Socialists will burn Democratic Party ‘to the ground’: Joe Concha

Two House Democrats voted with Republicans this week to advance a resolution condemning socialism, and you'd have thought from the reaction that Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez had defected to another planet. That tells you something. Condemning socialism used to be a bipartisan no-brainer, the kind of vote nobody blinked at. Now it splits the caucus down the middle and makes national news when a couple of Democrats from working-class districts refuse to play along with the party's drift.

Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez aren't radicals. They represent Maine and Washington districts that don't look like Brooklyn or Berkeley, and they know their voters aren't asking for collective ownership of the means of production. What they're picking up on is a real fracture. The party's energy, its loudest voices, its most online organizers, have moved sharply left, while the people who actually decide House majorities in swing districts have not. Joe Concha calling this a fuse that could burn the party down isn't hyperbole for effect. It's just describing what happens when a coalition tries to hold together members who can't agree on whether socialism deserves a formal condemnation.

The irony is thick. Democrats spent years insisting Republicans were exaggerating the socialist drift, that it was a fringe talking point. Then a resolution simply saying socialism is bad couldn't get uniform support from Democratic members. You don't need Trump's old warnings about Venezuela to make that point anymore. The vote made it for him.