Well that didn’t take long: is socialism the future of the Democratic Party?
According to Ocasio-Cortez’s mom, her daughter would like to be president. That’s not really surprising or noteworthy coming from a mother. The 28-year-old clearly is interested in politics and ambitious, so why not dream big?
But this article isn’t from a relative of Ocasio-Cortez. It’s an op-ed in the Guardian entitled “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents the future of the Democratic party”:
Voters have had enough of Democrats who sell out the working class in the name of moderation that only serves those with money and power.
(Actually, isn’t that why Trump got elected—voters were tired of politicians from both parties who fit that description, and he was perceived, despite his own wealth and power, as a champion of the working class and a populist?)
But I digress. More from the Guardian:
Many voters, particularly young people, understand the time for incrementalism and moderation is long over, and ended for good when a race-baiter who empowers white supremacists and oligarchs stormed into the White House.
It ended with the kids in cages, the attacks on immigrants and all people of color…
In retrospect, Crowley as a future speaker was a laughable proposition. Ocasio-Cortez represents the future of the Democratic party.
The author of the piece is someone named Ross Barkan, who is “a journalist and candidate for the New York state senate.” I think he’s a bit premature, but perhaps only a bit. A victory in New York City, against a lackluster incumbent opponent, with a voter turnout of something like 10% in an off-year in a district so heavily Democratic that the winner of the Democratic primary is virtually assured of victory in the general, does not a national trend make. Not yet, anyway.
However, I agree that Ocasio-Cortez represents a very real phenomenon in the Democratic Party, and “trend” is not a bad word for that phenomenon. It’s a cliche for moderate Democrat political-changers to say that they didn’t leave the party, the party left them by veering more and more to the left over time. With the rejection of Joe Lieberman more than a decade ago, and its emphasis on anger and identity politics, the Democratic Party made its enormously leftward drift obvious even before Ocasio-Cortez was old enough to vote. The recent rise of Bernie Sanders, as well as the hysteria of the anti-Trump wing, has only made it more clear.
Does the future of the Democrats belong to the telegenic, young, leftist firebrands? Perhaps. Youthful voters seem more and more amendable to their message. Potential problem for the Democrats, however, is that youthful voters go out into the world, get jobs, have families, and tend to turn more to the right as time goes on, although they are replaced by a new crop of youthful voters. But reality checks do not favor socialism.
A similar upset, albeit on a much smaller scale, happened in my neck of the Rust Belt in SW Pennsylvania. Summer Lee, a young, black, openly socialist female attorney, won the nomination over white, middle-aged, male Democrat Paul Costa, who comes from a powerful local political family. He had held the seat for nearly two decades. Even the New Yorker took notice:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/a-democratic-socialist-landslide-in-pennsylvania
It’s this sort of thing that makes me suspect that a civil war isn’t the resolution, but rather a divorce. Not even when I was 18, working for minimum wage, could I have imagined thoughts like these. I literally do not understand how anyone with a functioning brain can think this sort of thing. I am aware that they would think the same of me.
I believe that I have the truth on my side, but that really doesn’t matter because leftist nutjobs don’t care – and have never cared – about facts, reality, human nature or anything else. No amount of failure, or “unintended consequences” (which other people can readily predict) will affect them. They are not like sane, normal people who are subject to having second thoughts and might switch political loyalties. Like people with chemical abuse problems, they may at some point hit a bottoming-out in which they realize, dimly, that they have a problem, or they may have a few seconds of clarity in the moment before their own movement eats them – as leftist movements have a tendency to do – but meaningful communication is impossible. Coexistence is also impossible. No matter how much we are willing to tolerate their crazy, violent fanatacism, they are not willing to let the rest of us live and let live. In small numbers, their ability to damage is limited, but if their numbers become great enough, they are a mortal hazard to everyone.
I view them like zombies. Before they were infected with the zombie virus, they might even have been friends or family, but they no longer are. They are just unthinking eaters bent on destroying not-us.
Our side needs to do a better job of countering these radicals. For instance, the people who want to get ride of ICE should be asked whether it is better to have families separated by overdoses of fentanyl smuggled across the border by coyotes using unaccompanied kids. ICE goes after these coyotes and smugglers.
Ask the socialist whether they have read Gulag or if they even know who Pol Pot was. Ask them whether the US should send emergency shipments of toilet paper to Venezuelans.
We have to do a better job of confronting their ignorance starting with the media idiots.
“Expat” should expand on the beginning of his list of
Questions To Ask A Liberal.
Might come in handy.
If she ends up being anything like our wonderful socialist Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant then she will be a train wreck.
Neo:
Voter turnout of only 10%? Sounds as if Ocasio-Cortez won by a crafty voter suppression campaign. 🙂
“Expat” should expand on the beginning of his list of
Questions To Ask A Liberal.
Richard Stockinger: Sadly that ship sailed a while back. As far as the current crop of liberals — actually progressives and some now out-of-the-closet socialists — are concerned, there will be no debate.
For them Republicans and conservatives are simply Nazis, white supremacists and all varieties of -phobe and bigot. To engage us openly is to empower evil foolishly. So they won’t.
In the meantime they are looking for every lever to “deplatform,” as they call it, conservative speech, so we may speak but not be heard.
