"The Democrats onstage saw themselves as morally courageous. American voters, it turned out, saw a group of politicians hopelessly out of touch."

"Standing side by side at a primary debate in June 2019, nine of the party’s candidates for president were asked to raise their hand if they wanted to decriminalize illegal border crossings. Only one of them held still. Six years later, the party remains haunted by that tableau. It stands both as a vivid demonstration of a leftward policy shift on immigration that many prominent Democratic lawmakers and strategists now say they deeply regret, and as a marker of how sharply the country was moving in the other direction."

I'm reading "Can Democrats Find Their Way on Immigration? The party’s leftward shift in the Biden administration arguably laid the groundwork for President Trump’s aggressive approach. Deciding the next move won’t be easy" (NYT)(free-access link).

"The next move" = it's a game. You can't win the confidence of the people if they can see it's a game. 

What can you do to demonstrate/fake sincerity? The old plan was to denounce Trump as a racist, and there are still prominent Democrats like Ayanna Pressley, who's quoted saying: "Democrats have to stop talking about the issue of immigration within a Republican frame. This has nothing to do with law and order. This is about power, control, terror, and it is about racism and xenophobia. Donald Trump wants to make America Jim Crow again, and then some."

"We typically don’t engage in these bad-faith attacks but yesterday a line was crossed. A GOP candidate referred to Ayanna as 'a modern grand wizard of the KKK'..."

"... because she speaks out against racial injustice. This is backwards and harmful, but that is the point.”

 
Said Ayanna Pressley's "team," quoted in "Ramswamy [sic] stands by dis of Dem Rep. Pressley as among 'wizards of the grand KKK'" (NY Post).

Ramaswamy hadn't faulted Pressley for speaking out against racial injustice, but for saying "we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice," which he characterizes as contrary to racial injustice.

ADDED: Video of Ramaswamy.

"Everything I do is political," says Representative Ayanna Pressley, about revealing that she is, in fact, completely bald.

There's no explanation of why she lost all her hair — was it traction alopecia from wearing tight braids? — but she does explain why she's choosing to reveal that she is bald, rather than simply hiding it by continuing to wear wigs. The explanation is that everything she does is political, and that, she says, pushed her to talk about it and actually to show it (which you can see at 6:00 in the video).

I think she looks fine being out-and-proud bald (other than that she's projecting sadness and loss). I wish more people who go bald would be openly bald. If you're bald and you choose to wear wigs, it may be a good idea to wear a perfectly wiggy wig — like they say in the old song, a "wig-hat" — so that there's no expression of hiding or shame.

I think of Andy Warhol. He wore wigs from 1955 on, and they were very wiggy-looking wigs. From "The Andy Warhol Diaries":

"Wearing matching 'Squad' pajamas with 11 bridesmaids I’d never met, for the sake of a perfectly filtered, faux candid photo of us throwing our heads back and laughing..."

"... didn’t seem worth what the room would cost. So how could I say no to a friend I’ve known since we were 16, without becoming persona non grata?... I was uninvited to the long bachelorette weekend in Spain, and told, via WhatsApp, that I was no longer a bridesmaid. This left me $675 in the hole for what I had already spent on a trip I was now banned from, including a nonrefundable airline ticket...."

From "Go Broke or Go Home Bachelorette Parties/What happens when friends are consumed by wanting their bachelorette parties to be picture perfect at any cost? Credit cards are maxed out and debt rises. Instagram wedding envy wins the day" by Rhiannon Picton-James, published in the NYT on July 16th.

Interesting to see the disparaging use of "Squad." On July 15th, I was asking about the origin of the term "squad" to refer to the set of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna S. Pressley. It had popped into the national discourse through Nancy Pelosi, who'd seemed to be trying to get the group under control. In my effort to understand the term, I checked out Urban Dictionary and found 2 definitions that help understand the disparagement intended by Nancy Pelosi and Rhiannon Picton-James:

"Crew, posse, gang: an informal group of individuals with a common identity and a sense of solidarity. The term is a bit flashy and is more likely to be heard in hip-hop lyrics than in spoken conversation"/"A word overused by teenagers that think they're ghetto to describe their clique of friends"/"A dumb word only used by white middle schoolers in suburban areas to describe their group of friends and try to sound ghetto. It doesnt make them sound ghetto, but actually increases their whiteness."

