Andrew Gillum is the Democrat nominee for Governor of Florida.  He is backed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.  He’s saying all the right things to the same people who are already talking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a future presidential candidate, e.g., Medicare for all, abolish ICE, soak the rich, anti-corporation, etc.

Where in Miguel seems to be of the belief that the collective memory of socialism in the Hispanic community will backfire, I’m not so sure.

This is an OpEd from The New York Times.

The New Socialists
Why the pitch from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders resonates in 2018.

Throughout most of American history, the idea of socialism has been a hopeless, often vaguely defined dream. So distant were its prospects at midcentury that the best definition Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, editors of the socialist periodical Dissent, could come up with in 1954 was this: “Socialism is the name of our desire.”

It’s not been a dream in America for most of our history.  America was introduced to the effects of Socialism first hand in the European theater in WWII, then Korea, then Vietnam.  The Greatest Generation and many Baby Boomers rejected socialism, having seen the mass graves that were filled by the “often vaguely defined dream.”

That may be changing. Public support for socialism is growing. Self-identified socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are making inroads into the Democratic Party, which the political analyst Kevin Phillips once called the “second-most enthusiastic capitalist party” in the world. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the country, is skyrocketing, especially among young people.

What explains this irruption? And what do we mean, in 2018, when we talk about “socialism”?

A collective bullshiting of people by radicals in academia and the media who have figured out how to divorce the pipe dream ideals of Socialism with the blood soaked reality.

Since the 1970s, American liberals have taken a right turn on the economy. They used to champion workers and unions, high taxes, redistribution, regulation and public services. Now they lionize billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, deregulate wherever possible, steer clear of unions except at election time and at least until recently, fight over how much to cut most people’s taxes.

You mean all the things that have caused the US economy to go through the largest economic growth in history, while the nations that adopted more burdensome goverment practices from the Soviet Union to Greece to France have stagnated, gone bankrupt, or have totally collapsed.

Just imaging if you will, the state of technology today had Silicon Valley unionized under IBEW the way the automotive industry did under UAW.  Dial-up would be cutting edge in 2018 and you wouldn’t be reading this blog.

Liberals, of course, argue that they are merely using market-friendly tools like tax cuts and deregulation to achieve things like equitable growth, expanded health care and social justice — the same ends they always have pursued. For decades, left-leaning voters have gone along with that answer, even if they didn’t like the results, for lack of an alternative.

The marginal embrace of a friendly market is the reason California is the bankrupt, open air sewer state that it is and not the third world dystopian hellhole of Venezuela.  Hollywood and Silicon Valley are keeping California afloat despite the regulations, not because of them.

It took Mr. Sanders to convince them that if tax credits and insurance exchanges are the best liberals have to offer to men and women struggling to make stagnating wages pay for bills that skyrocket and debt that never dissipates, maybe socialism is worth a try.

The Bernie Approach is to be so upset that some people can’t afford over-regulated heath care that he destroys the health care industry so nobody get it – unless they are very well connected.

Socialism means different things to different people. For some, it conjures the Soviet Union and the gulag; for others, Scandinavia and guaranteed income. But neither is the true vision of socialism. What the socialist seeks is freedom.

That is one big pile of shit.  The Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Nazi Germany, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, are all real socialism.  The only one that isn’t is Scandinavia.  That is Democratic Feudalism.

So what is Socialism to the New York Times? What does he want to try?

Under capitalism, we’re forced to enter the market just to live. The libertarian sees the market as synonymous with freedom.

You mean we are expected to produce some value to live?  The market is synonymy with freedom because freedom means choice.  It doesn’t mean an abdication of responsibility.

But socialists hear “the market” and think of the anxious parent, desperate not to offend the insurance representative on the phone, lest he decree that the policy she paid for doesn’t cover her child’s appendectomy. Under capitalism, we’re forced to submit to the boss. 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.

What sort of bullshit is that?  In what world does this guy live?

You buy heath insurance with an understanding of the coverage.  If you think that coverage can be denied because you didn’t grovel to the claims rep on the phone, you do not understand contract law or how insurance coverage works.

Maybe scraping or flirting with the boss is necessary in Hollywood.  In the real world there are layers of HR you have to go through, not to mention an army of lawyers happy to take a wrongful termination suit on your behalf.

Apparently this guy hasn’t evolved his thinking on the free market since Henry Clay Frick was still alive.

The socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor. It’s that it makes us unfree.

Holy shit, this guy is pulling straight from the Newspeak dictionary.

When my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival.

