Ocasio-Cortez plays into this at every turn.
Take the Green New Deal, for example. She proudly tweeted that she and her friends threw it together over the course of a weekend, as though that were a good thing. It’s an unrealistic dreamer’s errand and a wish list, and the price tag on it has all the conservatives licking their chops.
There are those who accuse us of hostility to AOC based on her taking out of Joe Crowley, who undoubtedly was one of our best guys, and who genuinely will be missed. This is not the case, however; we are Democrats, and we support democracy. We bid our condolences and farewells to Joe and moved on. At this time,
Millennial Democrats wrote Ocasio-Cortez an article of welcome and sincere congratulation, asking her to reconsider her stance on some things and drop the socialist aspect of her philosophy.
As for the environmental changes proposed as part of the Green New Deal, we fully support those aspects of the bill.
Nancy Pelosi made that clear when amending the bill. Her version is the one that mainstream Democrats like Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar have gone on to indicate some support for, not AOC’s.
Former Vice-President Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change science. Our side has been fighting for this since long before AOC, or any other Millennial Democrat was even born. Our opposition to the bill has less than nothing to do with that, although most of us rightly are grateful to and venerate our elders in the baby boomer generation.
We’re not for doing things sloppy. There are very serious legislative flaws in that plan. It was not well crafted, and the crafters were completely ill-prepared. They got in trouble right away because of that FAQ that went around last week, talking about the people “unwilling to work”, et cetera.
At any rate, the problems are much more foundationally serious than an unvetted fact sheet. Expert
Mike Pesca weighed in, pointing out very few environmental experts consider the targets laid out in the plan to be attainable in any way. Climate change experts have called for zeroing out emissions in the power sector by 2050, while the Green New Deal proposes doing so by 2030.
On what basis does it maintain the time frame can be accelerated by two-thirds? It does not say.
What Ocasio-Cortez and her friends have actually done is to confuse the issue further, make the true adherents of climate change look bad, and make it harder for the professionals responsible to get the actual progress made, which is the problem with her entire organization, modeled after
Bernie Sanders from the start. AOC sadly didn’t just used to work for JD and DSA, she is very much a part of them now, and is in fact their greatest asset.
Because of that fact, she is also the greatest Republican asset, which is one more eerie way in which the interests of the far left and alt-right coincide. Their attacks on her are likely part of their usual cunning political strategy; they know booing her is an easy way to make the left embrace her, which in chess terminology is like eating a poisoned pawn, because of what an insanely atrocious idea signing on behind the original Green New Deal would be.
Why else would
Mitch McConnell allow a vote on something he knows will never pass, like the Green New Deal, except to be able to tar and feather anyone who goes for it as a socialist wingnut who gets up at three in the afternoon?
In Ocasio-Cortez, in the few very loud members of our generation that have been hoodwinked into supporting this truly evil and invasive form of government, the Republicans now have a walking personification of all they have been fighting with their money to create: a just accusation that Democrats are socialists, and that to support us is to personally become the vector of socialism. It’s George McGovern all over again.
Meanwhile, the Venezuelan situation provides a vivid example of how big disaster socialism can be. At the end of the SOTU speech, Trump did what he’s going to be doing a lot- pointing to Bernie Sanders in silence, looking horrified, waiting for the people to become so disgusted they can’t take it and vote against their interests. Policy be damned, they will say. Look at that blue clown suit. I would rather burn than have that guy as my president.
The claim that we Democrats are going to turn America into a Venezuelan socialist hellscape looks like something new, but as every reader of this blog will be aware, they’ve been laying the groundwork for it for the last several years. Contrary to Trump’s new narrative, the Democratic Party has never embraced Bernie Sanders. We do share some policies, but he goes too far with them and makes them look ridiculous. Now he’s got AOC there with him, screaming for seventy percent income tax rates on the rich and protesting Nancy Pelosi over climate change.
Wonderful.