Pinkos Have More Fun

But then came Bernie Sanders’s 2016 candidacy, then the membership boom of DSA, then the proliferation of socialist cultural products like Chapo, and then, finally, the spectacular rise of Ocasio-Cortez.The politics of the socialism that they helped revive isn’t always clear. “Any mild reform to capitalism or our society will be called socialism anyways, so why not just go whole hog and ask for what you really want to achieve?” And so, two years after we were supposed to usher in our second era of Clintonian triangulation, we’re staring down this country’s most serious flirtation with socialism since the 1930s (all while the right aligns itself with Russia and supports a coup in Venezuela).Many socialists distance themselves from Chapo, which for many embodies Bernie-bro machismo. America is with you,” tweeted Gawker alum Hamilton Nolan recently.) Across the industry, editorial staffs of a number of publications, including this one, have unionized.Meanwhile, the magazine Jacobin — named for the insurgents who led France’s murderous Reign of Terror during the Revolution — has only grown in influence since its 2010 founding, popularizing socialism for a wider audience (“Are Workers the ‘Gravediggers’ of Capitalism?”; “Eight Marxist Claims That May Surprise You”) and elevating a new generation of leftist voices. In the wake of the Amazon pullout, de Blasio abruptly reversed himself, and an account that tracks copy changes in the Times caught this revealing tweak: “FOR SOME 2020 DEMOCRATS, REJECTION OF AMAZON ALIGNS WITH FAR-LEFT LIBERAL POLICY VIEWS.”Last year, Audrey Gelman of the women’s co-working space the Wing, and Lena Dunham of Girls — both Hillary Clinton backers in 2016 — held competing events for Ocasio-Cortez and millionaire actress Cynthia Nixon, who in her gubernatorial campaign against Andrew Cuomo declared herself a democratic socialist. People stuck red roses next to their Twitter avatars and started calling each other “comrade.” And while in theory socialism connoted a collectivist politics, in practice it ended up becoming a new identity category around which to rally.DSA is still a sixth the size of the Rotary Club, and only two of its members are in Congress. “This event is now the Well, Actually.” While the racial breakdown was indeed a little awkward — Latina candidate onstage, white allies in the beer tent — it was nothing new for the nearly all-Caucasian DSA left.The more interesting tension at the event was generational. At the Verso party, I ran into a libertarian-socialist guy whom I hadn’t seen since college, and who told me that “North Star is the worst thing you can call someone in DSA.” Then there are disbanded groups like the ReFoundation caucus, which was populated by Fidel Castro sympathizers and Stalinoid tankies. And while the sheer amount of random stuff going on every night can feel like leftist self-parody — “eco-socialist working group”; “North Brooklyn Night School Session 19 — The Lenin Controversy” — DSA’s wide-open democratic structure has also empowered its members.In the middle of the dance floor I ran into Nicole Carty, a DSA-curious professional organizer I also hadn’t seen since college, who made a name for herself doing tenant work after Occupy Wall Street. (DSA can feel like a never-ending Brown University reunion.) “Movements are, yeah, about causes and about progress and beliefs and feelings, but the strength of movements comes from social ties and peer pressure and relationships,” Carty said. “I see you’re trying to answer that question, but that is a white-supremacist hand signal.”Ross Barkan, a 29-year-old local political journalist who ran unsuccessfully for State Senate in his native Bay Ridge last fall, told me he aggressively courted DSA’s endorsement as “one of the very few groups anywhere that can put a lot of bodies on the ground.” (DSA declined to endorse anyone.) Still, Barkan says, “DSA can be intimidating for outsiders. If you are not steeped in the vernacular and jargon of the socialist left, if you did not attend college, if you did not take the right classes, you will not know what they are talking about.”DSA’s closest historical analogue is probably not the century-old socialism of Sanders’s hero Eugene Debs but the New Left of the 1960s and its campus organizing vehicle, Students for a Democratic Society. SDS laid the groundwork for a lot of effective antiwar activism, but the New Left was far from a mass movement and never got close to wielding political power.“DSA needs to become a genuine working-class organization,” Barkan said. Terrified of getting on his bad side, we bow and scrape, flatter and flirt, or worse — just to get that raise or make sure we don’t get fired.” The further democratic socialists stray from that message, the less resonance socialism may have with a broader audience.When Barkan ran, DSA sent him a questionnaire to fill out. “Open borders,” he has said, “is a Koch-brothers proposal.” A cause like Abolish ICE, in the view of the socialist old school, will galvanize a progressive constituency at the expense of uniting a populist movement, which Sanders has long dreamed of building around class. Which is exactly how ultra­progressive congresswomen and close AOC allies Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and DSA member Rashida Tlaib were elected to the House in the November midterm elections.