Primary Every Democrat
Feb. 4th, 2025 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerI saw an interesting essay in my newsfeed yesterday, Primary Every Democrat. Written by former national political reporter Meredith Shiner and published in The New Republic, it distills my frustration about our most senior/most powerful elected Democratic party politicians: they so completely fail to understand the political and media landscape of 2025— or 2015, for that matter— that they're unable to offer any meaningful check against the Constitutional crisis President Trump has created in just his first two weeks in office as he and his cronies engage in rampant illegal behavior burning down government agencies.
The threat of primarying a politician, verb-ing the institution primary elections, is no stranger to Republicans. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have been primarying mainstream GOPers for years, pushing them to the extreme right or replacing them with extremists in cases where candidates tried to hold on to their scruples of recognizing factual reality and the rule of law. Even now the threat of being primaried keeps the congressional Republicans in line. Trump controls most of the GOP fundraising; and his henchman Elon Musk spent an estimated $250 million of his own money in just the final months of the last election cycle to help elect him. What's a quarter of a billion dollars to the literal World's Richest Man?
Now we Democrats need to do it, too. Primarying, that is. Republicans have shown us they treat modern politics as a knife fight. We Dems have too many leaders who are still playing Pat-a-cake. We need to push out of the way every complacent fossil who still politics like it's 1992. They're failing to represent us anymore.
The threat of primarying a politician, verb-ing the institution primary elections, is no stranger to Republicans. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have been primarying mainstream GOPers for years, pushing them to the extreme right or replacing them with extremists in cases where candidates tried to hold on to their scruples of recognizing factual reality and the rule of law. Even now the threat of being primaried keeps the congressional Republicans in line. Trump controls most of the GOP fundraising; and his henchman Elon Musk spent an estimated $250 million of his own money in just the final months of the last election cycle to help elect him. What's a quarter of a billion dollars to the literal World's Richest Man?
Now we Democrats need to do it, too. Primarying, that is. Republicans have shown us they treat modern politics as a knife fight. We Dems have too many leaders who are still playing Pat-a-cake. We need to push out of the way every complacent fossil who still politics like it's 1992. They're failing to represent us anymore.
