Ocasio-Cortez

That was inspiring.

…

IMO, if they had done that back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and never let it go, never abandoned the “working class,” with no adjective in front of it, just the working class, period, we never would have suffered through Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and now Trump . . . and if Obama had run and won, he would have governed from a totally different baseline.

The Dems made a fateful decision back then: Abandon the working class in favor of the professional class — as Thomas Frank talks about. Talk the talk when it comes to minorities and women, hoping they, too, could see a route into the professional, managerial and academic classes. But it was always a false choice. They never had to abandon the working class, as if that meant only “whites.” Create radical policy to improve the lives of the working class, period, and you also improve the lives of minorities and women. It’s a twofer. The two go hand in hand. But the same can not be said if the goal is to “diversify” the richest 10% . . . or, more generously, the richest 20%.

That does nothing about the hierarchies themselves, which are the root of all inequality to begin with. That does nothing to help the bottom 80 – 90% of the population. They’re still stuck.

A fateful decision, nearly 50 years ago. It never had to be this way.

(Of course, while you deal with economic inequality, you still have to radically change the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties status quo ante, and make it illegal to discriminate. Period. Both/and. But by ignoring the economic side, the engine needed to maintain discrimination and worse remains. The mechanism for it. The distribution of power itself, etc.)

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

That was very, very good. It’s exactly what the Dems should have been saying and doing for decades, and that particular candidate has “star” written all over her, in the best way. Not in the cynical way.

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Well but to me thats like saying Orcs should be more like elves. Ya know.

The Dems havent been doing and saying that because…they are dems. Wall-street loving, Corporate loving, Rep-Lites. Its who they are. Mostly.

But not totally.

Maybe another defeat at the hands of Trump is what they need, before there can be a Dem swamp-draining. I dunno.

w
v

I’m speaking more in historical terms, really. It may just be me getting old and seeing through the fog of time, but my memory of the Dems is that they really were different 50 years ago, and that they really have shifted radically to the right, chasing corporate money to catch up to the GOP. Thomas Frank writes about that as well. We both could be wrong, but it rings true for me.

Not that they were ever “radical.” Far, far from it. Not within light years of that. But they were at least solidly center-left. Now they’re solidly center-right.

(No reason for a “Third Way.” We already have the Dems, etc.)

This is an interesting tweet from a Dem rep who admits as much. Kinda surprising:

“Democrats don’t just represent progressive values, we also represent the middle & even the middle right because of how far the #GOP has shifted,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) tweeted Tuesday night.

nittany ram wrote:

wv wrote:

Well but to me thats like saying Orcs should be more like elves. Ya know.

w
v

Well, if you consulted your Tolkien, you’d see that orcs were decended from elves; their bodies and minds twisted by the evil Melkor…

The point being, the orcs were forced to be who and what they are. They had no choice.

Unlike the orcs, the dems have a choice – they just choose to be greedy.

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All of that reminds me of this quote:

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

[Kung Fu Monkey — Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”

― John Rogers