Republicans are freaking out today over the Biden administration’s nomination of Neera Tanden to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Lindsey Graham has gone so far as to call her a “nutjob”, and with this much bile aimed at her, you might think she’s a leftist. She’s not. She’s not even a progressive (despite being the president and CEO for a thing they call the Center for American Progress) unless you redefine the word progress. In fact, she is just a standard neoliberal who even helped sink the Sander’s campaign and opposes Medicaid for All. Sanders and MfA are both centrist positions (balancing the needs of the people with the desires of the powerful), making Neera Tanden a near-right politician.
Everything toxic about the corporate Democratic Party is embodied in Neera Tanden.
Briahna Joy Gray, former national press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders
Republicans are apparently angry because she had a lively Twitter feed where she constantly bashed Republicans — as if their own commander-in-chief didn’t spend about a third of his tweet time doing the same thing. Are they not the party of of free speech? I’m kidding — we all knew they were lying about valuing free speech. Tanden certainly didn’t say that any Republicans should be taken out and shot — which is exactly what one of Trump’s attorneys recently said about the Republican former cybersecurity czar.
Don’t believe the Republican party when they call someone a leftist — they are probably lying. They want to make the Democratic party sound like dangerous extremists in order to energize the Republican base. They want you to believe that anyone left of Hitler is a Soviet, even while they tacitly support all of the strategies that made Russian communism controversial.
Don’t believe the Democratic party when they claim to be “the left” or “progressive”. They’re conservatives. They want to make the Democratic party sound progressive in order to energize the left to take them seriously and support them with both votes and labor while party leaders continue to support conservative positions. They do, of course, seem progressive if you only compare them to the fascism of today’s Republican party. And yes, there are individual Democrats who are definitely progressive; they don’t control the party.
It’s no wonder so many Americans are confused about politics. America’s ruling class (billionaires) and their minions continue to destroy the meaning of political words to the extent that it’s hard to even talk about what is real. We’ll have to overcome that if we’re going to ever have any kind of real progress. I’m certainly not suggesting anyone should oppose Neera Tanden’s nomination — with the Biden administration, that’s as good as it is going to get.