Your well being doesn’t depend on the whim of the boss.  Your well being depends on your ability to do useful work.

Take the most extreme example.  Go off grid.  Be a substance farmer.  You answer to nobody. You don’t have to smile or be nice or deal with any boss or coworkers.  If you don’t work, you don’t eat.

The 1 percent and the working class are not economic descriptors. They’re political accusations. They split society in two, declaring one side the illegitimate ruler of the other; one side the taker of the other’s freedom, power and promise.

Society isn’t split in two.  There is a whole range of incomes and lifestyles in America.  This 1% vs everyone else is straight out of the Soviet Revolution playbook.

To critics in the mainstream and further to the left, that language can seem slippery. With their talk of Medicare for All or increasing the minimum wage, these socialist candidates sound like New Deal or Great Society liberals. There’s not much discussion, yet, of classic socialist tenets like worker control or collective ownership of the means of production.

So is this guy admitting that “Medicare for all” and “free college” are the gateway drug that gets these people elected and that collectivization is the real goal?

And of course, there’s overlap between what liberals and socialists call for. But even if liberals come to support single-payer health care, free college, more unions and higher wages, the divide between the two will remain. For liberals, these are policies to alleviate economic misery. For socialists, these are measures of emancipation, liberating men and women from the tyranny of the market and autocracy at work. Back in the 1930s, it was said that liberalism was freedom plus groceries. The socialist, by contrast, believes that making things free makes people free.

This is the appeal to the modern socialist.  What they want is “freedom” from responsibility.

The young socialists want the “freedom” to go to college, major in Grievance Studies, party at night, show up for their first class at 11:00 am with a hangover, graduate with no useful skill then get a guaranteed income and housing from the goverment, subsidized utilities and food, and never have to work a job they don’t want to.

Society has never worked like that, ever.  It’s simple enough to understand why.  Someone has to grow the food, drill for oil, generate the power, build the buildings, and do everything else that keeps society running.

The idea of collective work doesn’t work.  It takes skill to do these jobs.  You can’t get some hipster to drive a tractor part time when he feels like it and produce enough food for society. The Soviets tried collective farming.  Twenty million people died of famine as a result.

You cannot have a segment of society be subsidized to be lazy while another segment of society does the work of keeping society running.  Either it all collapses or the lazy people force the industrious ones to work at the point of a gun.

But clearly what the OpEd writer wants is for you to think of yourself as one of the people sitting at a Starbucks on a Wednesday at noon, drinking your latte paid for with your UBE, free from being subjugated by the boss.  Not as one of the people in the killing fields picking kale under the threat of execution.

Now that we understand what the NYT socialists want, why do I think that gives Gillum a chance at winning.

David Hogg.

Hogg and his cohorts fought to get the State of Florida to raise the semi-auto rifle buying age to 21.  He also thinks kids should be able to vote at 16.

Think about the Baby Boomers that protested to demand that the voting age be 18.  Their rationale made sense, if you were old enough to get drafted into Vietnam than you should be able to vote for the politician who doesn’t want to send you to Vietnam.

If you are old enough to die for your country, you are old enough to vote for its leaders.

Hogg represents a complete reversal of that idea.  He thinks at 16 he’s old enough and knowledgeable enough to vote but too young and dumb to buy a gun.  He’s old enough to die in Iraq with an M4 in his hands but not old enough to go to the range with an AR-15.

He is saying quote clearly that he doesn’t want the burden of being a responsible gun owner and doesn’t want any other young people to either.

He wants to have the “freedom” of feeling safe in school, and to accomplish that he is going to take away your rights.

The central idea of “the young people will win” is that his idea of “freedom” means his personal comfort at the expense of your rights.  This idea of personal comfort trumping other’s rights is not new to Hogg, he grew up saturated with this idea.

So what about the collective memory of the Hispanic community in Florida.

I grew up hearing about the Cuban Revolution from the people who witnessed it.  They are almost all dead now.

The stories of socialists shooting Abuelo’s brother are just the ravings of an old man that gets seen a couple of times a year at the retirement home, assuming he’s still alive.  Socialism means free college from the person on Twitter with 250K followers is the voice the youth is listening to.

If you don’t think that there is a real chance Gillum could win, consider this:

The Cato institute ranks the 50 states in order of most free to least free.

Florida is ranked as the No. 1 most free state in the US.

The Democrat nominee for Governor has the backing of the Senator from No. 46 and is being compared favorably to other politicians from Nos. 48 and 50.

The Democrats actually want to take Florida from the most free to the least free state in exchange for their doctor’s bills.