Desert Sage: Why socialist candidates are good for politics Desert Sage column

Algernon D'Ammassa | Las Cruces Sun-News

Show Caption Hide Caption Ocasio-Cortez win huge moment for democrats The upset primary win in New York by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a huge moment for the Democratic Party because it shows the left-wing base is energized heading into the midterms, according to AP National Politics Reporter Steve Peoples. (June 27)

You cannot do your duty by proxy. You have got to do it yourself and do it squarely and then as you look yourself in the face you will have no occasion to blush. You will know what it is to be a real man or woman. You will lose nothing; you will gain everything. Not only will you lose nothing but you will find something of infinite value, and that something will be yourself. And that is your supreme need—to find yourself—to really know yourself and your purpose in life. – Eugene V. Debs

100 years (almost to the day) after that speech by Debs, 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won an upset victory in a Democratic Party primary in New York for the U.S. House of Representatives. She defeated 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley, a powerful professional politician ranked as one of the top Democrats in Congress.

The political establishment has been clucking like a chorus of Chicken Littles over the likelihood that Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, will join Congress. This spring also saw primary victories by other Democratic candidates endorsed by DSA or running on boldly progressive platforms.

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Yet the sky is not falling. This clamor about socialism invading American politics like creeping bentgrass is largely steeped in Cold War fear-mongering about the left. We’ve gotten used to people conflating authoritarian communism with anyone who supports a minimum wage. Happily, opinion polls and recent election cycles indicate that younger voters have their own thoughts.

Socialist politicians exist all over the world, winning and losing elections. Some govern well, some screw up. Socialist politics have a long history in the United States from the coasts to the Midwest to the American plains. Socialism isn’t new or exotic.

Hysterics over a label should not distract voters from the possibility of a humane politics representing those who work and struggle, unafraid to overhaul systems that squeeze and divide us.

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One need not identify as a socialist to endorse Ocasio-Cortez’s platform: universal health care, treating housing as a right against overdevelopment and price inflation, scaling back perpetual warfare and ruinous military spending, guaranteeing employment and higher education, ending the private prison industry and enacting criminal justice reform, making elections more representative, addressing climate change, and other measures of economic and social justice.

As she said in an interview: “I can’t name a single issue with roots in race that doesn’t have economic implications, and I cannot think of a single economic issue that doesn’t have racial implications. The idea that we have to separate them out and choose one is a con.”

Her platform is ambitious, with many aspects that would be a hard sell even with a Democratic majority in Congress. The proposals are all worth examination and debate. In any case, it is an exuberantly humane platform. It represents things a republic might do if it turns towards the needs of the working class – and what becomes debatable when more legislators come from that class.

Eugene Victor Debs ran for president five times as a Socialist Party candidate. In 1912 he took 6 percent of the vote (better than Ralph Nader, Gary Johnson, or Jill Stein ever did).

Debs was a popular figure not because millions of Americans went bolshevik, but because of Debs’s humanitarian conviction and willingness to stand for the vulnerable against systems of oppression and exploitation.

Ocasio-Cortez entered electoral politics with a background in social movement work. She draws from an experience of grassroots organizing with a broad humane vision. This is the kind of citizenship that transcends the aspirations of professional politicians, building polities with a clear vision of human purpose.

Algernon D’Ammassa is Desert Sage. Share your thoughts at adammassa@lcsun-news.com.

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