I've gotten a little behind on blog posting, which isn't unusual if you've got a schedule as highly programmed as mine is. I'd hoped to write about a number of topics tonight but, well ... it isn't going to happen, unfortunately. So I'm going to catch up starting this weekend, which means that you should bookmark this post and come back to it next Monday, when I will have edited it with a few observations on a number of topics.
Thanks for reading, hang in there, and believe as I do that better days lie ahead for all of us.
UPDATE:
Well, it's a few days later, I'm better rested, there's been a break in the action (as they sometimes say in sportscasts), so I can now talk about ... well, what I wanted to talk about.
Which, to start off with, is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshperson Congresswoman from New York who, IMHO, is the most exciting thing to happen in Democratic politics in decades. Yes, perhaps even more exciting than Barack Obama, notwithstanding the essential American history he made by being elected. I say that because a lot of Obama's supporters made the assumption that, because he was both African-American and a Democrat, he would be the strongly progressive leader that the U.S. had not had since the 1960s. Unfortunately, many of those supporters did not pay enough attention to Obama's Senate career, because, as measured in votes and public statements, Obama was not quite the flaming progressive that some wanted him to be. (Neither is Bernie Sanders, but that's a blog post for another time.) So Obama's presidency was similarly characterized by policies and speeches that only partially fulfilled his progressive promise. And this, in turn, led to disenchantment, the rise of Tea Party politics (and a Tea Party Congress), and the failure to get a "third term" by way of Hillary Clinton, whose failure to break the glass ceiling led to the crass basement of D***** T****'s presidency.
But that's precisely why Ocasio-Cortez is so exciting. Not a billionaire wanna-be, who thinks the presidency is merely another reality show. Not a "centrist Democrat" who lives to surrender the accomplishments of the past, inch by inch, for the sake of looking "reasonable" to the MSM and other practitioners of "bothsiderism." But also not a pie-in-the-sky idealist who can't articulate her ideas or develop them into practical applications. And, perhaps best of all, not a Caspar Milquetoast with no idea of how to defend herself from the slings and arrows of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
To begin with, there's the fact of her election itself. She won her seat in a heavily Democratic district in a heavily Republican state, so her victory in the general election is not all that surprising. It's what she did in the primary that was absolutely amazing: knocking off Rep. Joe Crowley, the fourth-ranking member of the Democratic House Caucus. She did it with grass-roots financing that was enough against Crowley's corporate fundraising, and with a message that spoke to the aspirations of people on the increasingly broken streets, and not in the increasingly plush boardrooms. Absolutely no one in the chattering classes saw this coming, which should show you how little they know in the first place.
Moreover, and more importantly, she did it with a message that she has already taken beyond campaign rhetoric, turning it in a well-though-out plan that cuts across the needs of the American people but also unites them in a slogan that is as forward-looking as it is historically resonant: a "Green New Deal." Through this plan, which you can read more about here, Ocasio-Cortez proposes to link the fundamental goal of the Democratic Party--economic security for all--to meeting the challenge of combating climate change. It represents the kind of thinking and messaging that have been absent for far too long from American politics.
And this is a case where both the message, and the messenger, are terrifying the living daylights out of the conservative commentariat. Perhaps even more delightfully, they are reducing their already minimal verbal skills to babble.
Take, for example, this attempt in the New York Post to "explain" Ocasio-Cortez' appeal. It starts out by saying that it has nothing to do with her demographics, but ends up saying--wait for it--that it's all about her demographics! Along the way, the piece takes the predictable pot-shots at her allegedly zany, loony-left ideas, the ones that are supposed to turn us into Russia at the end of "Dr. Zhivago," but with worse music and cinematography.
That's the line of debate they've taken over at Fox News on the subject of AOC, as she's come to be known. Blah blah blah Communist, blah blah blah Venezuela, blah blah blah un-American. A funny thing happens, though, when they get into the details and discover that the Devil has them by the tale. For all of the specifics of AOC's political advocacy, astonishingly, turn out to be things the American people actually want! Even more astonishingly, her proposed method of doing so, by asking the rich to be just a teeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeny less rich, is also something they want. So, the more Fox News attempts to discredit her, the more they actually help her to make her point.
It even reaches the point at which they do so directly. Way to go, Tucker Carlson; I didn't think you had it in you. Perhaps, in time, they'll just come out and admit that the country AOC wants to turn us into is not Russia or Venezuela, but something more like Sweden.
But that may take a little while. AOC's white-male-winger detractors have largely attempted to go to war with her by way of social media. A mistake of epic proportions. AOC is of the generation that grew up on social media, and has regularly schooled her detractors when they make the pathetic attempt to play her game against her. Even when they dug up a supposedly "embarrassing" video of her dancing, she turned it around on them and made them whine about how she and her supporters were picking on them.
