Socialists have made clear that their animus toward mainstream politics extends beyond Republicans toward mainstream Democrats. DSA candidates such as New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier, who successfully primaried incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), has declined to endorse House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) as a potential House speaker; he was even taunted with a “you’re next” cry at a Chevalier election-night watch party. The Wall Street Journal reports that incoming DSA members of Congress will push for far-left policies.
“Demands on the table for Jeffries included wealth taxes, advancing language and votes on Medicare for All, the pro-union PRO Act, an arms embargo on Israel, raising the minimum wage and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
Those who remember the 1960s New Left know, we’ve seen this movie before — and it didn’t end well for Democrats.
That era’s Left political rebels, led by Students for a Democratic Society, were explicit in denouncing the centrist Left — despite the promise of the Kennedy-Johnson years. Its signature founding document, the Port Huron Statement, written by Jane Fonda’s future husband Tom Hayden, would be right at home with the Democratic Socialists of America today: “The economy is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.”
SDS labeled this goal as “participatory democracy.”
Leading Left cultural figures went so far as to mock the Old Left. Consider when “folksinger” Phil Ochs, more propagandist than entertainer, crooned a bitter satire titled “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” He satirized those who “read New Republic and Nation; I’ve learned to take every view,” who once “even went to socialist meetings … but I’ve grown older and wiser.”
Ochs deserves credit for some artfulness and for calling out liberal hypocrisy: “I love Puerto Ricans and n***** as long as they don’t move next door.” Left agitprop has since become less subtle. When singer Billie Eilish accepted a Grammy Award, she said simply: “No one is illegal on stolen land. F*** ICE.”
SDS splintered. Ochs died by suicide — but participatory democracy transformed the Democratic Party. The 1969 McGovern-Fraser Commission successfully recommended that presidential nominating convention delegates had to be identity-group based to include women, black people, and those under 30.
DSA GROUPS WALK BACK POST CALLING OCT. 7 ‘RESISTANCE AGAINST IMPERIALISM’
The result was the resounding defeat of the commission’s leader, South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, as the party’s 1972 presidential nominee. Democrats would flounder in the Reagan-Bush era. It would require a Southern moderate, Bill Clinton, to break the spell. (One must view Jimmy Carter’s election as a result of the Nixon scandals.)
The DSA may succeed in pushing the Democrats to the left: in Texas, Michigan and elsewhere. But winning battlegrounds may be quite a different matter.
Howard Husock is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The Projects: A New History of Public Housing.
Continue reading...
[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
