Socialism

The Delusions of the Progressive Populist Left

/ Rich Wilkins / 1 Comment
This could be written in one sentence- “They didn’t vote for him.”

Welcome to the mythical summer of “the Democratic Tea Party.” They can win the most gentrified areas of New York City. They can win Denver. They can win the super safe Philadelphia seat. The Bronx? The Hudson Valley? Suburban Chicago? All the competitive Texas seats? Suburban Philadelphia? South central Pennsylvania? Every California competitive race but one? Suburban Maryland? The Iowa seats? I could go on. They lost every one of them.

Progressive populists are winning low intensity primaries. Safe seats that no Democratic nominee can lose. Races with backbench, lower profile (to the general public) candidates or divided, underfunded competition from multiple candidates. Wildly leftist seats. Rural white seats and gentrified white trust fund babies. Actual working class districts with working class voters? Those folks want nothing to do with these idiots. People in competitive districts? They’ll pass.

Their movement is white, educated, and very male. Their attempts at “working class” are trust fund babies like Graham Platner and grifters like Bob Brooks that somehow didn’t get beat up too badly in their bar room days. When they ran Bernie in 2016, he hit his high in the low-40’s in the primaries. Four years later, with huge money advantages and organization, he fell downward closer to a third. Both times Black peoples had no interest in him. No primary this year suggests anything has changed.

But let’s play along for a minute. Their entire theory is that most Democrats will stick with the party in the event the DSA takes over. They also believe there ae a group of non-voters and even Republicans out there who would vote for them, but not Dems. Is this realistic? Would Republicans cross over to vote for DSA Democrats? Well 77% of them call themselves conservatives, another 18% call themselves moderates, and just 4% call themselves liberals. Even among the whole electorate, liberals are the smallest share of the three options (conservative, moderate, and liberal). Could people not voting right now tip the scales in favor of the DSA types? Well, more non-voters favored Trump in 2024, so that’s not super promising. It doesn’t stand to reason that people calling themselves conservative or moderate in general would prefer the further left version of Democrats to the current version of Democrats that they also didn’t prefer to Trump. But there’s a greater danger here- it really wouldn’t take many existing Democrats just deciding they’re out on this to make the Democrats a hopeless minority forever. Democrats have received about 48% of the vote or more in every Presidential election since 1996, so let’s use that as a baseline. If ten percent of Democratic leaning voters decided they didn’t want to vote for this party anymore, the party would be a 43% national party and would lose both houses of Congress and the White House for a generation. A little over 40% of Democratic voters are independents that lean Democratic, and about 45% of them are moderates, at minimum. So figure conservatively somewhere around 20% of Democratic leaning voters are definitely well to the right of these people, at least. Losing half of them seems to be an automatic. Reality is that these numbers could be a lot more.

What’s the point in taking over a party that can’t win anymore? Ok, you win a majority of a small group and meanwhile the larger public is repulsed. It’s hard to put lipstick on a pig. You can say Mamdani is a model for Democratic Socialist governance if you want, but they can talk about the $4 billion bailout from Albany he got this year and the missed pension payment for city workers worth $2.3 billion more. We all know that $6.3 billion for a city is a lot of money. People who don’t live in these big, blue cities are not going to be as okay with that kind of government as the very progressive voters in those places. How do you sell this to people who are largely not all that ideological, let alone to anyone opposed to leftism?

The answer is you don’t, and you won’t. Yes, they are going to win elections in very blue areas right now. Expanding beyond that isn’t something they have even fathomed beyond some nonsense about “turning out non-voters” that probably don’t like them either. The whole thing is just Corbyn’s British Labour on steroids, and probably will go about as well. In what world are you going to sell voters in the Midwest, or even here, on electing people who are members of a political party that is nominating people supporting the Kremlin, Cuban communism, and people chanting “death to America” over in New York City? Literally why would any American with a sane mind look at the recent winners in New York City and Denver and be like, “yeah, I’m for this?” This is a dead end. For those of you who say “well the establishment Democrats lost too!,” yes, you are right. They lost in no small part because the country thought they were too obsessed with social justice and economic redistribution under Biden, how the hell do you think the country is going to react to someone who is actually a real life leftist?

