Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is the author of The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks alongside Sen. Ed Markey at a news conference about the Green New Deal, in Washington, on Feb. 7, 2019.PETE MAROVICH/The New York Times News Service
Last week I began to understand how the Democrats will lose the 2020 presidential election. The reality is that they are not one party, but two: a liberal and a socialist. The former can beat Donald Trump – but not if it is associated with the latter.
Socialism is a term for so long regarded as anathema in the United States that it used to be avoided altogether: Instead of socialism, one said either progressive or the s-word. These days, however, the s-word is no longer taboo. In their eagerness to recruit a new generation of young voters, the Democrats have – not for the first time in their history – admitted a faction of radical ideologues into their midst.
Exhibit A is the “Green New Deal” unveiled on Thursday by the Bronx’s very own La Pasionaria, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and the rather less glamorous 72-year-old Massachusetts senator Ed Markey.
Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not in denial about climate change. But the measures proposed in the Green New Deal to “achieve net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions” are breathtaking. Comrades, we’re talking about a “10-year national mobilization” on the scale of the Great Patriotic War … sorry, I meant the Second World War. By the end of the Green Leap Forward, 100 per cent of U.S. power demand will be met from “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources,” which means geothermal, hydro, solar and wind – nukes are out, according to the FAQ sheet on the “10-Year Plan” released by AOC’s office.
“All existing buildings in the United States” are going to be upgraded “to achieve maximum energy efficiency.” And, there is going to be investment in high-speed rail “at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” The people’s commissars are also going to “guarantee a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement to all people of the United States.” The highlight of AOC’s FAQ sheet was the pledge of “economic security” for people “unable or unwilling to work.”
This is what you get when you recruit your legislators more or less directly from college. For this is the language of countless student union resolutions, freighted with the pious verbiage of today’s “intersectionality,” oblivious to the echoes of the totalitarian regimes of the past. And yet, this document has been endorsed by (thus far) five of the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination in 2020.
Meanwhile, in the real Democratic Party, all hell is breaking loose. Just more than a year ago, they were celebrating the swearing-in of a new governor in Virginia, the former army-medic Ralph Northam, who during the election campaign had accused his Republican rival of “fear-mongering, hatred, bigotry, racial divisiveness.” Symbolizing the new, progressive South was the election of the African-American lawyer Justin Fairfax as Lieutenant Governor – not forgetting the bravery of the Attorney-General Mark Herring in refusing to defend the ban on same-sex marriage in the Virginia state constitution.
Last week, all three men were battling for political survival after a) the publication of a photograph from Mr. Northam’s medical-school yearbook showing two students, one in blackface and the other in a Ku Klux Klan hood (it’s not clear which is the young Northam); b) the allegation, strongly denied by Mr. Fairfax, that he had sexually assaulted a woman in 2004; and c) the admission by Mr. Herring that he, too, wore blackface in college.
The point is that it is political suicide for the Democrats to embrace the campus socialism of AOC.
In this Feb. 5, 2019, photo, President Donald Trump gives his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington.The Canadian Press
Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address was not only delivered with a panache that took his opponents by surprise. It was also subtly crafted to expose the fatal contradictions between the Democrats and their socialist succubi. Sure, there was red meat for the Republican base on the economy, immigration, and abortion. But the blue potatoes of bipartisanship were more plentiful – infrastructure investment, criminal justice reform, China-bashing – as appealing to the aging Democratic leadership as they were repugnant to the youthful lefties. I lost count of how many times he forced Nancy Pelosi to applaud. AOC’s face was a rictus throughout.
“We are born free and will stay free,” Mr. Trump declared early on. “America will never be a socialist country.” But he saved the best for last: a devastating broadside against the crumbling Chavista regime in Venezuela, “whose socialist policies have turned [it] from the richest country in South America to the poorest on earth.”
There are a great many reasons why Mr. Trump ought to be a one-term president. Yet the further the Democratic Party lurches to the left under the influence of AOC and her fellow social-justice warriors, the higher the probability of his re-election. In U.S. politics, unlike in Europe, those who live by the s-word, die by the s-word.
©Niall Ferguson/The Sunday Times, London