The President of the U. S. has been fuming about "communists"* winning primaries in New York City and Colorado. He appears to be peeved about a subset of Democratic candidates for Congress, who won in very blue districts and who go by "Democratic Socialists of America" and whose politics is, generally, considerably less socialist than Upton Sinclair, Eugene V. Debs or the general trend of the governments of Nordic countries. (All of which just happen to have capitalist economies.)
We've already got a couple of DSA-affiliated Representatives in the House, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and here's the thing: voters are entitled to pick their representatives. Indiana regularly sends an assorted bouquet of conservative Republicans to the House, along with one or two big-city Democrats for contrast. You might deplore the politics of some or all of that delegation, but the majority of voters in their districts wanted them, and so off they go to Congress, to butt heads or collude with their opposite numbers from the various states. That's how it works.
In a country with a strong two-party system, and ours is about as entrenched as they come, you're going to find a diversity of opinion within the parties. Maybe not as much as there used to be; my parents used to shake their heads over that wild liberal (but nominally Republican) Nelson Rockefeller, and express concern at the most stick-in-the-mud of the conservative Southern Democrats. It really does take all kinds, and ideally, we're going to get all kinds in Congress, where -- maybe! -- they'll actually address substantive issues and try to find some path to accomplishing the things that really need doing.
I'm not especially hopeful that the members of the House and Senate are going to do much besides make pretty speeches for their bases and assume various traditionally partisan postures, but if sending in a few younger people, who owe less to lobbyists and big business and aren't in lockstep with their party's orthodoxy, will shake 'em up and at least produce some substantive debate, I'll be happy to see it, no matter what it takes. I'm not too worried they'll pocket the good silver, not while the Executive Branch is all but looting the Treasury and daring anyone to notice, and with all of their seniors in the Legislature giving them the hairy eyeball.
It's high time we stopped giving away special tax breaks to the rich, especially on Social Security and Medicare. Chumps like you and me, the more we earn, the more we pay -- but there's a threshold, low by millionaire standards, where those withholdings plateau, and as fewer and fewer people hold more and more money (and income), the shortfalls in those programs grow in direct proportion. Removing or at least modifying those limits on Medicare and Social Security pay-in for big incomes isn't making the one or two percent pay extra, it's just asking them to pay the same rate as the rest of us. If it takes a few firebrands with wacky notions to move the needle in that direction, hooray. If they get too obstreperous, they can always be voted right back out. Try that with a sticky-fingered gazillionaire, and see how far you get!
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* He used the term "godless communist," which is an oldie from 1950s or earlier, popular during the Red Scare, but the two DSA reps presently in Congress consist of one Muslim and one Catholic, neither of which faith lacks in a Supreme Being. Atheists are screamingly rare among American office-holders and whoever wins in November, you can all but count on 'em being a member of some theistic religion. Our Congressthings have many flaws, severally and each, but an insufficiency of God ain't among 'em.
Update
1 year ago
4 comments:
I suspect that if asked, he'd have a really, really hard time defining the tenants of Communism in any way that made sense.
As for the DSA- I'm not a fan. They just want the government to take over and regulate different aspects of my life, liberty, and property than the hyper MAGAs do. Maybe as malignant as MAGA, but if I wanted to live in a Euro style nanny socialist state, I'd move to Europe or Australia.
But to be fair, if the radicals are the only effective opposition to the status quo, one shouldn't be surprised when people put the radicals into power. And since my party has pretty much prostrated themselves to Trump, well, elections have consequences.
It might be useful to have a look at their positions, which are a combination of European-style social welfare (Medicare for All, free college, universal child care) and pie-in-the-sky (32-hour work week!).
More to the point, the House might see as many as five (5) DSA-affiliated Dems out of a total that'll run near a couple of hundred, plus or minus. Which means they'll probably still have pool funds with the libertarian-inclined GOP reps if they want to throw much of a far-out-fringe Congresspeople cookout. Power, it ain't.
What they will do, right along with whatever libbytarian and, yeah, newbie MAGAed-up Republicans get in, is help mitigate the Old Boy's Club aspects of Congress, in which a bunch of well-off people in nice suits, most of 'em with law degrees, figure out how they're gonna hang onto their phony-baloney jobs and screw more money out of the taxpayers, lobbyists and contractors while producing just enough sound and fury to appear to be doing useful stuff. We could randomly let tigers loose in the Capital instead, but this way is more civilized.
P.S. DSA positions at Wikipedia. Trotsky wouldn't have had 'em.
I've spent considerable time in Australia, so I'm familiar with Euro style social welfare stuff. And to be fair, while it's got some good points, there's more than a few downsides, enough for them to not get my vote.
Of course, one does hope that a few more radical types can maybe shake things up. Sometimes it works in a good way, and sometimes they get an outsized say in the running of a government because that handful of radicals is juuussssst enough to make a majority- the Greens in Australia a decade or so ago during one of the Labor governments comes to mind. If Julia wanted to stay PM, she had to jump whenever the Greens said 'frog'.
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