The Left Eats Its Own

When the late Arizona senator John McCain bucked his party he was called a "maverick" and feted by the progressive media, but when one of Arizona's current senators, Kyrsten Sinema, bucks her party she's called every name in the left's very thick thesaurus of insults.

Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) provides the details:

Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children. And like clockwork, the progressive mob has set on Kyrsten Sinema. Next time the left lectures on unity, women’s rights or Joe Biden’s decency, lock your door.

The Arizona senator continues to infuriate her fellow Democrats, who are frenzied to impose their $3.5 trillion social revolution. Ms. Sinema reportedly has issues with the cost of the package as well as its tax proposals and some programs.

She’s conducted dozens of meetings with the White House and key players, though has also made clear she won’t be jammed and won’t negotiate with the public. Her refusal to bow to the left’s price tag and timeline has incensed colleagues and activists alike.

So the party member has now officially been declared an enemy of the party cause—fair game for the tactics the left long ago honed for use against the right.

What are some of those tactics?

"We’re committed to birddogging” Ms. Sinema, vowed Our Revolution Executive Director Joseph Geevarghese to Politico this week. “We’re going to make her life unpleasant or uncomfortable” until she follows orders.

The group—which spun out of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign—gathered shock troops this week outside Ms. Sinema’s Phoenix and Tucson offices to make a start on that threat. Only the left gets away with warnings like this. Suburban parents who grump at school boards are labeled (by the same progressives) “domestic terrorists.”

The Arizona Working Families Party and the Sunrise Movement arrayed Monday at the Boston Marathon with plans to accost the senator as she ran (an injury prevented her from taking part). An activist confronted her on a flight to Washington. Progressives stalked her after she landed, hounding her for responses.

This was after activists at Arizona State University chased her into a bathroom and videotaped her there. Liberal groups are running ads in Arizona trashing her. Democratic operatives last month launched the Primary Sinema PAC (using “primary” as a verb).

The press—which spent several years worrying that MAGA hats were triggering — has licensed and encouraged the mob. “What’s Wrong With Kyrsten Sinema?” demanded the New York Times. The Nation called her the “Senate’s newest super villain,” while the New Republic branded her a “traitor.” Jezebel, the “feminist” blog, tweeted: “Absolutely Bully Kyrsten Sinema Outside Of Her Bathroom Stall.”

"Until she follows orders"!? Aren't United States senators supposed to do what they genuinely believe to be best for the country? Wasn't McCain a hero to the left for refusing to "follow orders"? (Well, he was a hero until he ran against Barack Obama in 2008.)

One might expect that Sinema's female colleagues would express outrage at the treatment being meted out to her by the very folks who profess to champion independent women and who in other cases condemn the harassment of women.

Yet the party’s women have been largely silent—never mind the outrage if any group dared similar moves against, say, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (AOC once even objected to Nancy Pelosi’s mild, private rebuke of the Squad, saying it amounted to “singling out” “women of color,” which could inspire “death threats.”)

And about the only male Democratic senator willing to say anything about Ms. Sinema was Mr. Sanders—who accused her of “sabotage.” Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan sneered that he was waiting for Ms. Sinema to show the party “something other than a designer purse.”

If her female colleagues won't defend her one might think President Biden, who was elected largely because many voters thought he'd bring decency to the Oval Office, would tell his party to back off. But in his only public comment on the matter, Mr. Biden delivered himself of a lapidary bit of callousness, shrugging that the treatment of Sinema is just "part of the process."

None of this behavior is a surprise to the right. The left more than a decade ago began embracing intimidation as a basic political tool.

Think of the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative nonprofits, or Barack Obama browbeating the Supreme Court, or activist boycotts of companies that supported Republicans. By giving license to this behavior, senior Democrats allowed it to escalate dramatically in the Trump years.

Remember Rep. Maxine Waters cheering when White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was run out of a restaurant and telling followers to do the same to others, to “create a crowd” and “tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Ms. Strassel concludes with this:

If leaders think these kinds of campaigns will stop at the doors of “centrists” like Ms. Sinema or Sen. Joe Manchin, they need to crack the history books. An unleashed progressive left will use the same tactics against anyone unwilling to bend to its rule—right, center, left, far left. Revolutions eat their own. And this revolution is now headed toward Democrats themselves.

She's right. Left wing revolutions going back to the French Revolution in 1789 were usually led by idealists, but once the revolution succeeded the idealists were deemed no longer useful to the ruthless tyrants in the movement. The idealists were soon shunted aside or, more often, sent to the guillotine, the firing squad or the gulag.

The left always seems to wind up eating its own.