“It’s weird to me that DSA is a coalition of college-educated white people who, like, hate the idea that the Democratic Party should appeal to college-educated white people,” McElwee said. Candidates like Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders are no longer too precious to run on the Democratic ticket, though the proposals they suggest are so ambitious — like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and free public college — that they don’t feel like compromises at all. Like devoted members of a social club, or a church parish, Brooklyn’s young left seemed to be building something designed to outlast the vagaries of a campaign, or transcend the personality cult of its politicians, and in doing so keep alive the embers of an idea that’s lived and died so many times before.*A version of this article appears in the March 4, 2019, issue of New York Magazine. An intense ground search would resume Monday morning.Everyone remembers how House Republicans paused their hearings on Benghazi, the IRS, and Fast and Furious whenever Obama went abroadSo Hickenlooper is … a progressive who likes to get things done?John Hickenlooper, who served two terms as governor of Colorado, announced Monday that he is running for president, touting his accomplishments in a state that moved to the left during his time in office.As governor, Hickenlooper presided over steady economic growth, the legalization of marijuana — which he initially opposed — and a surge that put Democrats in full control of a once-conservative state.“I’m running for president because we need dreamers in Washington, but we also need to get things done,” Hickenlooper says in a video announcing his candidacy. “I’ve proven again and again I can bring people together to produce the progressive change Washington has failed to deliver.”Lawmakers want Cohen to tell them who begged a pardonLawmakers are investigating whether President Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen was involved in any discussions about possible pardons — which they view as a potentially ripe area of inquiry into whether anyone sought to obstruct justice, people familiar with the matter said.Cohen has said publicly he never asked for — and would not accept — a pardon from Trump. Was it what I expected?” I had no reaction other than that I was very confident when he would be testifying for a second time that the truth would be revealed and that he was directed to lie.A new poll highlighting voters’ discomfort with socialism and older presidential candidates is raising eyebrowsThe NBC/WSJ poll asked voters to weigh in on 11 different presidential characteristics:The most popular: An African American (a combined 87 percent of all voters say they are “enthusiastic” or “comfortable” with that characteristic), a white man (86 percent), a woman (84 percent), and someone who is gay or lesbian (68 percent — up from 43 percent in 2006). The numbers for capitalism are almost the exact opposite: 50 percent positive, 19 percent negative.And more than half of Democrats want their nominee to be a change agent who agrees with them:55 percent of Democratic primary voters say they prefer a nominee who proposes policies that could bring major change (despite their cost and difficulty passing into law), as opposed to 42 percent who say they would rather support someone whose policies might bring less change (but cost less and might be easier to pass).What’s more, 56 percent of Democratic primary voters say they want a candidate whose issue positions conform to their views, while 40 percent say they prefer someone who gives the party the best chance to defeat Trump in 2020.Nate Silver warns against over-interpreting the socialism sentiment:Just a reminder that public opinion is complicated. [He] will need this election to be a choice… He likely won’t be able to win if it is a referendum on him.Venezuela’s U.S.-backed opposition leader says he’ll return to country to lead protests on Monday — and it’s not clear how Trump’s regime-changers will respond if Maduro arrests himOpposition leader Juan Guaidó called for nationwide demonstrations on Monday as he returns to Venezuela, in what could be a pivotal moment for the U.S.-backed campaign to oust authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro. …On Sunday, John Bolton, the U.S. national security adviser, said that if Maduro detained the opposition leader, “it would just hasten the day that he leaves.” President Trump has said that the United States was maintaining “all options” to deal with the Venezuela crisis — even military action — but his aides have downplayed that possibility. And they have filled the daily threat briefing with charts and graphs of economic data.In an effort to accommodate President Trump, who has attacked them publicly as “naïve” and in need of going “back to school,” the nation’s intelligence agencies have revamped their presentations to focus on subjects their No. 1 customer wants to hear about — economics and trade.Intelligence officers, steeped in how Mr. Trump views the world, now work to answer his repeated question: Who is winning? Some of the children remain detained while others have been sent to live with foster families or relatives, according to the immigration organizations Al Otro Lado, Families Belong Together and Together Rising.Trump got a standing ovation at CPAC on Saturday when he talked about shutting down sanctuary cities, but his efforts haven’t had any success thus farAbout 18 months after the Trump administration threatened to withhold law enforcement grants from nearly 30 places