The abysmally erratic first two years of our Game Show President unleashed an explosion of women into the U.S. Congress this year, most notably a 29-year-old no-nonsense balls-out Bronx kid named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka AOC–in the social media parlance of our times. AOC is an unapologetic, vocal, and bring-the-pain socialist. Trust me, this is coming from someone who was registered as one in the late 1980s and hounded for half a decade to write for and speak on behalf of its tenants–so much so that it eventually sent me running screaming back to a libertine level of capitalism. But this ain’t the ‘80s, it is the age of Trump, whose inability to form a sentence or have an original thought or understand much less embrace any ideological concept has allowed him to be hijacked by isolationists, evangelical nuts, and the age-old GOP Trickle Down thing that is coming home to roost for middle class tax returns this year. Since, the tribes have gone to their corners. Trump holds on to his 35 to 40 percent zealotry while the New Left has taken control of a third of the federal government that will challenge where the Democratic Party may go into the fast-approaching 2020 presidential scrum.
All of the above would have been considered fair political analysis before things went way off the rails. Now anything goes, because if this current craziness is acceptable than bring on the opposite craziness, right? Compared to the pall of 2019 D.C., which has no real agenda beyond feeding the fragile ego of a maniac, and the general feckless capitulation therein, we have ourselves a vacuum, and it is being filled.
But, really, how crazy is socialism in a country with income tax, Social Security, Medicare, and the most popular entertainment on the planet, the NFL–a completely socialist construct that controls wages, shares revenue, shuts down free speech, exploits bullshit patriotism, blackballs its employees, awards liars and cheaters, and forces American cities to build giant edifices in which to ply their brain-damaging trade? Shit, they want to kick people off their land to build a southern boarder wall no one needs or wants. Socialism is everywhere, bub, and to be fair it is really popular and it’s getting more and more so. There is now an entire generation of kids who are finally seeing our fixed game and now with a bunch of demented old white men running things into the ground, giving each other tax breaks and attacking minorities, immigrants and the socially progressive, they have awakened from their normal level of stupor to get involved. And they are not alone. What AOC and nearly every early Democratic candidate for 2020 has learned is everything they are bringing to the fore is amazingly mainstream.
At the top of the list is an expansion of what is suddenly not only an invincible Affordable Care Act, which is the main reason the House of Representatives flipped in such a dramatic way last November than anything else. Clearly unpopular in 2010, ironically costing the previous president the House, it now costs the current one its chamber. The ACA has become a major plus for progressive candidates. In fact, a FOX News poll right before the 2018 midterms revealed 51 percent of Americans support the ACA while 40 percent despise the 2017 GOP tax cut which is predictably unraveling among middle class voters, especially in the states that made Donald Trump president—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. And that is FOX News! The others, as you can imagine, lean further left and were even higher. This has also been exacerbated by the realization that the jobs El Douche promised these poor suckers are not coming back. For instance, the coal industry, despite a massive deregulation campaign, has been losing more jobs under Trump than Barack Obama, but this of course has nothing to do with presidents. It’s called capitalism and progress. If only Trump or those who voted for him understood this before it was too late.
You would think nothing could compare to the power of the ACA or the fury building out there against the rich. But let’s consider the 77,000 desperate Rust Belt Trump voters also supported another admitted socialist, Bernie Sanders. Like Trump, Sanders was the populist, isolationist, anti-trade, pro-American working-class candidate standing against Hillary Clinton. There is enough post-2016 data that makes it possible that had Sanders not been ripped off by the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign, he may be the 45th president instead of whatever the hell this thing is in the White House. This has always been about Hillary Clinton and not Trump or Sanders for that matter.
The numbers don’t lie. In fact, we should have seen this coming. For instance: the only right-leaning president to win the popular vote in the last quarter-century-plus is George W. Bush in 2004. Obama won it twice. And despite the propaganda, Obama, a pro-free trade, pro-Wall Street, geopolitical centrist was not remotely as “radical” as AOC or what is a large Democratic caucus in the congress right now. In fact, The New Left is the final nail in the Clinton/Moderate/Electable coffin. Those days, like the days of pure conservatism Trump has slaughtered, are over.
Need some more samples of how The New Left is more mainstream than you think? How about two out of three Americans, and its building monthly, support gun control measures? Many of them are starting, for the first time in my lifetime, to inch this majority to challenge the Second Amendment, which I thought silly in the 1980s. And no one can blame a generation filled with kids who’ve been shot at now in record numbers for over a decade. I kind of predicted this one a while ago, and it is starting to happen with a wind at its political back.
Marriage equality is not even up for debate anymore, obviously, but its support is now in the eighty percent level, which is stunning, even for an old marriage equality warhorse like me. Roe v. Wade? Holy crap. While the numbers for restrictions on abortion have risen in recent years, with the advent of science, still a solid 60 percent of Americans do not support overturning it.
Finally, the two new ones that have rightfully brought the fear of Allah into the hearts of the ultra-right across the board is AOC’s call for a Green Initiative. But eight out of ten Americans accept the overwhelming science on Climate Change, including 65 percent of Republicans, while the president thinks it is–like all things with this guy–a hoax. And the 70-percent tax rate on people making over $10 million a year that has sent the Right into paroxysms of fear and loathing? Eighty percent of Americans agree with this idea. Factor in the over three million popular-vote even Clinton accrued and the sheer volume of voters that came out for Democrats in 2018, those are the kind of numbers that win elections. As long as we keep having them and the new generations who support socialist measures come along, you can see why GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is doing backflips trying to pass laws to suppress it.
The New Left isn’t coming.
It is here.
