The AIPAC-Centric Lesson Lefties Must Learn from Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman’s Losses

Last night, Squad member Cori Bush lost her primary, just like her ally Jamaal Bowman did earlier this year. The primary takeaway from a macro perspective is how Democrats are apparently fine with foreign election interference so long as it is helping them. AIPAC, the lobbying arm of Israel’s right-wing Likud party currently perpetuating a genocide in Gaza, spent $12 million in the most expensive primary in U.S. history to unseat Jamaal Bowman and $8 million to take down Cori Bush last night. St. Louis prosecutor Wesley Bell beat Bush, as groups backing him outspent her by a ratio of 4 to 1.

AIPAC has targeted the Squad because they are the only part of the Democratic Party that has demonstrated any serious interest in holding Israel accountable for its crimes against humanity, and some Dems looking the other way and taking their money is a tacit admission that they do not want to get on Likud’s bad side so long as they have a political ally fending off attacks from their left flank.

A lot of the progressive thinking since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shock victory over Joe Crowley, the third-ranking Democrat in the house in 2018, is that we can throw our weight around in deep blue districts — and we can — but the thing we must keep in mind is that deep blue districts are still heavily Democratic districts. You can support lefty policy to your heart’s desire and probably be fine, but what you cannot do is go against the Democratic Party’s main priorities and anger the Democratic voting base.

Bush and Bowman’s opponents both hit them hard for voting against Biden’s major infrastructure bill, and the notion that they were supposedly standing in the way of popular Democratic policy was behind the thrust of a lot of AIPAC’s ad spending. This attack highlights the political limits of opposing Democratic policy, even though it is disingenuous and misrepresents how Bush and Bowman actually fought tooth and nail for Joe Biden’s agenda.

As Sophie Hurwitz excellently detailed for Mother Jones, Bush and Bowman shared the same position as Joe Biden that both infrastructure bills needed to pass, as exemplified when the president said “If this is the only [bill] that comes to me, I’m not signing it. It’s in tandem.” Bowman described the one that passed as a “hard” infrastructure bill about roads and such, while he, Bush and others held out to pass the other bill centered around support for childcare, universal pre-K, paid family leave and other important policies that have widespread public support. The Squad held their votes to extract concessions and try to get as much of it through Congress as possible so they could meet up with everyone else at the finish line and vote it into law.

Remember that Joe Manchin was basically President of Letting Good Things Happen during this process thanks to the razor-thin margin in the Senate, and there was a huge fight to strip priorities that both progressives and Biden asserted were intrinsic to the bill. Being good soldiers and putting their necks on the line for the Democratic establishment likely cost them their seats when figures backed by AIPAC and the Democratic establishment portrayed that effort as opposing Democratic policy.

So what’s the lesson here? The natural inclination is to say “fuck ‘em, this is war,” because who would want to deal with someone who just stabbed you in the back? And this is war as far as AIPAC is concerned, and there is no meeting in the middle here with them. However, the lesson from Bush and Bowman’s losses is not to toss AIPAC and the Democratic establishment into the same basket of deplorables, because then it just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We have to drive a wedge between them.

The goal should be to make the Democrats choose between AIPAC or progressive political support, which means that in key moments like the infrastructure bill fight, where Bowman and Bush were sticking their necks out to try to push Joe Biden’s signature legislation over the finish line, we must be savvier about demanding AIPAC-centric concessions from the Democrats in exchange.

Us lefties are good at reflexively using our ideological fervor as leverage in political negotiations, but a similarly passionate tactical marginalization of AIPAC now must be embedded into every political calculation of the left going forward. We know they are coming for every one of our representatives, and so they must act and vote in ways that attempt to insulate them from these inevitable disingenuous attacks in Democratic primaries fueled by Republican donors. I cannot help but wonder how different today may be had Bowman and Bush held their noses and cast a vote that ultimately was meaningless for a policy that passed without it. Symbolic political calculations like this must be given more weight now given how easy it is to misrepresent the past in our present politics.

A more straightforward defense would be demanding a public pledge in the moment from the Democratic Party and its affiliated organs to not support any primary challenge against Reps. like Bowman and Bush in exchange for putting their careers on the line to try to pass Biden’s legislation. Another goal should be to try to get AIPAC money out of Democratic primaries altogether. If the Likud Party is supposedly so interested in helping the Democratic Party out, they can do it in the general election after the Democrats have chosen their candidate without any foreign election interference. Citizens United obviously limits how much progressives can box AIPAC out, but at the very least, we must present the choice as between one or the other while being a better asset to the Democratic Party than AIPAC is.

And lefties are, as demonstrated by Bush and Bowman sacrificing their seats to help get as much of Biden’s agenda passed as possible while the Likud Party perpetuates a genocide that helped make Joe Biden a one-term president while its indicted leader clearly supports Donald Trump.

A lot of people today are repeating the disingenuous infrastructure bill attacks launched on Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush over votes that no one made a big deal of at the time, and this is proof of their effectiveness. Lefties can still push Democrats around in blue districts, we just need to make sure to look over our shoulder for the genocidal maniacs trying to marginalize our power and make efforts in day-to-day political life that attempt to insulate us from AIPAC’s undue influence we know is coming.