around the country it felt weren’t doing enough to work with federal immigration agents, all but one have received or been cleared to get the money, the Justice Department said.In most cases, courts chipped away at the crackdown that escalated in November 2017 with letters from the Justice Department of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to 29 cities, metro areas, counties or states it considered as having adopted “sanctuary policies” saying those policies may violate federal law.Of those 29 jurisdictions — which include cities as large as Los Angeles and as small as Burlington, Vermont — only Oregon has yet to be cleared to receive the grants from 2017, a Justice Department spokesman told The Associated Press this week.Israel’s mirror Chances are that [Netanyahu] will pull off an electoral victory despite the [corruption charges against him.] His party base is unquestioningly loyal. As the economy continues to expand (however anemically compared to historical averages) and he continues to avoid credible charges of impeachable offenses, Trump is becoming sunnier and sunnier while the Democrats are painting contemporary America as a late-capitalist hellhole riven by growing racial, ethnic, and other tensions.An alternative view:Amy Klobuchar and Ivanka Trump attempted some self-aware humor at last night’s annual Gridiron swamp-fest in D.C.At a moment when she’s facing scrutiny over reports of poor treatment of her staff, Klobuchar, a 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful, made several self-deprecating jokes referring to her reputation as a tough boss — including a reference to what’s quickly become an infamous anecdote.“How did everyone like the salad?” Klobuchar joked, alluding to the report that she’d once eaten a salad with a comb and then told a staffer to clean it after berating the aide for failing to bring her a fork. … Trump [also] joked that she’s been criticized for wanting others to work despite being born into privilege, “as if being Donald Trump’s daughter isn’t the hardest job in the world.”Where lawmakers are caving to parents’ pseudoscience-fueled anti-vax hysteriaMeasles is spreading from New York to Texas to Washington state in the worst outbreak in years, but some state lawmakers want to take the vaccination debate in the opposite direction: Loosening rules covering whether kids get inoculated.In Oregon, state lawmakers will consider a so-called transparency bill favored by the “vaccine hesitant.” New York is simultaneously considering eliminating and expanding exemptions that allow parents to opt out. SpaceX employees at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, cheered the docking, then burst into applause again when the Dragon’s latches were secured.A float got cheeky with the Mueller probe at the Krewe d’Etat Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans on Friday (video here) Nadler says “it’s very clear” Trump obstructed justice, will seek documents from over 60 people in Trump-world starting MondaySo this totally happened todayTrump’s address to this year’s CPAC was the longest speech of his perpetually off-script presidencyPolitico:Trump clearly delighted in the passion of the conservative audience, pointing to onlookers and applauding as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” blared on the speakers. “I’m in love, you’re in love and we’re all in love together,” the president said.NBC News:“I’ve learned with the fake news, if you tell a joke, if you are sarcastic, if you’re having fun with the audience, if you are on live television with millions of people and 25,000 people in an arena, and if you say something like ‘Russia, please, if you can, get us Hillary Clinton’s emails! “Robert Mueller never received a vote and neither did the person who appointed him,” Trump continued, as he attempted to portray Mueller’s team as a group of the “angriest Democrats.”Trump even got meta about his super-long super-scattered speech as it happened, per Daniel Dale:Trump says that the CPAC people are probably thinking they’re getting a lot more than they bargained for today. [He] refers to a good friend of his in New York, a “stone-cold killer,” then says the man is “not even a good friend of mine” because he’d turn on him quickly, but he’s “very rich.” He says the unnamed man asked him what he was going to talk about today, and he said “I dunno.”Trump says his unnamed non-friend “chokes” whenever he has to make a speech to nine or more people, because of a fear of public speaking, even though “he kills people for a living, meaning mentally and financially.”Politico again:At one point, Trump regaled the crowd with a story about a general he said was named “Raisin Caine” (it wasn’t immediately clear who he was referring to). …He also insisted that nobody had left the speech early, but journalists present reported that in fact, some attendees were seen departing before the close of his remarks.And there was a new authoritarian promise for the base, notes the Washington Post:“If they want our dollars, and we give it to them by the billions, they’ve got to allow people like Hayden and many great young people, and old people, to speak,” Trump said, bringing onstage a young conservative, Hayden Williams, who was physically attacked last month while tabling for a conservative organization at the University of California at Berkeley.The executive order, Trump said, would “require colleges to support free speech if they want federal research” money.