It's stunning how fixated the neoliberals of both parties have been on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after her upset win over Establishment bigwig Joe Crowley. That includes just about everyone in the GOP, whether conservatives or libertarians, as well as a big chunk of the Democrat party, who are desperately trying to reassure folks that she only won for neoliberal-friendly reasons -- being a woman, being non-white, etc.
Both sides know she won for her Bernie-like focus on inequality, class, trade, anti-militarism, and so on. That wouldn't be so threatening if she were a fringe candidate, since then they could admit why she won but write it off as something that doesn't appeal to normal people.
What worries them the most is that an open democratic socialist who dethroned a 20-year incumbent, and head of the local political machine, is not a bitter misfit with pink hair and a nose ring, facial tics, a condescending tone of voice, a "loves humanity but hates people" attitude, a strict diet of soyburgers and obscure indie bands, and an obsession with social and cultural issues like letting trannies invade the girls' bathroom.
She's someone from the pretty-and-popular crowd of your high school, not one of the self-important ones, but a people-person who genuinely likes interacting with her fellow students from across a broad range of cafeteria cliques.
The kicker: she came to her views organically, became an organizer for the Bernie campaign, and ran for office in order to see them implemented, not because some political machine wanted a wolf in sheep's clothing to trick the voters.
In a normal world, a warm, wholesome, maternal woman under 30 is not supposed to be agitating for fundamental political change. But that only reveals how fucked-up our world has become. It's no longer the misfits, miscreants, and misanthropes who are angry at their place in the social order -- over the course of the Reagan revolution, the economy has become so rigged in favor of the 1%, even "the girl next door" is willing to burn it down so we can recover the system that we enjoyed before.
When the system has lost the trust of those who usually favor conformity and the status quo, the regime's legitimacy is over. Sooner rather than later, it's going to get brought down.
This article suggests she will be ineffective and manipulated by Democratic leadership, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/07/28/nile-j28.html
ReplyDeleteSeems like Dems are regretting recruiting Bernie to run sgsinst Hill in the primaries....
ReplyDelete"This article" is Trotskyist propaganda, nice try moron. Any radical organization old enough to have been infiltrated and co-opted by the FBI and CIA, has already been. No one gives off a stronger whiff of being feds and spooks than Trot leaders, who only have naive college students to prey on. (The author is running in a college town district including Ann Arbor, MI.)
ReplyDeleteTheir only message is ever the pointlessness of attempting any political or economic change that falls short of immediate Communist revolution. In the past that represented the uncompromising zealotry of the ideologues, but by now it is nothing more than a demoralization campaign by the intel agencies to keep college students from getting radicalized and doing something productive about it.
Posing zero threat to the Establishment -- incapable of breaking 5% on the ballot in even local elections, and steering zero labor unions or other civic organizations -- the Trots are the last to blather on about what needs to be done.
Getting back to the main point, the author of that article looks like some generic snooty pseudo-intellectual dork. That's exactly the kind of person who's threatened by the normie-ization of radical politics. His silly little rad-lifestyle cult are going out of business if the population looks instead to the girl next door for fundamental change.
As for her prospects, revolutionaries only fail when there's no broader revolution. Success is social, and just like any other political realignment throughout history, hers requires a critical mass of like-minded people winning key spots in the organs of power.
ReplyDeleteLook at how badly Goldwater bombed in the 1964 election -- there was no broader revolution against the New Deal order. By '76, there was a burgeoning movement to overturn the New Deal, including by the leader of the party that created the New Deal -- Jimmy Carter, who ran on dismantling it, and won the presidency on that theme.
By 1980, the opposition party seized control on the same theme, edging aside the ineffectual dominant party that could not shut down their own creation. That was Reagan being supported by scores of other Reaganites in Congress, the courts, civic groups, and elsewhere throughout society.
Over-turning the Reagan regime will be no different. A few individuals will win their way into positions of influence at first, and before long it will be a full-on assault against the status quo.
The wheels of change are already in motion, and sooner rather than later, Reaganism will be done for.
Adding to the list: she loves rather than hates her family, her home town, her formative community, her culture, and her ethnic group.
ReplyDeleteWith standard-issue Leftists, it's the exact opposite. Growing up, they merely did not fit in with these groups, typically because they were anti-social and did not want to put the group above their individual concerns. By college and after, they've become bitterly hostile to these groups.
"Fuck you, Dad." "Everyone from the embarrassing town I grew up in is such a braindead hick." "God dammit, are they seriously playing Taylor Swift in Whole Foods again?" "The Church / America / white people / Western culture are irredeemably genocidal institutions, and if they vanished tomorrow, the world would be better off."
That's really the only link to her ethnicity playing a role in her success -- non-white radicals tend to value family ties, strong communities, hometown pride (not transplant pride), normie tastes, and non-ironically taking part in your ethnic group's cultural traditions.
They are only on the periphery numerically -- wherever their ancestors came from, these ways are the mainstream, but here in America, they are on the margins.
They are not rigidly sub-cultural or counter-cultural, though. That would turn them against not only mainstream white American culture, but the mainstream culture of their own Puerto Rican / Lebanese / Indian / Whatever background.
But they like the distinctive clothes, food, music, dance, vocabulary, etc. of their background.
I noticed this the most during my college activist days. Most of what I worked on was US imperialism in the Middle East, and the ethnic Middle Easterners involved were total normies, who got involved due to having skin in the game. They didn't want their home society, which they loved, to get wiped out by American society's military and banking powers.
The typical white radical activist who got involved was coming from a background of "America sucks for rejecting me socially". Organizing against US imperialism was a form of revenge against something and someone they hated -- not out of shame for how something they cherished and belonged to had been corrupted and perverted to do something so evil.
White radicals tend to join a coalition of peripheral groups because they're attitudinally, not just numerically, outside the mainstream culture. That fuck-society attitude kills any chance they have of leading a broadly successful social-cultural transformation or political-economic revolution.
They have little concrete sympathy for others, and are not very sympathetic themselves. The Establishment is perfectly happy for those kinds of people to be the face and the reality of a movement against the status quo.
Once the normies take it over, look out.
In sociological jargon, non-white radicals have ascribed status as a sub-culture, white radicals have achieved status if they belong to a sub-culture. (A very small number of non-white radicals have achieved status as a sub-culture -- the fuck-all-cultures misfit types.)
ReplyDeleteBy not having a deliberately chosen sub-cultural status, the non-white radicals are actually in a better position to resonate with white normies -- provided they do not culturally antagonize them by organizing around identity politics, but around class and anti-imperial issues that the two groups overlap on.
White radicals can reach their fellow white people, but they have to be socially and culturally integrated into their own mainstream culture, not being a misfit or reject.
That's why Ojeda in West Virginia poses a greater threat to the Establishment than a West Virginian who has fled their home state and region after being socially rejected, and has shacked up in a Brooklyn enclave for fellow social reject transplants.
Radicalized normies, here they come!