Here’s a NYT op-ed from a few days ago by a professor of philosophy at Yale and Vassar:
“The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to an Audience”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/free-speech-just-access.html
Back to the candidate herself, here’s something I hadn’t seen elsewhere:
https://nypost.com/2018/06/27/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-now-the-vanguard-of-the-democrats/
“Party leaders in Albany concocted the cockamamie idea of running a mid-June primary for national races while saving the statewide races for the usual September primary. This decision to create a deliberately small voter pool is an old-time cynical ploy designed to give incumbents like Crowley an insuperable advantage — because low turnout almost always favors candidates who have institutional support.
Almost always. But not always. In this case, Ocasio-Cortez quietly played a series of cards against Crowley — Hispanic vs. white, leftist vs. liberal, young vs. old, female vs. male — that built her a 15,000-voter following apparently invisible to him and his team.
That was enough to finish him off. I suspect that had he been paying sufficient attention, Crowley could have ginned up another 4,000 voters from the Democratic Party’s database in a district where he received 150,000 votes in November 2016.”
On the one hand, I am horrified that the Democratic Party can go so far toward the full Bernie. On the other hand, as long as they think this is a good strategy, they’re thoroughly messed up. Let’s make popcorn.
The ‘time for incrementalism is over’ thinking reminds me of the Parkland HS anti-gun activists, particularly David Hogg.
Maybe I’m just too old and cynical, but their immaturity is showing with this impatience. “I want my way now!” they scream, as if wanting something passionately enough makes it happen. Is this the Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste generation?
Its been the point of the democrat party since earl browder said that the communist party could not distinguish its platform from that of the democrats and the communists would no longer run candidates for president.. (that was the 1930s)
And it seems, a visiting professor at someplace called Wuhan University, in China. Apparently he is also a translator of Chinese “philosophical” texts. I use scare quotes around “philosophical” to point to one of the debates or minor controversies he’s been engaged in, which followed his claim that the so-called canon of philosophy texts in American universities should be inclusive of non-western texts and perspectives: whereas, some of his critics rejoin that he has ignored what philosophy is, and where and how it originated, in the first place.
For those who wish to get some insight into his philosophical perspective, I think it is probably safe to refer to the second part of a lecture he gave to Chinese students or Richard Rorty.
My bet is that although it does not describe his own epistemic theory so closely that there is no wriggle room, he nonetheless would himself own most of the statements and views he attributes to Davidson and Rorty.
Especially important I think – and this relates directly to the tone and tenor of his NYT article – is his view of what constitutes socially legitimate skepticism (from the prevailing social consensus), AND, his view on what constitutes sufficient knowledge to act. Or more practically in a political sense: what kinds of grounding is necessary in order to claim that you know the “truth” or enough of it to compel others.
And in this he is it appears, at odds, as are all progressives and pragmatists, with the notion of the moral necessity of initially possessing indubitable or self-evident first principles when it comes to managing “our collective life”; managing, that is to say, the lives of others.
Thus, what once were seen in our tradition as political and interpersonal boundaries not to be crossed -unless we first had a confrontation (a self-evident/ seeing engagement) with indubitable first principles from which we could then safely deduce such permissions – are now dissolved.
This has been accomplished by relocating foundational knowledge not a confrontation with an undeniable “thing”, but rather in the divination of the supposed sense of the community – presumably, that would be the sense of the “progressive” segment of the political population.
This perspective, they then claim, is not relativism. And they imagine it is therefore immune to the self-devouring claims of that comic relativism which is mocked by table-turning metaphysical realists as a mere taste (chocolate or vanilla) which undercuts the relativists’ presumption to speak on behalf of, or to morally lecture, others.
https://youtube.com/embed/khpLc7Bkq54?start=306&end=369
https://youtube.com/embed/khpLc7Bkq54?start=1327&end=1436
artfldgr Says:
June 29th, 2018 at 10:18 am
Its been the point of the democrat party since earl browder said that the communist party could not distinguish its platform from that of the democrats and the communists would no longer run candidates for president.. (that was the 1930s)
* * *
Maybe it’s time to rethink Buckley’s hatchet job on the anti-communist John Birch Society?
(not a Bircher — too young! — but do we really know what they taught and did, or just what the MSM and MRM (main right media) have told us? — in light of revelations these days, is it possible (gasp!) that they were misrepresented somewhat?)
Buckley’s hatchet job mostly consisted of his unsuccessful attempt to cure the Society from its paranoid obsession with conspiracy theories, like painting Eisenhower as a Communist agent. Buckley was a pragmatist who clearly seen that such extreme positions can’t win elections or even expand the voter base of Conservatives. The cardinal mistake of many on the Right was and still is to confuse an ideology with conspiracy or treason. Even if Joe McCarthy was mostly right in his assessment of the scope of Communist infiltration in USA government institutions, his paranoid attitude did not help him. More moderate appearance could have served him better. Never go full Joe McCarthy!
The Birchers were also leading the charge against water fluoridation which wasn’t quite as crazy as it was made out to be.
Nonetheless, fluoridation combined with the Bircher conspiracy mindset provided Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick with the elements to create General Jack D. Ripper, the rogue officer in “Dr. Strangelove,” who goes off his rocker and tries to attack the Soviet Union.
Strangelove was great ammunition against the anti-communist cause.
Sergey & huxley – thanks for the context – never go full Dr. Strangelove!