The U.S. Was Right to Remove Maduro (But Wait For It…)

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Nicolas Maduro was a failed leader. His country was in ruins. He was a socialist lunatic. His country had pirates off of the coast. Waves of people left seeking refugee status in other nations. There was starvation. There were human rights and free speech violations. He killed his own people. He annexed his neighbor’s territory. He was a client state for Russia and China. In short, Maduro was a terrible guy. Venezuelans are happy he’s gone. I believe it is good that he’s gone.

Is it bad that Trump didn’t ask for Congressional authority? Sure, but many Presidents don’t for one off operations. Is it bad to just remove foreign leaders? Yeah, usually. Does any of this matter if Maduro is gone, we don’t get stuck in some long occupation, and things get better for normal Venezuelans? No.

We have leftists on the internet and in major cities protesting this. Just stop. You don’t need to defend Maduro just because you don’t like Trump. Of course the weirdos I’m talking about are also the kind of people who want to “change the relationship to property ownership” here in America. These people aren’t redeemable. We really don’t need them in any political party. We can win the 2026 Election talking about real world issues like health care, household debt, and wages. And well, I say that as someone who supports more public housing and thinks Presidents should ask Congress to attack foreign nations. These people live in a fairy tale land. And they want to bring that here.

Reject it. Reject it and reject people who tell you it’s what’s best for us. It’s not.

Socialism Failed. Why Do Some Keep Bringing It Up?

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We just passed the 34th anniversary of one of the greatest days in the post-World War II world- the death of the Soviet Union. A bunch of hyper-ambitious morons decided to create a government on a theory and a myth, and ended up creating a failed shit hole of a state, an authoritarian, corrupt, awful nightmare of a state. As with most Socialist nations in our world, it turned into a cult of personality towards it’s leaders, complete with rampant corruption and “black markets,” poverty, and all kinds of human rights violations. The world is better off for not having the Soviet Union around today, whatever you think of the governments in the republics that replaced it.

Sure, there are Russians and others from the old empire that miss the power they had at that time. Even so, they’re not desperate to return to the system of government they had. Meanwhile, socialism has failed pretty much everywhere else- North Korea is a hellhole, China basically abandoned the system, Cuba is on the verge of collapse, Venezuela has literal pirates off their coast, Yugoslavia collapsed into a state of war and ethnic cleansing, the rest of Eastern Europe threw out their dictators, East Germany had to build a wall to keep people from leaving, and Bolivia’s economy is now in ruins. Socialism just doesn’t work anywhere. Even countries that didn’t end up in violent chaos ended up turning away from the failed system.

So why do progressives in the Western World, who are actually just old European Social Democrats (a very generous government “safety net.”) want to brand themselves as far leftist nuts? To be clear, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Graham Platner, Bob Brooks, and others are not calling for the government to “seize the means of production.” They don’t want a “First National Energy Company,” and even their “Medicare for All” is just covering everyone under Medicare- which is generally administered by private companies. Why are they associating the policies of a full social safety net with a failed economic and political system that allowed Joseph Stalin to kill millions and millions of his own people? How is this good politics?

Americans are generally smart enough to know that these people are idiots, which is why they don’t win elections outside of comfortably Democratic jurisdictions where primaries decide the winners. It’s one thing to want a generous Social Security program or a higher minimum wage, it’s another altogether to brand yourself a part of a murderous, failed political system. Somehow, a lot of Democrats want to turn to these people to turn their 2024 fate around. It’s a foolish strategy.

The Democratic Tea Party Moment has Arrived, and That isn’t a Good Thing

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

I’ve been around long enough to remember the Bush Republican Party. It was an awful institution, an institution that ruined our standing in the world with their post-9/11 foreign policy, created permanent deficits with their tax cuts, wars, and unfunded mandates, wrecked public education, put the architects of repealing Roe v. Wade on the bench, ran a Presidential campaign in 2004 based on gay baiting and homophobia, weakened environmental laws, and deregulated housing and Wall Street to the point of an economic collapse in 2008. In short, the reason I am a Democrat today is that the Bush Republican Party was an incredibly damaging group of people and was full of completely repugnant people, from Dennis Hastert to Dick Cheney. We should not opine the moral superiority of “those good ole’ days.” There was nothing good about them.

What followed the Bush Republican Party was not an improvement. Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and the rise of people like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul was not some return of moral leadership to the Party of Lincoln. Those folks gave rise to Trumpism, and Trump has been the revolution. Our government is largely no longer functional, and that’s what many folks who supported him want. “Norms” are no longer normal, there is no discussion of common ground. The current pathway is simply a regression to the desired conservative mean, a natural outcome of the algorithm billionaires and conservative culture warriors wanted. The destruction of this moment cannot be understated.

