An op-ed piece in The New York Times today informs us that the millennial socialists are coming, after the victories of three progressive women running in Democratic primaries who are all endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America. And Michelle Goldberg would like to tell us why this is a good thing. These two paragraphs tell you all you probably need to know about Michelle:
Their races were part of a grass-roots civic renewal that is happening across this country, something that is, for me, the sole source of optimism in this very dark time. Marinating in the news in New York City, I’m often sick with despair. An authoritarian president of dubious legitimacy and depraved character is poised to remake America for generations with a second Supreme Court pick. The federal government is a festival of kleptocratic impunity. Kids the same age as my own are ripped from their migrant parents.
But all over the nation, people, particularly women, are working with near supernatural energy to rebuild democracy from the ground up, finding ways to exercise political power however they can. For the middle-aged suburbanites who are the backbone of the anti-Trump resistance, that often means shoring up the Democratic Party. For younger people who see Donald Trump’s election as the apotheosis of a rotten political and economic system, it often means trying to remake that party as a vehicle for democratic socialism.
The dumbing down of our children through disastrous education policies in this country over the past few decades is coming into fruition now. Even while people in failed socialist shithole Venezuela are hunting dogs, cats, and pigeons due to food shortages, we’re still told that socialism is the way of the future! Free shit for everybody! These women, running on platforms such as free education for all, abolishing ICE, and free healthcare for all, seem to have forgotten history, or more likely simply are ignorant of how socialism and communism turn out every single time. And further down in the article:
Many of the D.S.A.’s goals, reflected in Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, are indistinguishable from those of progressive democrats. But if the D.S.A. is happy to work alongside liberals, its members are generally serious about the “socialist” part of democratic socialist. Its constitution envisions “a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.”
Talk of popular control of the means of production is anathema to many older Democrats, even very liberal ones. It plays a lot better with the young; one recent survey shows that 61 percent of Democrats between 18 and 34 view socialism positively. The combination of the Great Recession, the rising cost of education, the unreliability of health insurance and the growing precariousness of the workplace has left young people with gnawing material insecurity. They have no memory of the widespread failure of Communism, but the failures of capitalism are all around them.
