AIPAC and Oligarchs Versus the Progressive Movement

It’s a battle of strategies, but one side’s strategy is straight up Benjamins

A deeply investigated piece in Huff Post broke news about the Justice Democrats laying off nine of their twenty staffers. I have some quibbles with the piece, but it’s pretty good reporting overall.

Justice Democrats, if you don’t know, are a very important millennial arm of the progressive movement coming out of Bernie’s 2016 presidential run. They’re basically the “electoral left”—they have a progressive, pro-worker politics, but they focus on legislation and elections rather than on building worker power or promoting a political program out in the streets.

In any other country, they’d be cooler versions of run-of-the-mill social democrats…which is why they didn’t even exist prior to 2016.

I’ve said this many times publicly, but Justice Dems have a GREAT strategy: run progressive challengers to conservative Democrats in solidly blue districts. Simple, like all good strategies.

What makes it so good?

• It identifies a clear problem (neoliberalism—>rightward shift of the Democratic Party—>centrist Dems in congressional seats for progressive districts).

• It exploits a unique source of leverage (representational misalignment—blue congressional districts underserved by their existing political class).

• It concentrates resources against the problem (finances and organizes for progressive challengers to vulnerable conservative Dems).

• And it rides, rather than resists, prevailing political trends (polarization).

I’ve been saying this is good strategy since 2017, when I first discovered them, because I could see that they checked all the right boxes. And their track record since inception speaks for itself.

The Justice Democrats are how the “Squad” got elected to Congress—including that bright star known as AOC. And while the Huff Post piece doesn’t acknowledge it, Justice Democrats didn’t just start flipping seats and pulling the party left in 2018 and 2020. They also smashed it in the 2022 mid-terms—progressives overperformed compared to centrist Dems, even though they didn’t win every seat they contested.

So what’s the problem? Why have a funding crunch?

That’s where money and power politics comes in. Let me explain.