How did the Democrat Party move so far left so fast? No convention, retreat or caucus was held to designate Medicare for All, tippy-top tax rates, arcane identity litmus tests, free college tuition or a Green New Deal as Democratic dogma, but here we are.
So far, every major Democrat who has declared for the presidency—Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Tulsi Gabbard—has felt obligated at least to genuflect in the direction of Cardinal Bernie.
If in January 2015 you walked up to, say, 50 million American voters and asked them what they thought of when you said, “Bernie Sanders,” 99.9% of them would have replied, “Nothing.” If in early 2018 you had done the same thing with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, same answer—nada.
Today, the two socialists are household names. The Democrat Party belongs to them.
Bernie” is running for president again. In the beauty-contest opinion polls he is only a step behind Barack Obama’s vice president. And by the current standards of America’s political culture, AOC is a star.
Science no longer believes that genes are destiny. But in politics, which no one will confuse with science, it was inevitable that the Democrats’ genetic code on day would bring them to this point—unabashedly the party of the far left.
Both Republicans and Democrats have had to contend with challenges for control from the distant right and left. What primarily has kept these impulses at bay is the reality check of needing to assemble an Electoral College victory out of all the states. When the parties’ nominations have gone well right or left—Goldwater in 1964 and McGovern in 1972—they’ve usually lost by huge margins.
Eugene V. Debs was the first Socialist to run for president, in 1900. Debs, who had been a Democrat, helped found the Industrial Workers of the World. In 1935, playwright Clifford Odets wrote a play called “Waiting for Lefty.” His wait is over.
The Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal is an explicit homage to FDR’s New Deal, and Nancy Pelosi understood exactly what she was doing when she called it a “green dream or whatever.” She knows it isn’t 1935.
The American left went into decline after World War II, as the U.S. economy rebuilt. One can’t overstate the central role that private-sector labor unions—auto, steel, mines—played in keeping the Democrats centered.
Whatever their tensions with industrial capitalism, American union leaders like George Meany, Lane Kirkland and Leonard Woodcock knew their success depended on the private sector’s success. With the private unions’ decline and the rise of public-sector’s success. With the private unions’ decline and the rise of public-sector unions, whose lifeblood is tax revenue, a significant brake on the party’s roll toward socialism disappeared.
The Democrat left re-emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s, pushing the party outside political and cultural norms with street protests, antiwar marches and “occupations’ of universities.
Left-wing academics in those years not only began to develop the theories of gender, sex, race and identity that today animate core liberal beliefs, but they also drove out dissenting professors, mostly conservatives, who might have challenged those ideas.
Without a rigorous opposition, these left-wing theories descended into intellectual gobbledygook like “intersectionality.” It is no accident that the Democrat Party is represented today by the Millennial goofiness of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez or the smiling anti-Semite, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
Nor is it an accident that the Democrats are embracing ideas untethered to proofs or logic such as the Green New Deal, free college and pre-1960s income-tax rates.
Mr. Obama is a central figure in this story. He held the door open for the socialists with his endless speeches about “the wealthiest” and “the 1%.” Arguably Mr. Obama was our first Pop Marxist president, obsessed with class issues.
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat was the best thing that has happened to the Democrat left in the entire postwar period. She stood for what remained of the respectable administrative-state intellectuals who had worked for Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Nudge economics and all that. The left was tired of them.
Mr. sanders was in the right place at the right time. The modern left, the children of the new, no-standards university system, went gaga for Bernie’s comic-book socialism. “Medicare for All!” Bernie shouted across the land. They sent him $25 online donations by the millions. And still do.
The U.S. today has a labor shortage. The workers of the U.S. can’t unite because they’ve got to go to work.
What we have here is artisanal socialism, free-riding luxuriously on capitalism’s manifest success. In New Hampshire Monday, Kamala Harris said, “I am not a democratic socialist.” She should take a political DNA test. I’ll bet she is, or soon will be.