The Future of American Politics?

No, it’s never my intent to simply make fun of people, not even politicians. Yet when someone like New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez keeps putting herself forth as the representative of the new wisdom, one can’t help but comment occasionally.

The reason it’s hard to keep from commenting is that nearly everything she says, whenever it is fact-checked, is found to be utterly false. She is an avowed Socialist—the capital “S” is intentional due to her fervency in its espousal—who seems to have no concept that socialism has been a worldwide failure throughout both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What she is advocating is that the US look to places like Venezuela and adopt its policies for our future.

Anybody noticed lately what’s happening in Venezuela? That’s a topic for another post, but if you are in the dark, a quick search will tell you all about the horrors and miseries currently being experienced there.

Surely there are success stories, aren’t there?

Well, there are the well-known utopias of the USSR (whoops, that fell), Yugoslavia (sorry, another failure), Cuba (still reeling under a Castro), North Korea (what a joy it would be to live there, right?), and countless other examples.

But that’s what she seems to want for us. No, she doesn’t really want miseries, but she has this unflagging optimism that maybe this time it actually will work. The saddest aspect of this, though, is that she may be ignorant of socialism’s history of failure. Yet voters in her district put her in Congress.

Her latest comments are about climate change. You see, the world is going to come to an end in twelve years unless we change our policies. Newsweek, that organ of the radical right (sarcasm alert), quoted her thusly:

“Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like, The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?” the freshman congresswoman said. “This is the war—this is our World War II.

Cartoonists have had a field day with this.

AOC—as she’s now being called to avoid writing out her entire name—has positioned herself as the spokesperson for the new wave of Democrats in Congress, and she’s causing the Democrat leadership a lot of headaches. It’s not that they’re so moderate, but they fear her headlong rush into the realms of fantasy will hurt the party long-term. There are rumors of finding someone to challenge her in the next primary.

But she is unbowed; she will speak her mind, even though some of us question seriously what’s going on in that mind. And she’s accomplishing her short-term goal of making herself a political star. In fact, one could argue that I’m helping her out just by writing about her.

I know that giving her too much attention is not healthy, for me as well as for the nation. So I promise not to make her a focal point of many blog posts. Yet she certainly can’t be ignored. She may be pointing to the future of American politics, scary as that may be.