Don’t let the Black Lives Matter credentials fool you. Minyon Moore, the 2024 DNC chair, is a stanch Swamp careerist. The “grassroots” image is a carefully crafted thing – a masterful work of “astroturfing,” one might say. President Joe Biden serving as flag-bearer has driven home perceptions that Democrats have morphed into the official party of the political establishment. While the continuing presence of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as Republican Senate leader does much to discount that notion, it should be emphasized that only one of the two major political parties today is still able to successfully apply the contrived politics of pre-2016 America to its presidential nominating process – but how much longer can it last?
Party Like It’s 1992
In the modern era, the election of George Bush Sr. as president in 1988 was a bellwether event. From that moment on, both Democrats and Republicans engaged in a rather transparent yet highly successful bit of theater in which partisan rhetoric was ratcheted up significantly while actual electoral outcomes mattered little. Over 12 years of Bushes and 16 years of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, an ensconced ruling elite maintained unbroken control of the White House for nearly three decades while ceaselessly tossing out copious chunks of raw meat to red and blue supporters along the way.
Republican voters finally tired of this hollow game in 2014, toppling House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a stunning primary upset. This set the stage for an even greater earthquake two years later with the emergence of outsider presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The single most distinguishing characteristic of American politics today is that the Democrat base has yet to shuck off the pre-2016 formula. And so, once again, the Democratic National Committee, seat of blue establishment political power, is setting up its folding table, three shells, and pea.
Minyon Moore – Astroturfing Exemplified
“Minyon Moore, the former [Joe] Biden adviser who served on the board of directors of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation last year, will chair the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the party announced [Aug. 8],” Fox News reports. “Moore, a Chicago native who currently serves as a co-chair of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, previously served on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and as assistant to the president and director of White House Political Affairs under President Bill Clinton.”
Minyon Moore (Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images)
Moore personifies Democrat insider politics to a T. The Black Lives Matter connection conjures imagery of committed progressive ideology that only serves to conceal her identity as a staunch Swamp careerist.
“Moore now leads the public affairs firm Dewey Square Group’s state and local affairs and multicultural strategies practices, where she deals with, among other issues, branding and public policy strategies for corporate and nonprofit clients,” The Chicago Sun-Times writes. Dewey has been cozily nestled within the core of the blue side of the DC colossus for decades.
“The Dewey Square Group is a Democratic consulting firm that represents Fortune 500 companies and advises political campaigns,” watchdog site Influence Watch states. “The company and its leadership have consulted for numerous Democratic political candidates including working on the presidential campaigns of former Vice President Walter Mondale, then-US Sen. John Kerry, then-Vice President Al Gore, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and President Bill Clinton.” It is telling that Dewey is an experienced practitioner in the art of phony politicking.
“The Dewey Square Group has faced allegations over the years of conducting ‘astroturfed’ campaigns, or the tactic of making a PR firm-directed campaign appear to be a grassroots movement,” Influence Watch continues. “The firm has been linked to multiple letter-writing campaigns where it was discovered letters were either allegedly forged or written by people who later denied being the author.”
How about that? The maestro of the 2024 Democrat convention is a top staffer at a company with a history of masking canned political campaigns as authentic popular movements. It’s a perfect way to describe how the party operates today.
Pretend Time for Democrats
Moore’s BLM ties again confirm that fashionable progressive causes of the day do not pose a threat to the DC control apparatus. The DNC knows this and has been able to absorb the leftist social leanings of a sizable amount of its voting base via its presidential nomination process. It ventilates outrage by allowing progressive issues to dominate nationally televised party debates and convention offerings and then leisurely goes about crowning its selected insider candidate as the party nominee.
Joe Biden (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Think back to the circus that was the endless 2020 Democrat debate/town hall slog. From allowing race-baiting radicals like Univision anchor Jorge Ramos to badger candidates with nonstop identity politics questioning to having a nine-year-old transgender child query Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) at a CNN forum, the optics were pure progressive excess.
What did it all lead to? A thoroughly unwanted Joe Biden, who had spent the previous 47 years in the halls of Washington power, wobbled off with the nomination.
In 2016, Democrats crowed about unveiling the most progressive platform in party history. Democrats “advanced what is easily their most liberal platform ever as representatives of [Sen.] Bernie Sanders [I-VT] and Hillary Clinton strove toward unity during a sometimes contentious party meeting,” NBC News reported at the time.
The next sentence in the NBC account is telling: “The draft platform… showed Sanders’ clear influence, even though he lost a battle on his top priority: opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.” The old formula applied: Offer the rhetoric of reform while never threatening the status quo in any serious way.
There was no denunciation of a global trade treaty coveted by multinational business goliaths, but there was plenty of caterwauling about “reining in Wall Street” and “stopping corporate concentration.” “Ending systemic racism” and “reforming our criminal justice system” were also staples of a platform meant only to mollify the left wing of the party. What did it all lead to? A coronation of Hillary Clinton, the most visible embodiment of the Bush-Clinton-Obama orbit possible. How long will sincerely anti-establishment Democrats put up with this ongoing ruse? One glance at the GOP elite’s anguish over its inability to overcome the enduring popularity of Trump among its grassroots supporters shows that, of the two parties, only one voting base remains stuck in the old Uniparty matrix.
There’s good news for the DNC, however. It can still get blue voters to back its nominees merely by demonizing Republican opponents as an existential threat. The election of Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) in 2022 proves Democrat voters will back anyone once the GOP foe has been successfully caricatured.
Here’s the bad news: The party now has a genuine outsider presidential candidate making waves. The campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bears all the harbingers that marked the fall of Eric Cantor in Republican circles nine years ago. The more attention he gets as an alternative to Biden, the clearer it becomes that the current Democratic Party structure is fiercely resistant to real change.
