Monday, July 10, 2017

California Democrats Plunge Into 'Civil War'

Heh.

I love this.

It was bound to happen sooner or later.

At Politico, "In the wake of Donald Trump's election, progressives are demanding the party move more aggressively on a variety of issues":
LOS ANGELES — Long-standing tensions between the Democratic Party’s moderate and liberal wings have ignited in California, where progressive activists are redirecting their anger over Donald Trump and congressional Republicans toward Democratic leaders at home.

Stoked by a contested race for state Democratic Party chair and the failure of a single-payer health care bill, activists are staging protests at the capitol. Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon reported receiving death threats after shelving the health care legislation late last month, and security was tightened at the statehouse after activists disrupted a floor session last week.

The rancor, a spillover from the contentious Democratic presidential primary last year, is aggravating divisions in a state regarded nationally as a lodestar for the liberal cause. Establishment Democrats fear the rhetoric and appetite for new spending could go too far, jeopardizing the party’s across-the-board dominance of state politics.

All of it has taken on new significance as California embraces its role as the focal point of the anti-Trump resistance.

“We’re on the same team,” said Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, chairman of the Assembly’s progressive caucus. “We should not be fighting one another. We should argue with one another. … It should not devolve into something where it could tear the party apart.”

California established itself as a fortress of the opposition immediately after Trump’s election, with Democrats advancing high-profile legislation to defy the new president on climate change and immigration.

But progressives who have long agitated for more spending on social services and for stricter environmental and campaign finance rules believed that they might seize the post-Trump moment for other causes, too. Despite victories on a range of issues here in recent years, liberal activists have fallen short in other areas, unsettling progressives across the country who view California as a state in which they should be racking up wins...
This is especially interesting since Governor Brown has tacked to the hard left, positioning himself as the progressive left's main antagonist to President Trump, especially on, ahem, "climate change." See, "As Trump Steps Back, Jerry Brown Talks Climate Change in China," and "Jerry Brown Announces a Climate Summit Meeting in California."

The revolution inevitable eats its own. Governor Brown can't stop the anarcho-communist hoards agitating for the revolution.

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