When Big Money Is All in, It’s the Status Quo, Not a Revolution

Previously I have suggested that if “The Resistance” ever was anything, it was being co-opted by the incompetent Democratic establishment to deflect from any meaningful accountability for their failures.

Now the New York Times, drops an article talking about how “The Resistance” is upending liberal politics.

Their evidence is that big donors are aggressively contributing to the “Grass Roots Movement”.

This is not is actually evidence of the opposite:

It started as a scrappy grass-roots protest movement against President Trump, but now the so-called resistance is attracting six- and seven-figure checks from major liberal donors, posing an insurgent challenge to some of the left’s most venerable institutions — and the Democratic Party itself.

………

Entrenched Democratic groups are facing growing questions about the return on the hundreds of millions of dollars they have spent over the years. Groups affiliated with Mrs. Clinton “spent so much money based on a bad strategy in this last cycle that they should step aside and let others lead in this moment,” said Quentin James, a founder of a political committee called the Collective PAC that supports African-American candidates.

Mr. James’s committee is among more than three dozen outfits that have started or reconfigured themselves since the election to try to harness the surge in anti-Trump activism. In addition to political committees, grass-roots mobilization nonprofits and legal watchdog groups, there are for-profit companies providing technological help to the new groups — essentially forming a new liberal ecosystem outside the confines of the Democratic Party.

………

“We’re in a disruptive period, and when we get through it, the progressive infrastructure landscape may look different,” said Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance, a club of wealthy liberals who donate at least $200,000 a year to recommended groups. “There may be groups that have been around that don’t rise to the challenge, and there may be some new groups that do rise to the challenge, while others fade away.”

The Democracy Alliance has helped shape the institutional left, steering more than $600 million since its inception in 2005 to a portfolio of carefully selected groups, including pillars of the Clinton-aligned establishment like the think tank Center for American Progress and the media watchdog Media Matters.

This is not, “An insurgent challenge to some of the left’s most venerable institutions,” this is a rebranding this is more of the same.

The big donors, the Harvey Weinsteins of the world, want gay marriage, but they don’t want unions or effective progressive taxation, or or fair trade deals, or cheaper drugs, or sensible limits to IP, since that would require real sacrifices on their part.

This is more of the same.

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