The left has found itself a new litmus test. It always does. And unless you’re a seasoned political junkie (not that there’s anything wrong with being one!), you may have lost track of how many such tests the left has imposed in just the past twenty years.
In 2008, Barack Obama passed the test of his era. Back then, the American left was united in opposition to the Iraq War. If you were a progressive politician who wasn’t publicly angry about George W. Bush’s foreign policy, you didn’t stand a chance. The junior senator from Illinois deftly tapped into that anti-war sentiment, defeated his more moderate primary opponents, and made it to the White House. A few years into his administration – with Guantanamo Bay still open, and US troops still in Iraq and Afghanistan – progressives conveniently forgot all about that anti-war litmus test.
Squeezing the Saint
A decade later, there was a new article of faith to which all needed to swear allegiance. By 2018, if you wanted to get ahead in the Democratic Party, you needed to (loudly) demonstrate your commitment to addressing climate change. Barely a month into her freshman House term, media darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal. Every progressive candidate with political ambitions signed on. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, having shrewdly taken the temperature of the young activists who occupied her office, shifted left on the environment, signaling other Democrats to fall in line. As the 2020 election drew closer, American progressives even convinced the climate movement’s pubescent saint, Greta Thunberg, to endorse Joe Biden, a man she had previously despised. “I never engage in party politics,” she wrote, before doing exactly that. From a climate perspective, she conceded on Twitter, Biden was “very far from enough.” Then: “But, I mean…you know…damn! Just get organized and get everyone to vote #Biden.”
The progressive Political Vise even works on sullen Swedish teenagers!
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