AOC at Howard University May 14, 2019.
"I will be damned if the same politicians who refused to act then are going to try to come back today and say we need a middle of the road approach to save our lives."
AOC just delivered a scathing indictment of incrementalism with regards to climate change at Howard University May 14. Like others on the extreme left she is falsely blaming main stream Democrats for the sharp right-wing turn of our politics beginning four decades ago when white working class voters began voting against their own interests falling prey to incredibly effective anti-government propaganda with racist and sexist overtones from right-wing media.
Obama presented an ambitious 90 billion climate bill as part of the 800 billion dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, but eventually the efforts stalled because of massive Republican gains in the 2010 midterm elections.
The 2018 mid term elections clearly indicated that the political climate should be ripe for dramatic improvements in health care and climate protection after four years of Trumppulican attacks on health-care, medicare and social security, civil and voting rights, environment legislation and systemic corruption. Hopefully Democrats can stay on the relatively modest messages of improving health-care and more investments in education and infra-structure that led to gains of 400 seats switching from red to blue.
Suggested whole-scale overhauls of existing societal structures in the US from our left will only allow the right-wing to avoid being held responsible for their misdeeds, and the 2020 election will be framed as a referendum about the USA becoming another Socialist Venezuela by most media, and lead to a likely Trump win.
AOC was only a ten year old girl during the 2000 election when another passionate anti-incrementalist Ralph Nader and his Green Party voters handed the election to the Bush/Cheney/Rove Republicans. 3,000,000nationwide and 100,000 in Florida impatient and (as it has turned out) reckless environmental voters became indirectly and unintentionally complicit for not just the Iraq War, the 2007-2008 Global Financial Collapse, but the Bush appointments of SCOTUS nominees Alito and Roberts who in 2010 were instrumental in dismantling the 2010 Voting Rights Act and in 2013 the Citizens United decision.
These two SCOTUS decisions have been very important factors leading to the eventual Trump win in 2016 when millions of Democratic voters were prevented from voting in almost a dozen Republican states. Two additional even more conservative SCOTUS judges, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, have since been added to create a potentially activist right-wing Supreme Court. We can expect abortion rights, civil and voting rights, and environmental regulations to be damaged even further, perhaps even permanently, if our friends on the left gain too much influence in the Democratic Party, and we choose a nationally unelectable Socialist candidate for the 2020 election.