recently in a different context, a “teachable moment,” and the lesson needs to be drummed home. That lesson is what today’s left looks like, and it’s not a pretty picture.

First, in their own words:

• Here is Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake.
  

  Now [Van Jones has] been thrown under the bus by the White House for signing his name to a petition expressing something that 35% of all Democrats believed as of 2007 — that George Bush knew in advance about the attacks of 9/11. Well, that and calling Republicans “assholes.” I’m pretty sure that if you search through the histories of every single liberal leader at the CAF dinner that night, they have publicly said that and worse.

  Perhaps even Hamsher is too timid to describe the truther petition accurately, for, as Mickey Kaus points out, what it actually suggested is not simply that Bush knew in advance but that Bush “”may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.” From the sound of them at the time and later, you’d think that more than 35% of the Democrats thought that.

• And here is the always entertaining David Sirota, writing on Huffington Post, complaining about the “White House’s pathetic behavior” in forcing the saintly Jones out.
  

  First and foremost, Jones was one of the only movement progressives in a policymaking position in the Obama White House. By that I mean, he was one of the only people in the White House who came out of grassroots movement work and not just political/partisan hack work, and one of the only movement progressives put in a policymaking job, and not ghettoized into a political/tactical job….

  Second, Jones being forced out will not mollify the racists, crazies, tea baggers, Republican congresspeople and other assorted conservative freakshows – it will only embolden them. When lynch mobs in the Old South lynched someone, when a witchhunting band caught a target in Salem, when HUAC “proved” the supposed communism of its victims, that didn’t calm them down – it only intensified their bloodlust because it made them believe they could be even more successful in the future. So if the White House’s political “gurus” believe booting Jones was the safe and prudent way to mitigate right-wing hatred, then they are as short-sighted and stupid as they’ve proven themselves to be in mismanaging the summer’s health care debate. Seriously, folks – if you think you can appease or mollify someone who takes to the public airwaves and does this [linking a YouTube of Glenn Beck], then you are as crazy as that screaming lunatic is.

  Finally, the Jones announcement will inevitably create a chilling effect on the aspirations of other movement progressives. Van is a fantastic person who has done fantastic work. He’s kept his advocacy real and didn’t compromise his principles….

  So, Van Jones is a good “movement progressive” who has been sacrificed by a craven White House to the screaming lunatics, crazies, and racists on the right. Wait, did I just say he said racists? Yes, I did:

  By the way, that message is especially true for African American movement activists, because let’s just be honest – the fact that the right chose to mount a hysteria campaign specifically around an African American, Jones, was no coincidence. The right didn’t just randomly pick some mid-level guy working on noncontroversial issues (green jobs) – they were specifically looking for a black guy with movement politics in his background….

Hamsher and Sirota, of course, are not alone in this view. Ben Smith of Politico printed an email from an aide to NAACP President Ben Jealous asserting that Jones had been sacrificed to “those who spin lies for profit,” and Smith and Nia-Malika Henderson in a long Politico article sympathetically presenting a whole parade of Democrats and liberals lamenting the White House’s “sacrifice [of Jones] to the political gods.” Typical comment:

“As we’ve seen before, succumbing to these types of propaganda attacks from the right wing only emboldens the aggressors. This controversy will go away and they will trump up another one tomorrow,” said David Brock, founder and chairman of Media Matters for America, a group that has taken on conservative commentators. “No good comes from appeasing a lunatic bully like Glenn Beck.”

“If Jones left under pressure from the Obama administration then we are in for a very long and painful four years,” said Melissa Harris Lacewell, a political science professor at Princeton University. “I would hate to think that Glenn Beck can simply shout down any member of the administration he chooses to target.”

So, now that Jones has been presented as a modern lynching/McCarthyite victim for whom the White House should have stood and fought, let’s look at the content of what a good “movement progressive” believes these days. Here’s a brief summary by Byron York:

he signed a 2004 petition supporting the so-called “9/11 truther” movement; that he was a self-professed communist during much of the 1990s; that he supported the cop-killer Mumia abu-Jamal; that in 2008 he accused “white polluters” of “steering poison into the people of color communities”; and that earlier this year, speaking to a friendly crowd in Berkeley, Calif., he called Republicans “a–holes.”

And here is a slightly more heated version of the same description from David Horowitz:

There is no more mystery about Van Jones. He was a passionate defender of cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal, a self-satisfied and described “Communist,” a supporter of the destruction of the Jewish state, and a promoter of the theory that the Katrina tragedy was a white racist plot, and so forth. That’s okay with Democratic chairman Howard Dean, and Obama’s Environmental Quality Council head Nancy Sutley. (See Ron Radosh’s current blog for chapter and verse, and also the many blogs on Jones at our own www.newsrealblog.com.) This should surprise no one. The recent heads of the black caucus in the House — part of the 120 member “progressive caucus” — have all been Castro-loving racists — Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee to name two off the top of my head. Diane Watson is probably next. The Democratic Party today is a “popular front” organization (to pluck an appropriate term from the 1930s when liberals and Stalinists lined up together as well). There are no scoundrels, America haters, racists — that Democrats won’t assimlate. One of the more obnoxious racists and crooks in public life — Charlie Rangel — is still chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee because Nancy Pelosi can’t remove him so strong is his support in her party.

And if you don’t believe how far left the Democrats have lurched when I say it, here’s authentification from Alan Colmes who, after ignoring all the evidence about who Van Jones actually is and what he believes, and pretending that it’s all a Glenn Beck-World Net Daily-Horowitz plot, concludes “Van Jones is a mainstream liberal.” That’s exactly right Alan. And that’s exactly the problem.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you that the picture of today’s left is not pretty, but that’s not the worst of it. If one accepts Horowitz’s description of today’s Democratic Party as a “popular front” organization, then it follows that many, too many, contemporary Democrats are “fellow travelers” of the worst elements in that front, elements that, to stick with 1930s terminology, might now be termed the Van-guard of the revolution.

The Wall Street Journal has just said pretty much the same thing. After describing Jones’s closeness with a number of Democratic luminaries (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., John Podesta, Valerie Jarrett), the Journal editorial argues, persuasively that

[t]he ascent of Mr. Jones within the liberal intelligentsia shows how much the Democratic Party has moved left since its “New Democrat” triangulation of the Clinton years….

Our guess is that Mr. Jones landed in the White House precisely because his job didn’t require Senate confirmation, which would have subjected him to more scrutiny. This is also no doubt a reason that Mr. Obama has consolidated so much of his Administration’s governing authority inside the White House under various “czars.” Mr. Jones was poised to play a prominent role in disbursing tens of billions of dollars of stimulus money. It was the ideal perch from which he could keep funding the left-wing networks from which he sprang, this time with taxpayer money.

This helps explain why the political left is so upset about Mr. Jones’s resignation….

The Obamian Democratic Party. “Movement progressives.” Fellow Travelers.