Retrograde Slide

Over the past month or so, I've been following Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter, the Left's new telegenic, intersectionally acceptable (i.e., young, latin, female) celebrity. It's informative.

Although not a Democrat party leader (actually, not even a Congresswoman at this point), Cortez provides a important window into Democratic Socialist thinking and possibly, the direction of the Democratic party. She is unabashedly in favor of big government solutions for everything from healthcare, to income inequality, to climate change. She says all of the right things (if you're a progressive) and has a large following of mostly young progressives who idolize her in a way not seen since the fawning praise heaped on Barack Obama before he did anything as president. Recall that Obama was awarded a Nobel peace prize prospectively, yet after eight years of serial failure on the world stage, slaughters in Syria, Libya, capitulation to Iran, and other geopolitical missteps, his media hamsters still characterize the man as a transcendent figure. Oh well, I digress. Back to Cortez.

In a recent "climate summit" Tom Elliott reports that Ocazio-Cortez said:

“I believe that the progressive movement is the only movement that has answers right now,” she said. “We're the only ones that are drawing from the lessons of history, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from some of the most ambitious projects that we have pursued in American history. And that truly again is the scale that it's going to take.”

Hmmm. I suppose that depends on the questions.

I find it interesting that Cortez wants to go back to FDR's 1940s for direction, but refuses to acknowledge that a far a more recent socialist experiment in Venezuela has ended catastrophically. During the climate summit, she proposed nationalizing Tesla's EV technology in much the same way as Hugo Chavez suggesting nationalizing Venezuela's oil and gas industry. That did NOT work out well for Venezuela and it would NOT work out well for the United States, but Cortez is either too ignorant or too ideological to recognize the dangers (and failures) of centralized government control of an economy.

Cortez, her mentor Bernie Sanders, and the rest of the Dem Socialist crowd view the private sector as part of the problem, not part of the solution. Whether it's demanding centralized big government control of almost all aspects of our economy, dictating the wages that businesses should pay their workers, inventing regulations that strangle innovation, or demonizing capitalism, their Marxist-Leninist march toward the future is actually a retrograde slide into an ugly and failed past.