EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: “Jamaal Bowman’s loss signals uncertainty of where the first member of ‘the Squad’ to lose went wrong,” according to AP’s first draft headline yesterday:
It’s since been revised to: What Jamaal Bowman’s loss in New York means for the future of ‘the Squad.’
Perhaps a news and opinion organization that isn’t so close to the issue that they had(?) an office in Gaza in the same building as Hamas and Al-Jazeera might be able to figure this one out. Such as Batya Ungar-Sargon at Spiked, who explains: Why Americans are rejecting the Squad’s ‘anti-Zionism.’
The American left’s obsession with Palestine is a marker of its privilege. You need immense economic security to prioritise foreign policy during a cost-of-living crisis, where housing costs have skyrocketed and the price of groceries is up by double digits compared with 2020. Indeed, when Bowman won his seat four years ago, he criticised his then opponent for ‘spending too much time on issues so far from his district’. Oh the irony!
Bowman is the first Squad member to be ousted, but he won’t be the last. At the end of the day, the Squad, like the progressive left more broadly, represents only a small elite. Its views were fomented in the lab of American universities and are totally at odds with both the cultural and economic interests of the working class.
That’s the real story behind Bowman’s stinging defeat.
Much more like this, please. Or as Seth Mandel wrote at Commentary before Bowman’s defeat on Tuesday: Let Them Fear Our Voice.
(Classical reference in headline — to an earlier election year showstopper from AP, back in 2008.)