On September 1, 2020, the progressive flank of the Democratic Party was successful in getting Massachusetts to reject a chance to send another member of their modern political iconography and native son, a Kennedy, to Washington as their newly minted Senator.
The progressive wing did not back some insurgent, no-name upstart however. AOC [1] and the woke activist class got behind incumbent Senator Ed Markey – a creature of Washington since 1972, a creature that has been in Washington so long he fought against the desegregation [2] of Boston public schools.
The progressive left is obsessed and empowered by a need to rewrite or recontextualize history, not through a lens of all truth, but remade alone in their image. Nothing about the past is respected, even though they got behind an embodiment of all things wrong with the Democratic Party of the past. They rejected Joe Kennedy III [3], who, despite being a Kennedy, comes across as caring and thoughtful – working class in the way his grandfather Bobby did.
He gave the rebuttal to President Trump’s 2018 State of the Union. He was a rising star, a Kennedy that spoke Spanish! This race seemed like his to lose. But then AOC swept in. None of that Kennedy magic, in the compound home base of Massachusetts, seemed to matter. It started to hurt Joe.
AOC and the progressive left do not care about tradition or norms. They care about uprooting the entire American system, not improving it or building upon it, as even President Obama chastises them that they should. They want to tear down any American hero, any American apart of our country’s mythos.
This time, after going after Washington, Lincoln, Grant, and now even Ben Franklin, they came for Camelot. They are not woke – but shamelessly selectively woke. They do not care that Markey wanted to stop integration in Boston. They do not care that Markey spends most of his time away from Massachusetts in Chevy Chase, even though AOC railed against Joe Crowley for spending more time in McLean, VA, than Queens. They do not care that the Democratic Party was the party of the Klan.
They do not care that Planned Parenthood was founded by white supremacist and eugenicist Margaret Sanger. They do not care that Virginia’s governor donned blackface multiple times, or that Lee Carter incites riots. Ed Markey knew this bug in their hypocritical value set – and got in bed with them early – becoming a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal.
Joe Kennedy has lost, becoming the first Kennedy to do so in Massachusetts history. AOC defeated Nancy Pelosi and MLK III in the endorsement battle. A more traditional Democrat is not what the liberal base craves. They do not want the Kennedy name in Washington, let alone Washington’s name in Washington. The Progressives have ended Camelot. If I was Terry McAuliffe, I would err on the side of caution before making another run.
Yes, Biden is a moderate Dem at the top of the ticket. But he was saved by South Carolina before gaining steam and superdelegates, powering forward to become inevitable. And Virginia has become more like Massachusetts than South Carolina in recent years. Watch out.