After what felt like the longest presidential campaign in US history — amid a pandemic, no less — the Democratic Party escaped defeat. Sort of. The dust has yet to fully settle, but the disasters down ballot point to a House and Senate where Republicans will still wield substantial power. Party centrists ran the campaign they wanted, and this was the result.

But win or lose, centrist Dems see the Left — on the streets and in their own House — as enemy number one. So the party’s leaders, rather than taking the opportunity to do some much-needed soul-searching, are focusing their crosshairs on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and the party’s left wing.

The first postelection attack came from Virginia congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer who narrowly flipped her traditionally red district in 2018 and won reelection by two percentage points. During a private, several-hour-long Democratic caucus call, Spanberger, a stringent opponent of the party’s left wing, angrily denounced calls to defund the police, the core demand to emerge from the Black Lives Matter movement, reportedly declaring that “no one should say ‘defund the police’ ever again.” Socialism was also on her list of banned topics: “We need to not ever use the word socialist or socialism ever again.”