You can see the video in question here, along with a discussion of why conservative men seem to have such an obsession about her dance moves. Basically, the piece argues that their fear of AOC is rooted in their fear of her ideas, and the way those ideas challenge their basic assumptions about pretty much everything. That may be true but, as their failure to take her out through the video illustrates, what they're really afraid of is someone who has the integrity to be herself, not a package put together by consultants. People who are filled with fear have no game against someone who is fearless.
The only sadness I can find in AOC's political rise is the offense that certain people in the Democratic Party, of all places, seem to take to it. Obviously, when someone takes out an entrenched political power like Crowley, it stirs up a great deal of resentment among "Establishment" Democrats for whom the capital E seems to be more important than the capital D. Exhibit A for the prosecution: the not-so-honorable Joe Lieberman, former Democratic (later "Independent Democratic") Senator, enabler of the Bush-Cheney war machine, and endorser of the Republican presidential ticket in 2008. After AOC's primary victory, Lieberman described her ideas as "far out of the mainstream" and urged voters to support Crowley on a third-party ticket. Then there's Exhibit B: the unnamed Democrat from another state who recently urged New York Democrats to "primary" AOC in 2020 in favor of some unnamed individuals who had been in line for Crowley's seat.
A couple of questions here. First, why didn't any of these unnamed individuals decide to take on Crowley previously? No one was stopping them, apparently, but themselves and perhaps whatever retribution from Crowley. In any event, those people, if they have any political standing at all, should now that power isn't given to people who merely stand in line; it is given to people who step up and show that they have the ability to take it and make something of it. AOC did exactly that.
As for Lieberman, what can I say? The kindest, gentlest thing I can say to my fellow Jew is that he suffers from the same fear of leadership that afflicted the aforementioned unnamed individuals. He could have been Vice President in a Gore Administration that could have forestalled both 9/11 and the growing impact of climate change. Instead, he deemed it more important in the 2000 campaign to play footsie with Dick Cheney and the Republican efforts to block the Florida recount. Dayenu, Joe. Dayenu.
And yet, there is something sadder still than either Lieberman or anonymous Democrats. It's Baby Boomers (and yes, I am one), the generation that promised everyone it was going to be the biggest change agent in the history of the Republic, lecturing AOC and her fellow millennials about how to conduct themselves in politics. Case in point: Aaron Sorkin, the creator of the TV series "The West Wing," about a prototypical liberal Democratic presidency, headed by no less a liberal actor than Martin Sheen, who played Robert Kennedy in "The Missiles of October." One would think that someone like Sorkin would rejoice in the emergence of a new generation of leaders, one that could take the limited fulfillment of progressive ideas by Boomers and build something even better on top of them. Instead, we get grumpy lectures like this one, in which Sorkin laments the lack of "gravitas" among the new crop of Democrats in Congress, and wishes that its members would "stop acting like young people."
I'm not sure exactly what he meant by that comment. If he meant that they shouldn't be enthusiastic, bold, and even a bit pushy about expressing themselves, then he should remember a time when our generation, his and mine, were subject to some of the same criticisms. Somehow, it didn't stop us from doing some real good, and I suspect the same will be true of those who follow us. Frankly, it's depressing to listen to Sorkin in this instance and realize how "square" even a Boomer can be in middle-age.
For my part, I especially appreciate the fact that AOC's success thus far (knock on wood, pu! pu! pu!) is an affirmation of my thesis about modern politics: that it is not so much "local" as it is generational. AOC comes from a generation whose perspective on politics isn't summed up by Ronald Reagan standing at a lectern and asking people if they are better off now than they were four years ago. The generation of which AOC is a part has never know what it was like to be "better off" in the sense that Reagan meant. That generation has never known what it was like for Boomers like Sorkin and me to grow up in a world surrounded by a prosperity we ultimately came to take for granted. That generation has never had the luxury of assuming that their lives would be more comfortable than the lives of their parents. That generation has never been systemically patted on the head and constantly told how wonderful it is. Indeed, if anything, the followers of Reagan have largely dismissed that generation as a bunch of whiners who aren't spending enough to line the pockets of the 1 percent as quickly as possible.
Well, guess what? They aren't "spending enough" because they are not being paid a living wage that reflects their worth. And that, in turn, is happening largely because of 40 years of policies that promised wealth that would "trickle down," like crumbs from a feast to undeserving peasants. Instead, the wealth that the "peasants" created got sucked upward, higher and higher, until only a handful of people can reach it.
AOC and the people she's helping to bring to the table have figured it out. It's time to overturn the table, and replace it with one that has a seat for everybody.
I'm proud to say that I'm rooting hard for her to succeed. If she does, we all do.
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