JUST DON’T MENTION THE CULTURE WAR: Old and Busted: “We Are All Socialists Now,” the infamous headline on the cover of the then-Washington Post-owned Newsweek at the dawn of the Obama era in February of 2009.
The new hotness? “Speak no more of socialism,” Richard Cohen of the Post writes of the Democrats’ new “It Girl*,” the far left Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
The socialism to which Ocasio-Cortez adheres lacks the militancy of old and is supposedly attractive to young voters who have no memory of any communist association. The trouble is that young voters often don’t vote and older voters do. To the latter, the socialist label is anathema and, as far as I’m concerned, unnecessary. This, after all, is the avuncular socialism of Bernie Sanders: universal Medicare and free higher education. It needs no label. Sign me up.
The socialist label, combined with the demand to obliterate the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, is the nitro and the glycerin of a bomb that Trump can throw at the Democrats. It combines the bugaboo of socialism with the irrational fear of immigrant hordes rampaging through the countryside.
The latter fear is not to be messed with. In Germany, it may yet bring down Angela Merkel’s government and has already made doughty Denmark mad with anti-immigrant regulations that reveal a nation demented by cultural paranoia. But the United States, too, has gone through such phases, deporting “aliens” of what a 1918 law called the “anarchistic and similar classes.” They were detained first on the very Ellis Island that had welcomed some of them — and then shipped back to Europe on a tub that made steerage seem ritzy by comparison.
By the authoritarian “Progressive” superstar Woodrow Wilson, Cohen conveniently leaves out of his article.
Oh, and speaking of Ocasio-Cortez, “Valerie Jarrett Endorses Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” Steve Bartin writes at NewsAlert – using that dreaded “S”-word in his headline.