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Lashing out does not help working class

Liberal leaders are so angry about any potential challenges to the Democratic Party’s new far-left orthodoxy that some are beginning to sound like positively vicious.

Take the reaction to former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s decision to consider running for president as an independent. Some liberals fear that could siphon off votes from their 2020 presidential candidate, who is virtually certain to run on a socialist platform.

In truth, Schultz could cost President Donald Trump some votes, too. That doesn’t matter to those who sense in Schultz a threat to the current political establishment, which for Democrats is very liberal.

How to react? With reasoned arguments in favor of Democrat candidates and against Schultz’s ideas?

No, says Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, a powerful left-leaning think tank. Tanden has told reporters that if Schultz runs for president, she will organize a boycott against Starbucks.

That might cost Schultz a few dollars, because he owns stock in Starbucks. But he stepped down as CEO in April 2017. He doesn’t run the company anymore, and current Starbucks executives say they have no desire to become involved in Starbucks.

Who would be hurt by a boycott of the company’s stores?

Perhaps the 157,000 people who work at the 14,600 Starbucks locations in the United States. Or maybe the roughly equal number at the nearly 15,000 stores in other countries. A really effective boycott could cost some of them their jobs.

Apparently that doesn’t matter to Tanden and like-minded leftists. They just want to lash out — and the heck with who gets hurt. That isn’t the politics of helping the working man and woman, as Democrat candidates so often proclaim they are doing. It’s the politics of clawing for power by whatever means necessary.

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