Monday Schadenfreude: The Delicious Demise of the Justice Democrats
From this past Saturday's Politico:
FIRST IN PLAYBOOK: MAJOR LAYOFFS AT JUSTICE DEMS — Justice Democrats, the progressive PAC that made waves in recent years by helping new-generation lefty candidates run against more establishment Dems, laid off nine of its 20 employees this week as the organization faces a major financial crunch, Daniel Lippman reports.
“It’s no secret that Democratic and progressive organizations like us are in a difficult fundraising environment right now,” Justice Dems executive director Alexandra Rojas said in a statement to Playbook. “We had to make tough decisions to remain one of the most impactful progressive organizations in the country for years to come.”
The group also separately lost its top spokesperson, Waleed Shahid, who left after six years and said in a tweet that he was proud to have played a role in building “one of the most impactful Democratic and progressive organizations from scratch.” Shahid is joining the board of the organization as he figures out his next steps.
Wait, so while Joe Biden set a fundraising record by hauling in $72 million during the second quarter of this year, Justice Democrats were forced to lay off nearly half their staff?
That is, in a word, hilarious.
Because as has been my outspoken thesis over the past 7 years, the Justice Democrats' sole purpose has been to try and undermine the Democratic Party. They wanted to remake the party in their image with a Democratic authoritarian leading as opposed to a Republican. Specifically, they wanted to bring in their own people who would be loyal to Bernie Sanders, whose principal message was that the Democrats weren't doing enough to help everyday Americans. They wanted to be the Tea Party of the Left, to come in and somehow force a center-left political party to dramatically lurch to the left. They felt that if they elected enough of their own, they could create a new voting bloc, one that the rest of the Democratic Party would have to appease to get anything done. The goal was never integration, but rather implosion designed to force today's Democratic Party to acquiesce to their demands.
Thankfully, the Democratic Party isn't as weak as the Justice Democrats believed. Other than a handful of victories in overwhelmingly Democratic districts, the Justice Democrats have been largely irrelevant when it comes to national politics. That's not to say they haven't done damage. After all, their calls for a Green New Deal and defunding the police more than likely cost Democrats multiple House seats in 2022. But by and large the impact of the Justice Democrats has been minimal. The reason for that is exactly what I mentioned: not one single Justice Democrat won a House seat in a competitive district. In 2022, Justice Democrats lost all 4 races they ran, against Democratic incumbents, showcasing that they were simply incapable of flipping seats even in a primary itself. Combined with a penchant for endorsing perennial losing candidates like Nina Turner and Bernie Sanders, the Justice Democrats became a punchline for the Bernie Sanders "political revolution" that failed to materialize.
With Joe Biden raising record amounts of money and Justice Democrats shedding staff quicker than Donald Trump shedding lawyers, this should bode well for 2024. The writing is on the wall that the "political revolution" was nothing more than a get-rich-quick scheme for Bernie Sanders and his ilk. Even AOC has had the good sense to endorse Joe Biden, much to the dismay of the dozens of Justice Democrats supporters still being duped by the organization. It is hard to pitch the idea that the Democratic Party is in dire need of reform when the party is singlehandedly fending off fascism and is doing so through a robust economy that includes student loan reform, green energy, and increased wages, all hallmarks of the Justice Democrats' platform. We simply reached a point where "establishment" Democrats were outflanking the Far Left and doing so in a way that made them irrelevant.
Another masterstroke at the hands of the Biden-Harris Administration.