The problem of course is that as dumb as Trump truly is, there was a decent argument that a 20th century government and political culture was no longer working for America. The large, bulky government we had put together after World War II, and it’s technocratic wonkiness, had become a hinderance to the desires of the public. Our society was not, and by the way is still not, meeting our needs.

I won’t draw a comparison between the party of Obama/Clinton/Biden and the Bush GOP, because let’s be honest, they gave us things like Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and an infrastructure bill. If you want to argue they didn’t go far enough, fine, but they were good things. However, the Democratic Party had become the defenders of systems and institutions that were not, and are not, popular. We were arguing the economy was fine because of market growth and job numbers, while housing and costs in general were rising. We were arguing that Israel was right to attack Hamas, because they were, but were giving ourselves no room to criticize Netanyahu’s incompetence and total disinterest in getting to a sustainable outcome, even as he criticized and attacked us. We were right to bail out Wall Street, the auto industry, and the health care industry after 2008, but also not only didn’t make them pay for their bad choices, we sort of got stuck defending why America “needed” them. Basically, we got stuck keeping our systems working, because it was the best thing for society, and then also got stuck defending the institutions on which we had always been the only check. We started to look like the kids serving as hall monitors in high school, the wet blankets.

The correct response to this is not to start yielding to anti-semitism and white men with Nazi tattoos, that much I know. Globalizing the Intifada is still a very, very bad idea, even if you think Netanyahu is an abject criminal. Sure, Democrats should never have conceded to the data nerds and embraced a “base only” approach to politics, but the answer to that is not to embrace the very worst human beings one can find. The 2010 Republican Party conceded power to the Tea Party, and within a few years they were embracing Pizza Gate, Charlottesville, chem trail theorists, and “white replacement theory.” So much for Milton Friedman economics and “real politic” foreign policy. They were overrun with an unmanageable caucus in both houses of Congress and a Presidential candidate who was completely self motivated and transactional. What could go wrong? Well, everything. And now it’s the Democrats turn. We are on the verge of accepting anti-semitism, grifters, and crackpot conspiracy theorists. They are defending political violence against Jews. And before you say, it’s just one of them, no it’s the whole Alt-Left movement. As DSA calls murder okay, they organize for Mamdani. That would be Zohran Mamdani, who last year was a part of the uncommitted movement over, yes, Gaza. Up on stage at their DSA rally he had AOC, a proponent of the “defund the police” movement. Seriously. She didn’t just want changes to policing, she wanted it defunded. She meant it too. And then there was Bernie up there with them. Bernie, who ran and lost for President twice, the second time much worse, who never misses a chance to attack Democrats. Not on stage with them was Bernie’s heart throb in Maine, Graham Platner, a loud progressive who also thinks the Democratic Party sucks, and also has Nazi tattoos. Of course, the Alt-Left loves him and thinks they “might have found our Trump.” They also didn’t bring their old buddy John Fetterman around, because he’s sort of problematic right now, but he was Mamdani and Platner before they were.

There are Democratic leaders, from Martin Heinrich to Chris Murphy, maybe to even Hakeem Jeffries and Kathy Hochul, ready to concede to these folks. They are ready to concede the Democratic Party to self avowed socialists, conspiracy theories, and nuts. It’s about to happen here in the Lehigh Valley too. Bernie Sanders has endorsed Bob “Crooksy” Brooks in the 7th Congressional district primary. Just like he did for Fetterman. That would be Crooksy who stiffed his mother-in-law, but lives in a state of denial that people won’t care about stealing $55k, defending political violence, sharing racist memes, and being a religious radical. Of course Bernie is for this, he was for Fetterman too. And like Bernie and Fetterman, Crooksy lectures the Democrats about “not supporting the working class,” which for Crooksy just means they let the Black lady talk to Black people, which he definitely hates. Sadly, it sounds like Governor Shapiro is going to join the PA Dems in conceding the Democratic Party to the most vile, terrible elements of the left for political expediency. This is no profile in courage moment. Our leaders are letting us down. They are allowing anti-semites, conspiracy theorists, and socialists to be our future. This is our Tea Party Moment. We are failing it.