Democrat giant-slayer and soon-to-be Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came close to saying she supports abolishing the free enterprise system and the precious economic freedoms on which it is based that have made America wealthy beyond its founders’ wildest dreams.
The so-called democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez whom DNC Chairman Tom Perez hails as “the future of our party,” breezily dismissed the current strength of the U.S. economy, claiming unemployment is low only because Americans are working two jobs.
Capitalism is a fleeting phenomenon, she told PBS in an astounding display of historical ignorance that would no doubt endear her to anti-American conspiracy theorist Naomi Klein.
I do think that right now, when we have this no-holds-barred Wild West hypercapitalism, what that means is profit at any cost. Capitalism has not always existed in the world, and it will not always exist in the world. When this country started, we did not operate on a capitalist economy.
Asked if democratic socialism, the system to which Ocasio-Cortez claims allegiance, “calls for an end to capitalism,” the candidate said:
“Ultimately, we are marching towards progress on this issue. I do think that we are going to see an evolution in our economic system of an unprecedented degree, and it’s hard to say what direction that that takes … ”
The interviewer interjected: “It sounds like you are skeptical that capitalism is going to continue to be the right answer.”
“Yeah, I think it’s, um, I think it’s, I think it’s at least a question,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I think it’s absolutely a question.”
At Legal Insurrection, William A. Jacobson marveled at the candidate’s radicalism.
“There you have it. The hottest star in the Democrat universe will not commit to a continuation of capitalism under her Democratic Socialist political world view. That’s the headline.”
But it shouldn’t be the headline. This fraud called democratic socialism is nothing new.
As I’ve written before, democratic socialism is a profoundly dishonest euphemism calculated to make the horrors of communism more palatable. Karl Marx regarded socialism as a necessary way station on the road to the supposed utopia of communism. A socialist is merely a communist who isn’t in a revolutionary rush.
Socialists and communists “all want government or the collective to be master. They all subscribe to bad, un-American ideas, are all in the same ideological camp, and all tend to believe that the ends justify the means. In ideological terms, there is no bright line or safe harbor that neatly separates socialism from communism. They overlap and blend into each other.”
So of course Ocasio-Cortez isn’t committed to the truly revolutionary economic system that has liberated billions of human beings. She prefers the sclerotic, repressive system that murdered hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth century in the pursuit of absurd social justice abstractions.
The evidence of the power of capitalism to do good and effect positive outcomes is overwhelming and irrefutable. As Gayle Smith, then the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said of world poverty rates in 2016:
I think everyone in the room knows that this is a moment of extraordinary progress. Over the last 30 years, extreme poverty has been cut in half. Boys and girls are enrolling in primary school at nearly equal rates, and there are half as many children out of school today as there were 15 years ago.
Ocasio-Cortez’s ignorance aside, the radical leftist upstart’s unexpected primary trouncing of a key member of the House Democratic leadership is sending shockwaves through the Democratic Party establishment.
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member and first-time candidate Ocasio-Cortez, 28, slaughtered ten-term incumbent U.S. Rep. Joe Crowley, 56, in the primary election June 26 for the 14th congressional district in New York City. Crowley is chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, the fourth-highest leadership position among House Democrats and had been a leading contender to become House Speaker if Democrats regained control of that chamber. Ocasio-Cortez, who previously worked as an organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid, won by a margin of 57.5 percent to 42.5 percent.
The photogenic Ocasio-Cortez beat Crowley by running on an extreme-left utopian fantasy platform of abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, expanding Medicare to everyone, providing free college education, guaranteeing jobs for all, as well as a $15 an hour federal minimum wage.
Ocasio-Cortez is a confirmed ignoramus. In one media interview the newly anointed leftist folk hero seemed to confuse ICE with the CIA.
ICE’s “extrajudicial nature is baked into the structure of the agency and that is why they are able to get away with black sites at our border with the separation of our children,” she said during a journey into fact-free paranoia on CNN June 27.
Ocasio-Cortez has called for the abolition of U.S. borders. The politician told an Al-Jazeera spinoff that foreign citizens, border crossers, and illegal aliens ought to enjoy a “right of passage” into the United States.
She explained:
I think that immigration should be safe. I think that we should grant people a safe and documented right of passage. Republicans try all these scare tactics. And they go ‘Oh, open borders.’ Because they’re trying to incite fear. But what we really need to do is demilitarize a lot of what’s going on in terms of the detention of people, which has been happening for a very long time by the way.
The harebrained, politically suicidal promise to abolish ICE is too crazy even for Bernie Sanders who refuses to endorse it. Polling suggests the idea is political poison among Democrat voters.
And contrary to media propaganda, the idea that the DSA is only now “taking over” the Democratic Party is false: it took over the party long ago. The group’s members already largely control the party through various Democrat-related organizations. Virtually every member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, co-founded by the DSA in 1991, is already a member of the DSA, according to DiscoverTheNetworks.
DSA, a small-c communist group, is on the rise because the Left is in revolt against the Trump administration and perhaps because Bernie Sanders popularized the “democratic socialist” label, taking away much of the stigma traditionally associated with socialism. Trump Derangement Syndrome has pushed DSA membership nationwide to the reported 45,000-mark.
The far-left CPC has 79 members in the House and one in the Senate (Bernie Sanders).
What is happening now is that DSAers from outside the formal party structure are causing a huge media stink by tossing out Democrat office-holders in insurgent primary campaigns. DSAers have been succeeding at the state and local level but they haven’t been knocking off Democrat office-holders in large numbers at the national level.
In fact, Ocasio-Cortez is the only DSA-endorsed candidate to take out a sitting congressman. So while her victory is important and is clearly helping her shape party policy, it’s not quite the watershed event leftists build it up to be. It is more like an excuse, or permission, from the party’s radical electoral base to get even more radical.
The destruction of capitalism is what the crazies in the Democrats’ base have wanted for years.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aims to give them what they want.
This article by Matthew Vadum first appeared July 18, 2018, at FrontPageMag.