Elissa Slotkin’s Democratic Donors Don’t Want You to Say Oligarchy

Elissa Slotkin’s Democratic Donors Don’t Want You to Say Oligarchy

New centrist darling and former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin’s star is rising in the Democratic Party. They picked the junior Michigan Senator to give a response to Trump’s State of the Union, and now she is gearing up to release what she calls a “war plan” to battle back against Trump’s widespread lawlessness. In general, it’s good to see a centrist Senator get into the specifics of how Trump is destroying democracy given how most centrists have used that as a talking point to fundraise more than as a starting point for true legislative obstruction of it, and by simply detailing her concerns, Slotkin has made herself more useful than at least half of the definitionally useless Democratic Senate.

That said, this “war plan” so far looks like another rebrand for centrist Democratic cowardice more than some original idea earnestly trying to address the threat in front of us. Slotkin wants to change what she says is the “weak and woke” image of the party, proving that Beltway centrists’ brains are permanently stuck in the braindead op-ed pages of America’s elite newspapers. DEI has always polled well and currently does poll well, but these supposed Very Serious people who claim they are dispassionate and data driven consistently prove themselves to be unambiguous ideologues who are sympathetic to Republican attacks on minorities and accept their premise that empathy for marginalized groups is inherently bad.

But the big tell in Slotkin’s plan is her demand that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others stop using the word oligarchy, claiming that people don’t understand it, which is an outright lie. A recent Data for Progress poll shows majorities of Democrats, Independents and almost a majority of Republicans all can identify what an oligarchy is—and when provided with the definition, Democrats say the US is currently an oligarchy by a +32 margin while Independents say it is by +14. A filibuster-proof majority of Democrats, 67 percent, and 61 percent of Independents say the US is moving towards an oligarchy. There is no doubt that Slotkin’s team has similar polling that reflects this dynamic.

Hmmmm…why would someone with the full-throated backing of the corporate wing of the Democratic Party say that we should stop saying oligarchy? She must be mistaken, right? CIA analysts are notorious for not knowing the basic dynamics of the populace, right?

Given that Slotkin herself has been comfortable using the word oligarchy to describe the Russian elite, it’s quite clear where this edict comes from: the Democratic oligarchy. Pretty much all the Democratic Party’s problems originate from the fact that their donor class is wholly opposed to the priorities of their voters and Democratic politicians generally care more about their donors than their voters. Most Democratic donors are just Republicans who are smart enough to know they won’t get invited to fancy Beltway cocktail parties if they go full GOP fascist.

So they line up behind centrists who would be Republicans half a century ago, and Slotkin is their new favorite racehorse. The thing that gives me some measure of hope that Slotkin might not be as cynical as past favored racehorses is that this “war plan” sure seems like it stems from her own experience as a CIA analyst, and she says things that many other Democrats who take direct orders from their donor class don’t. You don’t hear many Democrats talking about free and fair elections in 2026 despite the fact that if Trump has his way, it’s clear there won’t be any elections in 2026, and Slotkin gets this by saying “my definition of success” is “free and fair elections in 2026, retaking the House, defending the seats we have in the Senate.”

The bar for elected Democrats is so low that simply acknowledging reality puts you in the top 50 percentile of Senate Democrats at minimum. The most charitable reading of Slotkin’s war plan is that she is trying to match Chris Van Hollen’s energy from the center and is genuinely concerned about our democracy that is no more, but given that the Democratic Party exists primarily to absorb popular movements, make them less popular, and then remake them in the image of the Democratic oligarchy, there is very little reason to trust Slotkin’s war plan right now.

I think she has some good recommendations in the puff piece that the oligarchy-friendly Politico ran to launch this campaign, like “not waiting until 2027” to start the presidential primary, but the “weak and woke” bullshit does not give me confidence that this is anything other than what we have come to expect from the pro-oligarchy wing of the Democratic Party. It’s on Slotkin now to prove she’s not just like every other braindead handpicked candidate in Democratic history who has helped lead the party to a point where no one outside the Beltway elite thinks they speak for anyone but the oligarchs.

 
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