About one month ago, Matt Bruenig was fired from Demos for tweeting (relatively) benign barbs at Neera Tanden. It wasn’t the “what” of what he was tweeting, so much as the “who.” And, while Twitter isn’t real life, Matt was an expectant father-to-be, and losing a job in that situation is sub-optimal. Now that the dust has mostly settled and the factions are clear, some lessons can be gleaned from what should have been a tiff confined to the decidedly-not-IRL stakes of Twitter. In fact, Bruenighazi can be used as a lens to understand a few new and novel things about this election:
While the ideological distance between us is less, Liberals are the true enemy of the Left in the United States, not the rapidly dwindling white nationalists that make up the GOP.
The Liberal establishment is scared. They will knock down the best (albeit most inflammatory) avatar of Millenial Leftism they can manage, but they still ignore the content of his critiques in doing so (and completely ignore young women and PoC–the start of the spat that ended in Bruenig losing his job in the first place).
For the Left to succeed in this time of flux and realignment, a clear, moral argument must be made against the limitations of Liberal representation politics.
The Matt Bruenig affair, while decidedly shitty for Matt and his new family, and slightly less shitty for those of us who enjoyed his online presence, has resulted in another corner of the velvet drapery covering the rotting flesh of liberalism falling off, revealing the degredation beneath.