And here's a piece from Vox on July 17th, "How 4 congresswomen came to be called 'the Squad'/The term is making headlines, but Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib have their own definition."

"For a left magazine to remove a classic gay-left essay is close to unheard of. But the remnants of The New Republic did exactly that last week..."

"... after publishing an article by Dale Peck on the candidacy and character of Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate for president in American history.... At the heart of the essay is a point that could, in someone else’s hands, have yielded a potentially nuanced insight into Buttigieg’s psyche. Buttigieg only came out four years ago; it seems his first serious relationship was and is with the man he married. Buttigieg is thereby more a homosexual than an acculturated 'gay.'... Like many others over the centuries, Buttigieg channeled this repression into becoming a classic example of 'the best little boy in the world'.... Peck tells us: Buttigieg is the gay equivalent of an 'Uncle Tom,' and he coins the term 'Mary Pete' to smear him as such.... [Peck's] 'gayer-than-thou' act is a classic of identity politics.... The point of the gay-rights movement for the left was to join other oppressed groups in overturning the entire liberal democratic and capitalist system. The point of the gay-rights movement for those of us on the right was to expand the space in which gay people can simply be themselves. That may mean embracing the identity of queer nonbinary whatever, or it may mean simply getting on with life as an individual who happens to be gay. No one is wrong to be the person they want to be. There is no right way or wrong way to be gay. I thought of Peck’s argument when confronted this week by a speech by Democratic congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.... 'We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice.' That’s why the hard left hates Buttigieg. Because he is a gay man who does not have what they believe is the correct 'queer voice.'"

Writes Andrew Sullivan (in NY Magazine).

Why are Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna S. Pressley called "The Squad"?

I keep seeing the term without an explanation of its origin. It wasn't easy to Google — especially with all the clutter having to do with Trump's recent tweets, which we're already discussing here. This post is just about the term "The Squad."

I decided to search the NYT archive for the 4 names plus "the squad" and to look at the oldest  all of the returns. The oldest article was "For All the Talk of a Tea Party of the Left, Moderates Emerge as a Democratic Power" (June 30):

While the House’s liberal superstars are adept at promoting their progressive positions and routinely generate headlines for breaking with the party line, they have not made a habit of lobbying their colleagues to defy Ms. Pelosi en masse. Last week, the foursome known as The Squad...

No explanation of who started that term and why.

The second-oldest is "It’s Nancy Pelosi’s Parade/'If the left doesn’t think I’m left enough, so be it,' she told me," a Maureen Dowd column from July 6th.

I asked Pelosi whether...it was jarring to get a bad headline like the one in HuffPost that day — “What The Hell Is Nancy Pelosi Doing?” The article described the outrage of the Squad, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts are known.

The term is not explained in the Dowd column (and isn't used in the HuffPo piece).

Next oldest is "Tensions Between Pelosi and Progressive Democrats of ‘the Squad’ Burst Into Flame" (July 9th):

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said they have no following in Congress. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York shot back that she and three of her fellow liberal freshmen, darlings of the left known collectively as “the squad,” are wielding the real power in the party.... The contretemps began when Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, asked Ms. Pelosi about the squad’s fury over the border aid package... The squad and its allies argue that they are tapping into the real energy in the Democratic base with their uncompromising and unapologetic stances....

Again, the term is used with no explanation. Further down, we see:

“AOC and The Squad have changed the entire national debate,” said an email rehashing the spat from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which offered a colorful “I STAND WITH AOC” sticker to anyone who donated to their work “electing more AOC’s to Congress.”

That suggests that the women came up with that name for themselves. Why would they do that? Maybe they're taking an epithet and wearing it with pride. I don't know.

There's also this other usage of "squad" in that article:

“This is an inevitable tension between a few progressives with one priority, which is their ideology, and a speaker with many priorities, including preserving the majority in the House, electing a Democratic president against Trump, and responding to the consensus of her caucus,” said Steve Israel, a Democrat and former representative of New York. “To the extent that it distracts from Donald Trump and becomes a circular firing squad among Democrats, it can be lethal.”

I am going to guess that talk of a circular firing squad — there's been a lot of that — led to calling the 4 Congresswomen "The Squad." That would explain why the explanation of the origin is suppressed. Too violent. Too much like a death threat.

