SALENA ZITO: The populist sledgehammer kills Amazon jobs that Middle America would love to have.
Tito Brown can’t imagine driving a perfectly good thing out of a town that hasn’t had a perfectly good thing come its way in a very long time.
At least, a perfectly good thing the size and scope of the Amazon headquarters that ideological politics drove out of Long Island City on Thursday, when Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., danced on the grave of the deal as Amazon walked away from the New York project.
Brown doesn’t really get that. He governs a city with a declining population, a 40 percent poverty rate, and would welcome the opportunity for a project such as Amazon to have considered locating here.
“Oh, any time I can get regional and/or economic growth in my community, I would absolutely want that here,” he said. “It’s budget time.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who has become the leader of the left-wing insurgency within the Democratic Party, slammed the plan in a tweet the moment it was announced in mid-November last year.
She initially said the response to the Amazon announcement from her constituents was outrage, arguing that the tax breaks Amazon would receive should be spent by city and state officials on the subway system and communities instead of billion-dollar corporations.
Which isn’t how tax breaks work. It’s not like there is a pile of money they would hand to Amazon that could have been spent on the subway system, but that is a story for a different day.
What this moment signifies in the Democratic Party is one that has been in existence for several years, but the party establishment and ruling class have been unwilling to face: the leftist populism punching up to take the reins of the party.
And this “populism” doesn’t represent the actual working classes, but the credentialed virtuecrats of the “helping professions” and government bureaucracies. It is the same lower-tier New Class constituency that fueled the Occupy Movement. As Kenneth Anderson wrote: “It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites.” In fact, the AOC-style “populism” can be seen as an intensification of that New Class civil war.
Related: Democrats are tearing themselves apart over Amazon.
UPDATE: I really think that the intra-Left class warfare here is fascinating, and offers a significant opportunity to Republicans. Folks in the comments, however, seem interested in other things.