by SHAMUS COOKE
In 2018, Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota made history by becoming the first Muslim women elected to Congress. They were joined in the house of representatives by other newly elected members, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) of New York, establishing themselves as a progressive wing inside the Democratic House caucus, adopting the moniker “The Squad.” AOC, Omar, and Tlaib all were challenged in 2020 primaries from the right, but won by large margins. The Squad also added two new members when Cori Bush of Missouri and Jamaal Bowman of New York were elected in 2020 after defeating incumbent Democrats in primary upsets.
Like Bernie Sanders, they attracted the support of many on the Left, and the backing of influential groups like the Sunrise Movement and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which AOC, Bowman, Bush, and Tlaib are members.
After two years of Republican control of the U.S. Senate and Donald Trump’s presidency, much has changed following the 2020 election. With Democrats in control of the government, the records and impact of the Sanders moment, including the existence of a renewed progressive, Democratic Party wing in Congress, demands a strategic assessment. (Even Jacobin, notable for its support for a Sanderite realignment of the Democratic Party, ran an article in its Winter 2022 print issue entitled, The End of the Honeymoon for AOC.)
It is in hopes of furthering these debates, and strengthening the Left in the process, that Tempest presents Shamus Cooke’s critique of Representative Ilhan Omar’s political trajectory and record.
At the same time, we recognize the onslaught of sexist, racist, and Islamophobic attacks to which members of the Squad have been subjected. Omar, in particular, has faced hundreds of death threats and has been slandered as a Jihadi by the far-right, while members of her own party have accused her of anti-semitism for any signs of opposition to Zionism. Christopher Hasson, a coast guard lieutenant, was arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate Omar. Two months later, another man Patrick Carlineo, Jr. was arrested after he threatened to assault and murder Omar in a phone call to her office. After he pleaded guilty, Omar asked the court for leniency in its sentencing. Multiple Republican candidates have called for her execution, including her own 2020 opponent in the general election. She has also faced disgusting and false rumors about her personal life, suggesting that she gained entry to the U.S. by marrying her brother.
These attacks against Ilhan Omar—themselves a product of this self-same political moment of a resurgent and confident Right—makes any policy or strategy disagreements from the Left difficult to articulate given the very real threats to lives. But only in calling attention to both, and by restating our unequivocal commitment to defeating the threats posed by the Right, can we hope to make progress. Only by building a Left strong enough to face the strategic challenges of the moment can we have any hope of defeating these reactionary (bi-partisan) politics, and defending and deepening the political opening for the Left and socialism.
As progressive Democrats make concession after concession to the right-wing, it’s increasingly clear that the “Squad” lacks the will, vision, or politics to lead the Democrats down a left-wing path. Instead the left-wing is being dragged to the right, with the broader working class trampled underfoot. The Squad’s boldness deficit is now on national display, but it’s been months—or even years—in the making.
For example, on July 28, U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar made a stunning ‘yes’ vote in support of a $62 billion legislation (H.R. 4373) that funds many of the more unsavory areas of U.S. foreign policy, including $3.3 billion in aid to Israel.
To call Omar’s vote “shocking” is an understatement, and represents the biggest political capitulation—if not outright hypocrisy—in recent D.C. memory, a town famous for Olympic-level flip-floppers. Omar voted in favor of the exact thing she was famous, internationally, for opposing, at a time when Israel was still bloodily “mopping up” in Gaza after its devastating military action. Omar had very publicly condemned Israel’s actions in May, boldly railing against the U.S. aid to Israel that she ultimately voted for in July.
Omar’s about-face garnered much more attention internationally than it did in the U.S., though it was denounced loudly by many pro-Palestinian groups, including Jews for Palestinian Right of Return, who said, “it is reprehensible that anyone, let alone someone who presents herself as progressive would vote yes on a bill that sends money to apartheid Israel”.
How did this happen? Simply speculating isn’t necessary, since Omar gives many hints in her autobiography, written last year, which outlines her political trajectory. In her book, This is What Democracy Looks Like, Omar doesn’t paint a self-portrait of a leftist connected to a progressive movement, but a more ambitious, establishment-style politician dedicated to the existing Democratic Party.
What Omar reveals in her autobiography
In the past, politicians wrote memoirs once they retired from public life. For sitting politicians, autobiographies are now commonly used to increase one’s political capital as they prepare for their next electoral conquest, and they typically do this using two tactics at once: projecting a sympathetic picture to a broad population, while also signaling to the political class where they stand on key issues: for the masses, “like me,” and to the establishment, “don’t fear me.”
Obama did this in his autobiography The Audacity of Hope, which helped endear him to millions while he also disclosed to the more sophisticated politicos that he was a neoliberal in the Reagan sense, of whom Obama described his admiration. This helped ease fears that Obama would, if elected, pursue a radical left program, or that he would even stray from the neoliberal path laid down by Reagan and followed by Republicans and Democrats ever since.
Omar’s autobiography has an eerily similar feel to Obama’s. Most notably, Omar admits that “the person I admire most” is Margaret Thatcher, that enemy of the British working class who was Reagan’s political counterpart. Omar proudly notes that she shares a nickname that Thatcher made famous, “the Iron Lady.” It’s also noteworthy that Omar is only 39 years old, and thus likely has little memory of Thatcher exercising power. Her admiration is therefore limited to history books, and any biography of Thatcher should mention that her removal from power came in response to mass protests against her poll tax, after she physically crushed labor unions, privatized and deregulated huge swaths of the British economy, and ushered in the neoliberal era.
Omar tries to distance herself from Thatcher politically, saying “her politics aren’t mine,” but such disclaimers fall flat whenever praise is lavished on a tyrant. Nor is Omar’s fondness of Thatcher an aberration in an otherwise progressive political outlook, since the political figure she writes about most is Nancy Pelosi.
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