Consulting Urban Dictionary, I can see that the use of the term could be experienced as racist: "Crew, posse, gang: an informal group of individuals with a common identity and a sense of solidarity. The term is a bit flashy and is more likely to be heard in hip-hop lyrics than in spoken conversation"/"A word overused by teenagers that think they're ghetto to describe their clique of friends"/"A dumb word only used by white middle schoolers in suburban areas to describe their group of friends and try to sound ghetto. It doesnt make them sound ghetto, but actually increases their whiteness."

How embarrassing! Embarrassingness increases the likelihood that this is the real origin of the term, since the source of the term isn't talked about.

I get the feeling Maureen Dowd heard the term and thought it was hip/cute/clever and she went public with it without understanding the problem with it. Now, they're stuck with it and vulnerable if anyone is ever curious enough to ask about the origin.

ADDED: From Elle Magazine in 2015: "Meet Hillary Clinton's Girl Squad/On Wednesdays, they wear pantsuits." Also, from 2018: "What Happened to Taylor Swift's Girl Squad?/Taylor Swift practically invented #SquadGoals, and now she's traveling solo inside her own suitcase. What gives?"

The asserted requirement that your "voice" must align with the color of your skin.

When stereotyping is not just okay but mandatory:

Rep Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice” pic.twitter.com/2NIj5Vvcor

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) July 15, 2019

The new Ocasio-Cortez is Ayanna Pressley.

There was so much talk yesterday about the Kavanaugh hearings and the Bob Woodward book, that you may not have noticed it was primary day in Massachusetts. And look what happened (NYT link):

Ayanna Pressley upended the Massachusetts political order on Tuesday, scoring a stunning upset of 10-term Representative Michael Capuano and positioning herself to become the first African-American woman to represent the state in Congress....

Her victory carried echoes of the surprise win in June by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who trounced a longtime House incumbent, Joseph Crowley, in New York.....

There is no Republican on the November ballot in this storied Boston-based district, which was once represented by John F. Kennedy and is one of the most left leaning in the country....

“This is a big wake-up call to any incumbent on the ballot in November,” said Mary Anne Marsh, a Boston-based Democratic strategist. “We’ve been in a change election cycle for years. But Trump may have opened the door for all these young candidates, women, people of color, because voters want the antithesis of him.”...

“It felt like a good time to give someone who’s not a white male a shot,” said Linus Falck-Ytter, 26, a software developer, after voting in Cambridge. “And I liked that she’s more outspoken about helping underrepresented communities.”...

Linus Falck-Ytter. I'm just going to guess that's a white male.

Capuano was himself a big liberal so she had to "win by out-liberaling a liberal" —as one Democratic politico put it.

She argued that the needs of the district had changed over time and that the overwhelming “hate” coming from the White House required more than simply voting the right way. Battling Mr. Trump and overcoming longstanding economic and racial inequities required an entire movement, she said, suggesting she was better positioned than Mr. Capuano to spearhead that effort with what she called “activist leadership.”

Moreover, she argued that her life experience — her father struggled with drug addiction and was incarcerated for most of her youth, and she is a survivor of sexual assault — better prepared her to help people who have lived through trauma and other struggles. Perhaps the defining line of her stump speech was this: “The people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.”

Well put!

“With our rights under assault, with our freedoms under siege, it’s not just good enough to see the Democrats back in power, but it matters who those Democrats are,” she said. She lacerated Mr. Trump as “a racist, misogynistic, truly empathy-bankrupt man,” but said that some of the policies that have created economic inequities in the district were put in place when Democrats were in the White House and in control of Congress.

“Change isn’t waiting any longer,” she declared. “We have arrived, change is coming and the future belongs to all of us.”

Welcome, Ms. Pressley. As that ogre Trump likes to say, we'll see what happens.

ADDED: A good — and much up-voted — comment at the NYT:

This victory is also a warning to the Black political establishment. Deval Patrick and John Lewis supported Capuano in a show of old guard male solidarity. And Byron Rushing, a Black, old guard, high ranking state legislator, was defeated last night too. They did not recognize the moment.

A lot of men are quaking in their boots this morning. Those that aren’t should be.

AND: "A lot of men are quaking in their boots this morning" — That assumes the men are wearing boots. I'm visualizing guys who've left their sneakers by the door and are propping their stocking feet up on the coffee table, leaning back, relaxing on the sofa, and looking for what they call "a good time": "It felt like a good time to give someone who’s not a white male a shot.” Don't worry, the women will handle everything, and do nothing but thank you, because you're doing your part by going utterly passive.