Democratic socialism

Adam Smith once wisely remarked that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” There is much less room for ruin in a city, as Portland, San Francisco and Seattle have proved in recent years, and Detroit, Memphis and Gary, did even earlier. Now, Chicago has decided to join that dismal parade. The Windy City was already marching toward the abyss under its outgoing mayor, Lori Lightfoot. She was elected four years ago with over three-quarters of the vote. This year, she got so few votes in the first primary (about one sixth) that she was eliminated from the runoff.

Cockburn had thought he'd seen it all. But now he learns that DC has reached a new low in the annals of Swamp incompetence. Democratic staffers in Representative Ayanna Pressley's office can't figure out how to turn their phones back on after setting them to go straight to voicemail for over a year and a half. Every Capitol Hill rat would agree that the worse job in a congressional office is answering the phones. From dusk to dawn, deranged boomers light them up, demanding Representative Joe Blow do something about their loud neighbors, or fix their TV, or help them pay their rent. Many of these callers don't even live in the lawmaker's district or state. It's an exhausting task usually reserved for the lowest of the low — interns.

Republicans are currently on track to end up with 214 seats in the House of Representatives in January. As of this writing, they’ve already netted seven gains, are leading in an additional nine races, and will pick up one more with two Republicans in a runoff for Louisiana’s 5th District.If it all holds, it would amount to an astonishing 17-seat gain for the GOP and the Democrats holding the smallest House majority in two decades. Cook Political Report predicted Democrats would expand their 232-seat majority by 10 to 15.

Forgive the analogy that follows. Is Bernie Sanders the Barry Goldwater of the left? Has Sanders, to echo the words of George Will on Goldwater, lost two primary campaigns but won the future? What reminds us of Goldwater is the clarity of Sanders’s proposals and the force with which he expressed them. Medicare-for-All, canceling student debt, free college tuition; paid for by soaking the wealthy with new taxes. Sanders made all of this thinkable, because most of his ideas are popular. The Sanders moment arrived at a time of political reorientation that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War years. Polling showed that half of millennials have unfavorable views of capitalism. Seventy percent say they are likely to vote for a socialist candidate.

Only just turned 18, David E. Oks extends over a lean 6'1 frame, bent slightly forward. His voice, called 'terrifyingly deep' by a fan, is unforgettable once you’ve heard it. Overall, he seems more like a Romanian apparatchik than the architect of the 2020 Democratic primaries’ biggest anti-war disruption. If you weren't aware, Oks, along with high school friend Henry Williams, was the teenage manager of former Alaska senator Mike Gravel’s insurgent bid for the Democratic nomination. In office from 1969 to 1981, Gravel read the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record to make them publicly available and became a leading figure in the end of the draft and the Vietnam War.

If you elected to build a library dedicated to the subject of Human Folly, the place would end up as wide as the Grand Canyon and as tall as the Burj Khalifa. Plenty of space then, for a modest pamphlet on the activities of the Democratic Socialists of America, who held their National Convention last week in Atlanta. Socialism – or something that calls itself socialism – has returned to America. There are some good reasons for this turn to the left, among them a justifiable anger with a feckless ruling class that is shared by the Trumpian right. Thomas Frank continues to argue persuasively (and ineffectually) that a populist turn to the left – not open borders advocacy and more managerialism – are the best way to beat President Trump.

They don’t have jobs, they can’t afford a house, but millennials have one thing going for them: They’ve finally found their Ronnie and Maggie, the political match-up to define their era. British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have held what the latter calls ‘a lovely and wide-reaching’ phone conversation and followed it up with some Twitter gushing about progressiveness and stuff. Quoth Corbyn: https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1092174819154710528?s=21 And the reply: https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1092210825228636161?s=21 One of the benefits of centrism collapsing is that left-leaning politicians no longer sound like human resources consultants.

Americans are not obliged to take the advice of a meddling Brit but nonetheless I feel compelled to offer a polite suggestion to my conservative cousins: do not underestimate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Conservatives are in danger of misreading the 2016 election. Americans were not dubious about Hillary Clinton because they disliked the Democratic party half as much as because they disliked Hillary Clinton. The Democrats’ 2016 candidate was extraordinarily shady, extraordinarily inept and extraordinary uncharismatic. Voters had no such qualms with Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and might have no such qualms with future Democratic candidates. These could well include Ocasio-Cortez.

By most conventional pundit metrics, Bernie Sanders should be the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. To state the obvious, he was last cycle’s runner-up, having won 46 percent of elected delegates, 23 states, and smashed small-dollar fundraising records. His policy platform has taken hold across the party, with most every nationally ambitious figure now calling for universal Medicare, free public college tuition, and a host of other measures that were closely associated with his 2016 run. He has consistently polled as the most popular politician in America, he just won re-election in his home-state by a massive margin, and his social media engagement is off-the-charts. So what’s the problem? Simply put, large sections of the party still view him as a threat.