Why Fox News' Scare Pieces About ... Ocasio-Cortez Keep Turning Into Ads for Democratic Socialism

[Snellius]

Why Fox News’ Scare Pieces About Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Keep Turning Into Ads for Democratic Socialism

Source: Slate

On June 27, self-identified Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated powerful Democratic incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in a New York City primary. Soon after, Fox News host Sean Hannity posted an ostensibly horrifying graphic about Ocasio-Cortez’s radical positions that became a viral phenomenon because it was, with some exceptions, a straightforward list of inoffensive general principles and economic policies:

Link to tweet

Why does this keep happening? One reason might be that what Ocasio-Cortez and other Democratic “socialists” like Bernie Sanders are advocating is not actual socialism in the sense of the government taking over businesses on behalf of the world’s workers. Universal free college is an extension of existing public education principles, just as “Medicare for All,” under many definitions of the term, would expand an existing system of government payments to private health care providers. The $15 minimum wage movement involves a mechanism that has existed since 1938 to regulate America’s predominately private employers. Regulating or even breaking up too-big-to-fail banks are ideas that have more than a century of precedent in American government.

As writers like Eric Levitz and Sean McElwee have been pointing out in exasperation for years, these kinds of ideas—which involve supplementing, not replacing, a system of individually autonomous free enterprise to ensure that its participants can all live a “dignified” life— are not just popular with communist revolutionaries but with the U.S. population as a whole. (As is the idea of financing those improvements by taxing the rich, an idea that does not seem especially impractical or unfair when the rich just got a trillion-dollar debt-financed tax cut.) One way to look at what’s happening in the Democratic Party right now is that it’s not necessarily becoming something radically new as much as that it’s going through a course correction to once again become the party of the New Deal. (Even more overtly socialist concepts like jobs guarantees are resonant with FDR-era programs like the Works Progress Administration.)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/fox-news-ocasio-cortez-scares-helping-democratic-socialists.html

[Uncle Joe]

1. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread Snellius

[3Hotdogs]

2. She's unhappy because there is no talk about paying for the wish list. I got an idea.

How 'bout paying for it by rescinding the Orange-asshole's tax reductions for the rich? Or maybe reduce the defense budget?

[Merlot]

5. She's unhappy because it's hard to argue against these things successfully

It means she'll have to work harder to get people to actually believe education and healthcare are wrong.

[lagomorph777]

3. Chris Hayes had a feature on it last night; the wingnuts were apoplectic about how appealing it is.

What a concept: government FOR the people. Terrifying!

[Oneironaut]

4. RWNJ are like the Grinch, scowling at the sight of a happy society and thinking of ways to ruin it.

“I’m miserable! Everyone else needs to be miserable too! No happiness allowed!”

This agenda is terrifying to them. They see happiness and prosperity as zero-sum, where if other people get it too, it takes away from them.