Having control of the media, academia, and entertainment, the Left has long been effective at giving the radical and new (or previously rejected) status-quo status. Enter Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Reacting to liberal establishment fears that her set’s socialist agitation is pulling the party too far left, she has claimed that it’s actually just a case of returning to Democrats’ historic roots.
Ocasio-Cortez made the comments while stumping for presidential contender and fellow socialist Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) this weekend in Coralville, Iowa. Addressing “critics who say that candidates like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sanders are moving the Democrat Party ‘too far left’ with their proposals for “free” college, Medicare for All, and multitrillion-dollar climate change proposals,” reports Breitbart, Ocasio-Cortez responded: “When people try to accuse us of going too far left — we’re not pushing the party left. We are bringing the party home.”
“Are you all ready for a revolution?” she continued, to the blare of Spanish rap lyrics. “I sure am.”
“Ocasio-Cortez’s remark follows rumblings of internal panic among establishment Democrats, prompting some — like Michael Bloomberg, Hillary Clinton, and Eric Holder — to consider jumping in the race in a last-ditch effort to revive the Democrat field,” Breitbart also tells us.
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For Sanders’ part, his campaign welcomes the help, believing “that Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement will excite the base and turn out young and progressive Democrats” and “persuade new voters to give him a look,” reports Politico.
“‘She’s going to do both,’ said Stacey Walker, Sanders’ Iowa campaign co-chair, adding that ‘there is a generation of young political activists that see AOC as the future of the party’ and ‘we will see an expanded turnout among the Latino community,’” the site continues.
But other Democrats aren’t so optimistic. “‘Western Iowa isn’t exactly New York City,’ said Scott Punteney, leader of the Pottawattamie County Democratic Party, in explaining concerns about Ocasio-Cortez he’s heard from other officials,” Politico also informs. “Some of her ideas might not sit well with a lot of more moderate Democrats, which is kind of what we have in the area.’”
But the larger, more serious issue is that Ocasio-Cortez’s ideas don’t sit well, period, with the verdict of history. That is to say, it’s not just that the Green New Deal, instituted globally, could “result in the death of nearly all humans on Earth,” as former Greenpeace Canada figure Patrick Moore put it. It’s not just that an analysis shows that Medicare for All would cost more than $3 trillion annually (the total federal budget is “only” $4.4 trillion) and that seizing every dime of those earning more than $200,000 a year wouldn’t even cover it. It’s that those promising revolution generally deliver devolution.
Historically, revolutions don’t end well. Americans can perhaps lose sight of this more easily than most, since their founding revolution was an exception. But the subsequent French Revolution (1789) is more the norm, involving massive bloodletting and a series of unstable governments followed by the rise a decade later of a dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte.
Of course, Ocasio-Cortez could have been speaking metaphorically, of a political and social sea change ushering in a new day. But it’s irrelevant. Consider: Imagine someone wanted to “revolutionize” your diet — change it completely. Then you learned that he not only is prescribing what has previously brought ill health, but that he doesn’t appear to know much about nutrition, as evidenced by his having changed his tune continually the last number of decades. Would you take his advice? This is analogous to the “Left’s” civilizational prescriptions.
G.K. Chesterton once noted, “Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” A mouthful, it means that “progress” implies movement toward a goal (an ideal), and insofar as we’re unsure of the goal, we cannot be sure of the progress — including, of course, any progress a revolution might bring.
How is this relevant? Moderns, especially the type called leftists, are relativists, fond of saying there are no absolutes (though, paradoxically, their behavior can be most absolutist). “No, no, Simple Simon,” they will aver, generally driven by a desire to justify what objective reality, Truth, condemns, “you don’t understand. Sophisticated people know that there are many perspectives — life isn’t black and white, but shades of gray.”
Alright, but if everything is relative, then their societal prescriptions are relative, too. If all is “perspective,” how could any future order they create be “better” (or worse) than the present one they aim to destroy? It’s, again, as with that self-proclaimed dietician. Why would you upend your menu based on prescriptions he’s tacitly acknowledged are mere preferences?
Unless someone has a firm, iron-clad vision that he at least claims (correctly or not) has a basis in objective reality, he has no business prescribing any societal change, let alone a “revolution.” There is no falser prophet than one who worships the Gods of the Shifting Goalposts.
This shape-shifter orientation is why, mind you, we see the chasm (insofar as it actually is ideological) between the Democrat old guard, Pelosi & Co., and the Ocasio-Cortez crew. The only consistent definition of “liberal” is a “desire to change the status quo.” The older Left succeeded in overturning an older order and created a new status quo. But it now finds — as did the old Bolsheviks whom Joseph Stalin targeted for destruction — that a newer Left is challenging its status quo. (Now you know why young leftists may call Hillary Clinton “conservative”; from their “perspective,” she is just that: a defender of the current order.)
As playwright William Inge noted, “Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.” This is why older Democrats such as constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz, ever a man of the Left, is shocked at young Democrats’ efforts to squelch free speech. It’s why liberals once said that liberation meant free sex, and now it means freedom to choose your sex; once said homosexual behavior should be tolerated and now say that refusal to accept it should eviscerated; once said that enlightenment meant being colorblind, but now put us in a color bind (white-privilege dogma). That’s what happens with people quick with the passionate pronouncements but devoid of principle.
So, in reality, modern leftists certainly do need a revolution — between the ears.
