As media allies idealize House speaker Nancy Pelosi and her congressional Democrats "shaping the future" on the cover of Rolling Stone, the reality in the Democrat-led Congress is quite a bit uglier.

Roll Call reports that Democrats are in the midst of internecine warfare, fighting among themselves over the merest of legislative procedural moves called "motion to recommit," which permits dissenting voices to say something or maybe try to persuade for moderating amendments when extremely radical bills are presented in the House and headed to a vote. If nothing else, it's a desire to be heard. House minority Republicans use it, and that's enough for Democrats to want to shut it down. But it's also employed by moderate Democrats, many of whom do not want to come across as left-wing nuts to their constituents in red-tinged districts.

Someone isn't happy with that: socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Comrade Ocasio-Cortez to you.

She has a list...

Here's the Washington Post's report:

House Democrats exploded in recriminations Thursday over moderates bucking the party, with liberal Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threatening to put those voting with Republicans "on a list" for a primary challenge. In a closed-door session, a frustrated Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) lashed out at about two dozen moderates and pressured them to get on board. "We are either a team or we're not, and we have to make that decision," Pelosi said, according to two people present but not authorized to discuss the remarks publicly. But Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the unquestioned media superstar of the freshman class, upped the ante, admonishing the moderates and indicating she would help liberal activists unseat them in the 2020 election. Corbin Trent, a spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez, said she told her colleagues that Democrats who side with Republicans "are putting themselves on a list."

It sounds as though she's got show trials on her mind. Primaries as show trials? Why not? Every socialist system adapts.

Shades of Joe McCarthy and his lists, for sure, and the inevitable comparisons are going to make her mad. But even more accurately, it's shades of Vishinsky — Andrey Vishinsky, the famous show trial prosecutor in the heady days of the Stalin-run socialist Soviet Union, the infamous commissar who put his fellow comrades in the dock and effectively made them crawl on their bellies professing their allegiance to socialism and its leader. Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev — they all puddled into groveling in the face of the Robespierrian Comrade Vishinsky before they were packed off by the comrades and shot.

And now Comrade Ocasio-Cortez has a list...

So much for the socialist congresswoman's claims to democratic socialism. For all her talk about expropriating from the rich and spending to the skies, what we see here in this act is socialism as it's actually practiced, grotesquely intolerant of dissent and anything but democratic.

Yes, it's true to pattern. Why do you think socialist organizations such as the assorted communist parties in the U.S. are always breaking up and splintering off into factions, each angrier at its fellow splitters than at the little man with the mustache and the top hat on the Monopoly cards? It's because they are socialists being socialists, and there's no such thing as a socialist who doesn't expect a socialism where he himself is at the top of the food heap, running things and establishing nomenklaturas. That's why we see continous power struggles and phony arguments over orthodoxy among socialists, when the reality is, these fights are always about power.

Ocasio-Cortez's vow to be the bad cop against her fellow Democrats who are too moderate for her comes off as old socialist practices made new again. Like Stalin's henchmen, she'll primary them out of office. After that, the "real" socialism can begin.

Image credit: Official portrait with modifications by Monica Showalter.