Funny how the party that spent three years telling you everything was fine suddenly can’t stop fighting itself in public. DSA-backed candidates are knocking off establishment Democrats in primaries from Colorado to New York, and the people who used to run that party are standing there with that look on their face, the one a farmer gets when he realizes the fox got into the henhouse and the chickens voted for it.
Now Mike Johnson, a man who has spent his entire speakership trying to prove he’s not just Paul Ryan with a Bible, has decided to make lemonade. He’s launching something called “Contrast for America” on Monday, a play on Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract with America.” The website has five parts. One of them is a timeline of failed communist governments. Another is dueling lists: what Republicans are running on versus what the far-left insurgency wants. Abolish the Senate. Abolish police. Abolish prisons. Abolish borders. Hand the vote to noncitizens. Put the government in charge of every large corporation.
Office of Speaker Mike Johnson (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsYou don’t need a conspiracy theory for this one. They’re telling you to your face.
Johnson put out a video where he says, “Thirty-five years ago, Republicans and Democrats in Congress, they were fighting communism on a distant shore. Now it’s here.” He’s calling the midterm battle “common sense versus Communism” and accusing Democrats of wanting to drag the country down “this dark road of Marxism.” At a news conference Tuesday he said the contest is whether America stays a constitutional republic or gets “torn down to the foundation like the Communist Democrats want to do.”
Strong words from a guy who couldn’t pass a budget without holding a press conference about how hard he tried.
gdtography / PexelsBut here’s where I put on my dot-connector hat. Ask yourself who benefits from this fight. Not the voters. Not you. The DSA candidates benefit because they get to say the establishment is scared of them. Johnson benefits because he gets to point at the circus and say “look over there.” The incumbents who got toppled in Colorado and New York, the ones who spent years telling you they were the reasonable ones, they’re the ones standing in the rain.
And Johnson says the GOP could pick up eight seats. Eight. In a midterm. The party in the White House has lost Congress in almost every midterm going back to when your grandfather was young. But Johnson says this time is different because the Democrats nominated people who want to abolish the Senate. He’s been campaigning in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, with plans for 30 districts across 18 states.
Here’s what I know. The DSA’s own policy goals read like a wish list from a dorm room bull session at 2 a.m. Abolish borders. Mass amnesty. Public ownership of corporations. These aren’t fringe positions anymore. They’re winning primaries. The Democratic establishment created this monster by spending a decade pandering to its loudest activists, and now the monster is eating the establishment. Every action has a reaction, and the reaction is going to show up at the ballot box.
US Embassy Canada (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsJohnson may be a swamp creature, but even a broken clock tells you when the house is on fire. The Democrats built a coalition that included people who want to dismantle the country, and now those people are in charge of the primaries. The only question left is whether enough voters see it before November.
The establishment on both sides is scared. That’s the one thing I trust completely.