This writer watched the presentations of Sen. “Boynee” Sanders and Rep. Alexandria “Covetous” Cortez in Colorado. The latter’s speech revealed her deeply Marxist commitments as she referred over and over again to the working class as a mantra intended to evoke class resentment. This is a centerpiece of communist rhetoric since the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848. Not only was she replaying the communist mantra of the working class (“the proletariat”) being abused by “the bourgeoisie” (the capitalist overlords), which has been used in American political life since the International Workers of the World were active in the 1880s, but she also kept repeating the clichéd communist word “solidarity.”
Yet this term, “working class” — so popular with communists in the Democrat party (now a sizeable number since the 110-page pact between Sanders and Biden was signed in 2020) — now includes the homeless, the extremely indigent, and the millions of illegal migrants who were admitted during the Biden years. “Working class” is a catch-all term for anyone who is having a struggle living within their means or find themselves living on the streets or on the dole.
Workers are offended by being lumped together with these other groups and do not believe that their desire for their “rightful share” of American prosperity is in the same category as illegals or the dispossessed. Bernie especially hammered home the divide between the poor and the working class (again, lumped together) and the richest of the rich. It was a negative rant of abuse, as was Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s speech.
Sanders spoke after Ocasio-Cortez. He tried to arouse envy and disgust as he pointed out the economic power of certain high-level billionaires working with Trump and Elon Musk in our new Executive Branch administration. He lambasted our society because fewer and fewer people can aspire to homeownership, and because credit card debt is skyrocketing in order for the citizenry to make ends meet. He lambasted Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street because they are three investment companies that own more than 50% of 95% of our corporations. However, other sources dispute the percentage of companies owned.
He also did not comment on the extraordinary inflation during the Biden presidency that has devastated many households during just the past four years, nor the extraordinary public debt of our national government (and many state governments) from wasteful and leftist-driven spending literally for many decades. He did not mention that the top 1% of earners pay 40% of the taxes in the U.S. He also did not mention the astronomical waste and extravagance evident in federal expenditures. None of these realities fits into the reality he was attempting to depict.
He did not express gratitude for the hundreds of millions of dollars of waste and fraud now being uncovered and remedied by DOGE. Trillions in unnecessary and immoral expenditures — much of it certainly being graft, although this is never said publicly — is being revealed as part of healing our broken and distorted economy. However, in his blowhard remarks, Sen. “Boynee” failed to give any credit to the Trump administration for resisting this decades-old trending of extensive imbalance in the federal balance sheet.
When my father was active in forming the Transit Workers Union chapter for public trolley car employees (motormen, conductors, and repair units) in Philadelphia in the early 1940s, there were quite a few communist activists in the start-up. However, since most of the unionists were Irish or Italian Catholics, they forced out the communist faction because of the communist rejection of belief in the Christian God, sometimes resorting to force to do so. Other aspects of their identity as workers came into play in deciding what it meant to be “working class.” For one thing, the working class had to work. There were no food stamps, welfare payments, free cell phones, or first-class hotel rooms for the indigent at that time.
Incredibly, though more than 100 years have passed, the language of the speeches by Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders is very much the same as that used more than one hundred years ago by Eugene V. Debs, three-time Socialist candidate for president of the USA. He lost each time and was eventually imprisoned for opposing our entry into WWI. He also considered it of utmost importance to promote solidarity with the working class, and he explicitly stated that the term “working class” is to be identified with the Marxist term “proletariat.”
Debs’s depiction of the systematic conspiracy of the rich against the rest of society was stated here, here, and here. One commentator wrote about Debs, “Debs feared the rise of the monolithic corporate state. He foresaw that corporations, unchecked, would expand to ‘continental proportions and swallow up the national resources and the means of production and distribution.’” Sanders’s rant at the Colorado rally continues to echo that same view.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez hold these views, which are the same as those of Debs, even though unions have been recognized in the USA and there has been a vast leftward move of our politics since the administrations of Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Further, since Debs, communism came into Russia, which became the USSR and eventually collapsed. Later, after WWII, the revolution in China led by Mao established the PRC. This communist PRC was modified to allow capitalist activity by Western corporations in empowerment zones beginning in the late 1980s, which must have been disappointing to the hardcore Sanders.
In short, it is this writer’s view that their “tour” of speech-making is a deranged flight into a political mindset from more than 100 years ago — a mindset that failed then and is even more irrelevant today. They are suffering from a politically motivated delusion.
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Image: Bernie Sanders. Credit: AFGE via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
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Image: Bernie Sanders. Credit: AFGE via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
