There’s a point when you’re reading Mary Shelley’s classic story Frankenstein when you feel some sympathy for both the creator and creation.
Dr. Frankenstein, the mad scientist, brings life to an unholy matrimony of dead body parts — but faces the prospect of having created a monster. The creation was put in the world against his will and is hated by all humanity.
Referencing John Milton’s classic epic poem, telling the Biblical tale of creation and fall, Frankenstein’s creature tells him at one point: “The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.”
The creation is alone, abandoned by all, which gives us the note of sympathy. But the kicker is the accusation, and subsequent admission of guilt by of the creature, who says: “You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!”
And here sympathy evaporates — because both creator and creation are an image of the other. The creation murders with impunity just as the creator would kill the creation.
Dr. Frankenstein has imbued his creation not only with life, but with all the moral depravity that he had within him — the person who desecrated graveyards, mocked the living, and abused his creation. The monster had a choice too — and ran down the same path.
What sympathy the audience may have had is gone because both creator and creation are corrupt. They deserve each other. Which brings us to the internecine fight in the Democratic Party, and Speaker of the House Nancy’s Pelosi’s attempts to reign in her increasingly far-left progressive caucus.
“The Squad,” as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and her pals are calling themselves these days, are angry that Nancy Pelosi continues to single them out for scorn for their ineptitudes and failures as freshmen representatives.
Speaking to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Pelosi ripped the so-called “Squad” as having little influence in the House and hurting the Democratic party overall.
“If the left doesn’t think I’m left enough, so be it,” Pelosi told Dowd.
Never one shy for a quote or camera lens, squad leader Ocasio-Cortez responded in kind:
“When these comments first started, I kind of thought that she was keeping the progressive flank at more of an arm’s distance in order to protect more moderate members, which I understood,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Washington Post. “But the persistent singling out…it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful…the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.”
And that’s the story of how Nancy Pelosi became a racist, according to the “woke” squad of the Democratic Party.
AOC and the Squad eventually backed down from implying Pelosi was a racist. Similarly, Kamala Harris also backed down from calling Joe Biden a racist after she spent an entire debate bludgeoning Biden for being, well, a racist.
Pelosi and Biden are getting hammered by a progressive left that’s gone far beyond their own leftist politics and has arrived to attack not the enemy, but them. Biden and Pelosi created the Squad through years of calling Republicans racist for every idea put forward. Now the shoe is on the other foot — Biden and Pelosi are the dreaded “R” word for not doing what their left flank wants them to do.
Illiberal revolutions devour their own children, as the observers noted during the French Revolution. How Biden and Pelosi have struck opponents, again and again, has come back to haunt them at a time when they’re trying to win power.
Pelosi, obviously annoyed by AOC and her cohort, has spent her time fighting back trying to take control of the caucus. But like Dr. Frankenstein, the woke behemoth she helped create accuses her of the very sins she uses to attack others.
But perhaps the biggest irony is that Pelosi and the Squad™ aren’t fighting anything real at all; a fake reality that they constructed is devouring them. They aren’t the next generation of New Dealers trying to save the Republic, they aren’t fighting fascists, and they aren’t even fighting racists. They’re fighting for TV time. As Kevin Williamson says in his new book, it’s an instant culture:
What we have is Instant Culture, which is to culture what stevia is to sugar, what masturbation is to sex, what Paul Krugman’s New York Times vomitus is to journalism, what Monday’s dank memes are to the English language: a substitute that replicates the real thing in certain formal ways but that remains nonetheless entirely lacking in the essence of the thing itself.
AOC isn’t moping in the pages of The Washington Post because Pelosi is some arch-racist; the “Squad” frets because they’re bad at their jobs. They aren’t alone, they’re surfing high in the popularity contest of the coastal elite. Pelosi isn’t fighting some ideological fight in the party — she’s fighting for time on MSNBC, Rolling Stone magazine, and retweets on Twitter.
Pelosi pushed for the dynamics that helped create room for the Squad™. They’re mirror images of each other, imbued with the same progressive moral code.
It’s hard to feel any sympathy for that. And it’s hard to feel any sympathy if they tear each other apart. They chose this path.
It’s even harder to feel bad for people fighting over a fake reality. At least Frankenstein and his monster had the reality of the novel.
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