Marble Falls       I’m afraid that I’m living in an alternate political reality.  Everything I read, from the Trumpers to mainstream media, tells me that as a progressive, I’ve mysteriously gone from marginal to powerful.  How and why did this happen, and how come I don’t have more to show for it, if it’s true?

Reading the Wall Street Journal’s analysis of Vice President Harris’ choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be on her ticket as vice-president, the report spent huge amounts of ink speculating on the role progressives of one kind or another might have had on the choice.  Was the governor of Pennsylvania a near miss because of progressive lobbying around his statements on campus protests and the Gaza conflagration?  Did Walsh manage to be two-handed enough on this issue to survive, and so forth along this vein?  Meanwhile, the Harris camp, which would seem to really know, sought to disprove a negative, saying progressives had no role in her decision whatsoever, yet that didn’t dissuade the reporters and pundits from their endless commentary to the contrary.

It’s also big news that two members of the so-called “squad” in Congress, composed of some progressives, have lost Democratic primary challenges in New York City and St. Louis.  Lobbyists are taking all of the credit based on huge amounts of money they spent, but the winners in these primaries were anything but conservatives, and also identified as progressives.  In the case of Missouri Representative Cori Bush, voting against President Biden’s Industrial Recovery Act might not have been the best move, as well as some investigations around campaign financing that exposed some vulnerability.  Did progressives really lose here, or just change horses?  We’ll see in the general election, which could still be devastatingly difficult for conservatives to win.

Nonetheless, I’m still not feeling powerful, despite all of these reports about progressive clout.  A lot of it, I fear, comes from the Republican and right-wing talking points from Trump-Vance on down to red state governors and politicians.  It feels a lot like a new flavor of red-baiting to me.

Conservatives, except on the fringes in places like Arizona, the far west, and deep south, are a bit more careful about calling their opponents commies these days.  Partly, that’s because the Trump crowd continues to play footsie with Russia’s Putin, has mixed feelings about opposing their invasion of Ukraine, and might be willing to see that country go to the commies.  China riles them up, but you can’t catcall about commies in general in the way they used to in their good old days, instead, they have to rail about socialists.  Once they go down that road and start beating the drum about the tiny socialist presence in Congress and near invisibility as a political party, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to start conflating socialists and progressives as one and the same, peas in the same pod.

To her credit, Harris seems not be getting bought into this new form of red-baiting.  Reportedly, she feels comfortable in her skin as a California progressive and with a Midwestern progressive as her number two.  She also feels her record on Gaza can handle the heat from any direction.  So far, Trump-Vance have had trouble landing any blows in this area or even getting on the same page and figuring out a new campaign strategy.  Maybe that’s why the media is wallowing around hoping progressives can be seen as powerful and dangerous enough to be clickbait, while progressives know we may be a punching bag for all of them, but the notion that we have real power politically is a mirage, even it should be the status quo.  Walz handled it deftly, saying, “what’s wrong with children having full bellies so they can learn?”  Hard to call that a progressive position that’s threatening late state capitalism or anything in the halls of power.

Red-baiting is red-baiting, no matter how the words are substituted.