I’m old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan called Medicare socialism and campaigned against it for years, as Nobelist Paul Krugman reminded me.
I’m not quite old enough to remember when Republicans said Social Security and much of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal plan to lift the country out of the Great Depression were socialism. But I know the history. In 1936, FDR advised a Madison Square Garden crowd to know him by his opponents. “They are unanimous in their hate for me,” he said, “and I welcome their hatred.”
I was a pre-schooler during Joe McCarthy’s commies-under-the-bed Red Scare. Along with help from the likes of Roy Cohn and Richard Nixon, McCarthy made a hash of civil liberties — even worse than the modern MAGA hash-making.
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I also know the history of the 40-hour work week and child labor laws, unemployment insurance, the income tax amendment and another giving the people the right to vote for senators, who were previously appointed by state legislatures.
I could go on. Medicaid. Minimum wage. Fannie Mae. Women gaining the right to vote. Civil rights act. Voting rights act. Obamacare.
But I think you get the point.
They, meaning Republicans, warned us repeatedly that we were becoming a socialist country, that liberals and progressives were socialists and communists and worse and that the country, when Democrats were in power, was on the way to becoming a socialist hellscape. And yet, despite what you may read, the U.S. is still the leading economic power in the world, but also one with a huge wage and wealth gap that is growing only wider.
Which brings us to today. And to Melat Kiros, the democratic socialist who shockingly trounced a 15-term liberal in Diana DeGette in Colorado’s 1st Congressional District. DeGette first went to Congress before 29-year-old Kiros was born, which is not just a factoid. It was a major factor in her primary victory.
So, let me get to the point. I don’t know Kiros, other than the fact that she is another Bernie-endorsed Mamdani acolyte who has, in effect, won a seat in Congress. I don’t know if, as she’s often accused, she is an antisemite (I doubt it, given the people I know who supported her) or anti-Zionist.
Here’s what I do know: The democratic socialists are not taking over the Democratic Party. Most of the people who voted for Kiros, in the decidedly deep blue city of Denver, are not socialists of any stripe, unless you mean social democrats without the ist, which is what they have in most of Western Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the good old U.S. of A.
The democratic socialists may be way to the left. But when I listen to people like AOC, what I hear is less radical than simply radically progressive.
There are many reasons people voted for her, and we start not only with Trump’s steady assaults on American democracy, but mostly the failure of weak-kneed Democrats, particularly those in Congress, to successfully stand up against Trump.
Democrats have lost their hold on the working class, including many Latinos and a significant number of Blacks and a lot of young people in a fight against Trump and his Big Tech bros, who have been turning the U.S.-style market economy into a Putin-like oligarchy.
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Meanwhile, Trump is the crony-socialist here, who forces companies like Intel, Nvidia and U.S. Steel to give the government equity positions.Trump is the one who has browbeaten media companies and universities to either bend to his will or to cough up multimillion-dollar settlements. Or both.
The only ism Trump believes in — he has no real ideology, other than in-your-face corruption — is Trumpism.
Why do I bring this up when there are so many other issues that have sprung up since I last wrote — the cessation of the ceasefire and a return to war (for now), Trump’s bumbling Big-Lie-filled speech about election security, Tina Peters in the White House, the nonexistent Reflecting Pool vandals (who didn’t take the handles) and, maybe, the World Cup — to write about today?
Because Jared Polis made me do it.
Polis got in a Facebook snit with a progressive Colorado legislator, Rep. Yara Zokaie, D-Fort Collins, which caught the attention of Fox News, and, before you knew it, he was expressing his concern on national TV that socialism would ruin the country — presumably the kind that Bernie and Mamdani and Kiros are pushing — and equated it to fascism as an evil force.
“Jared Polis is one of the wealthiest individuals in Colorado, so it’s no surprise that he is scared of Democratic socialists who want to make him pay his fair share,” Zokaie tweeted in reply to a Polis Facebook post.
He replied to Zokaie: “I’m not scared of anyone. I just care deeply about our state and don’t want the socialists to destroy it. In a Colorado for all we don’t think less of anyone because of their net worth. Whether you have no money or are a millionaire, we love you in Colorado and want you (to) thrive.”
Which leads me to questions.
If Polis was so scared of what Kiros might do to Colorado (and presumably America), why didn’t he campaign against her? Is it because he’s a pariah in his own party?
Relatedly, why is Polis, who was censured by his party for the heedless get-out-of-jail-free card he granted to Tina Peters, suddenly so worried about splits in his party?
Does Polis really not understand that this is less about far-left ideology than it is about the failures of the Democratic establishment, of which he is a card-carrying member?
Let’s review what happened on primary day. Michael Bennet, running against Phil Weiser for governor, is a three-term establishment Democratic senator. Weiser is another establishment Democrat, no more progressive than Bennet, who turned his many lawsuits against Trump into an image of Fightin’ Phil. Fightin’ Phil, who’s no more socialist than Polis, easily won.
(And a day after his victory, Weiser blasted Kiros for an awkward, clumsy answer as to whether the deadly June 1 attack in Boulder was antisemitic. She said she didn’t know what was in the shooter’s heart. She would later go on to say, though, that it was a hate crime, which does give us some idea what was in the shooter’s heart. Just for the record, the attack was antisemitic and a hate crime.)
DeGette is another establishment Democrat. It was maybe past time for her to move aside, but hardly anyone expected her to be pushed out by a democratic socialist. Did Kiros win because she’s a democratic socialist or because she was a charismatic candidate who offered change?
In the other big statewide race, John Hickenlooper, the most establishment of the Democratic establishment types, was nearly upended by state Sen. Julie Gonzales, who had little money and a campaign that was underestimated by nearly every serious journalist in Colorado (including me). Gonzales is a progressive, but not a democratic socialist. And yet, she lost by barely more than five points. That was probably the biggest shock of the night.
Bennet, Weiser, DeGette and Gonzales all fit neatly into the Colorado Democratic Party, just as a pre-Tina Peters Polis did. If Colorado Dems tend to be pro-Bernie, as they’ve shown repeatedly, where does that put Kiros?
So, what is happening?
To Polis’ credit, when he went on Fox News, he pointed out Trump’s embrace of distinctly Trump-like socialism, which most Republicans seem not to have even noticed —or, more likely, have been afraid to mention.
But seeing the election of a few leftists, running on a platform that is certainly more radical than most of the candidates seem to be, to Congress as a threat to the country seems way over the top. The Democratic Party badly needs new blood and new ideas and some not-so-new ideas — you’ll recall that Bernie won the Colorado vote in his 2016 and 2020 primary contests against establishment Dems — and to say otherwise completely misreads the room and basically ignores the obvious threat to our country.
The thing that should matter to Dems today is not the leftists who win in deep blue congressional districts that will dependably vote Democratic.
What does matter is that Democrats must take back the House and possibly the Senate. What matters is that establishment Dems, who lost to Trump twice, need to be shaken up. It’s the only way to slow down MAGA’s runaway train — Medicaid has already been gutted by Trump and Medicare could be next —and offer the American people in November a real alternative to autocracy.
Whatever else Kiros is, she’s definitely a very real alternative. And that, more than anything else, is why she’ll be taking the fight to Trump as a member of Congress next January.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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