The hounding of Kyrsten Sinema
The Arizona Democrat was followed into a bathroom by progressive activists.
That progressives loathe Kyrsten Sinema is not news but the shifting boundaries of their loathing is noteworthy.
The Arizona senator is assailed by MSNBC — formerly a punchy progressive news outlet, now a Democrat establishment scold — and decried in the joke-free finger-wagging monologues of late-night comedians like Seth Meyers. These edgy radicals of the left-leaning news/entertainment industrial complex are aiming their fire at a centrist Democrat senator in service of a centrist Democrat president because apocalyptic hysteria gives them more fulfilment than ideas, policy or the humble comforts of family, faith and leisure that enrich the lives of happy people. Never mind, because they have got their point across and that point is that Sinema is A Bad Person.
Leftist group Living United for Change in Arizona has tweeted a video of activists pursuing the senator into a bathroom. The incident took place at Arizona State University, where Sinema is teaching classes on legal issues in social work. The activists can be seen approaching the senator and asking to speak with her only to be told she is leaving. They proceed to follow her, filming her as they do, into a bathroom where Sinema enters a stall and flushing sounds can eventually be heard.
From outside the stall, the students harangue her on her reluctance to support Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill — she wants spending capped lower than $3.5 trillion — and the need to repeal ‘anti-immigrant legislation’. One of Sinema’s pursuers demands the repeal of SB1070, the state statute that requires law enforcement to ‘determine the immigration status’ of any person they stop ‘where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States’. She says this statute was responsible for her grandparents being deported back to Mexico in 2010 while the absence of ‘a path to citizenship’ prevented her from going to see her grandfather, who died recently. She adds that there are millions of ‘undocumented people’ in similar or worse situations and ‘we need to hold you accountable’.
In a subsequent video, she and her associates follow Sinema out of the bathroom and along a hallway, yelling ‘Build back better, pass the bill’, ‘Undocumented, unafraid’ and ‘I am somebody and I deserve citizenship’. (Both videos provide insight into the odd permutations of a politics rooted in righteous victimhood. This young woman has become convinced that her continued presence in a country of which she is an ‘undocumented’ resident is some sort of oppression.)
It shouldn’t need to be said that following an elected official — or anyone — into a bathroom and filming them is not a legitimate form of protest. Sinema is often accused of being inaccessible but that is no justification. Build Back Better would be one of the centrepieces of President Biden’s term in office and it is only natural that Democrats want everyone on their side to back it, but that is no justification either. A path to citizenship for the Dreamers or a wider amnesty for illegal immigrants are emotive issues that stir deeply held beliefs and feelings — still no justification. College campuses are Bizarro World territories in which debate is considered disruptive so it’s to be expected that disrupting an instructor’s bathroom break is considered debate. Even so, no dice.
There is no need to invoke the slippery slope and ask where this kind of behaviour could lead. It is wrong in its own right. Do not mistake this for liberal good intentions poorly applied: this is progressivism in action and observably distinct from liberalism. In place of protest, pursuit. In place of campaigning, confrontation. Persuasion is not the object of these actions but intimidation, a flexing of power by activists who know that, because of their place in the identity politics hierarchy, an elected Democrat cannot be seen to refuse their demands on camera.
It’s true that politicians have always been at risk of embarrassing run-ins with displeased voters, ill-tempered activists and sundry malcontents, but there were — or seemed to be — implicit boundaries and agitators were generally considered to have undermined their cause when they trespassed these boundaries. The invasion of Sinema’s privacy, much like the heckling of Senator Joe Manchin outside his houseboat, and like earlier examples of Republicans and conservatives accosted in restaurants or treated to mobs outside their home, tells us these boundaries are collapsing and with them the bipartisan disapproval of their violation. Asked about the hounding of two senators from his own party, President Biden commented: ‘I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics but it happens to everybody,’ before laughing. ‘The only people it doesn’t happen to are people who have Secret Service standing around. So it’s part of the process,’ said the most heavily-guarded man in the United States. A line has been crossed and the return journey will be some time coming, if ever.
This is why it is an error to conflate progressivism and liberalism. Not only does progressivism not share liberalism’s cherishing of debate, freedom of conscience, and distinctions between public and private spheres, it actively seeks to dismantle them. Progressivism is not interested in a clash of ideas for it has already had all the ideas and now everyone else must accede to them. The clash is between will and anyone or anything that fails to bend to it. It’s as if someone took Nietzsche and Marx and fused them together in the philosophy department of Portland State.
That a Democrat is the latest unfortunate to encounter the progressive impulse is immaterial. (One can imagine the apocalyptic spasm were a progressive lawmaker to be followed into a restroom by anti-immigration activists. The New York Times would publish a timeline documenting how January 6 led directly to the Powder Room Putsch.) This is what many Democrats, the mainstream media and the broader civic culture has spent the past 18 months promoting, though many of these behaviours were indulged or encouraged long before the Great Awokening. You don’t have to spend long skimming through blue-checkmark Twitter to find responses ranging from equivocation to endorsement of the activists’ conduct. After all, if silence is violence, Sinema is the true aggressor and her pursuers the real victims. A manic logic has triumphed.
Incidentally, it is a testament to progressivism’s ascendancy that Sinema has become synonymous with moderation and even conservatism. She was endorsed by EMILY’s List, has 100 per cent ratings from Planned Parenthood and NARAL, 86 per cent from the Human Rights Campaign, a 78 per cent lifetime score from the AFL-CIO, and even Americans for Democratic Action gives her a respectable 65 per cent. A decade ago Sinema would have been recognised for what she is: a mainstream, pragmatic liberal. Arizona may be in the process of purpling but it remains a state in which almost twice as many voters identify as conservative than as liberal. In that context, Sinema’s centre-left stance is all the more striking.
Regardless, Sinema won’t be the last senator followed into a bathroom, or other previously off-limit places. The sharing of the clip on social media is about clout and others after clout will see it. Some will act accordingly. Those who think like Sinema, or think to her right, or otherwise think in ways that might make them a target for progressives, will also see the video. Some of them will act accordingly, too.
It’s part of the process now.
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