Weekend Reflections: Democrats are Fun!
Remember when Hillary Clinton faked a Southern Baptist preacher intonation and accent when she was speaking to southern black audiences? Remember, for that matter, when Barack Obama, a Hawaiian-born and -raised mulatto with a Kenyan father, educated in the privileged upper echelons of “white America,” put on that same intonation when he spoke to black audiences?
(I know, of course, that these days a man with dark skin faking a “black accent” for “his people” will always be given a pass. Otherwise, most of today’s black entertainers and artists would lose their identity-politics bonus points — their black privilege, if you will — and have to revert to earning fame and fortune on their merits alone, as black entertainers and artists used to have to do. Which, by the way, helps to explain why today’s black entertainers and artists are so third-rate compared to their unprivileged predecessors.)
Well, we have a new generation of radical Alinskyites in the Democratic Party now, and they are so sincere in their radicalism that they don’t even have to read Alinsky anymore, as Hillary did for her university thesis, or as Obama did to become Bill Ayers’ community organizer protégé in Chicago. No; today’s young rebels are so authentic, so down with the struggle, so beyond all the hypocritical posturing and half-measures of their progressive elders, so uncompromising in their revolution, and so done with the old incrementalists’ long-game cynicism, that when they speak to black audiences, by golly…they put on a fake black intonation, just like Hillary and Barack.
Thus, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells a group of people dumb enough to attend an event hosted by Al Sharpton that she’s proud of being a bartender, because “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.”
Ocasio-Cortez speaks in an accent that she never uses while telling a room of predominately black people that there is nothing wrong with them folding clothes, cooking, and driving other people around on a bus for a living. pic.twitter.com/FIbIAPokt0
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) April 5, 2019
I have to admit, however, that I loved her message in that clip and its follow-ups, though I won’t burden you with the audio here, as I think of Limbo as a peaceful, quiet place.
The problem for progressives is that when they want to ingratiate themselves to their audiences by boasting about their blue collar pasts, they invariably end up not only condescending to their supporters — assuming, as in this case, that a black audience must be made up entirely of low-wage working stiffs, because of course black people are never lawyers and doctors, right? — but also, more amusingly, they find themselves making the case against their own Marxism.
Thus AOC goes on, in that speech, to conclude that if she (a mere bartender) can work her way up to the United States Congress, “then so can you.”
Right. So can you. And the reason that’s true is not that Marxism creates opportunities for upward mobility among the working poor, which it manifestly and consistently does not. The real reason is that a constitutional republic grounded in principles of limited government creates such opportunities.
But AOC is so stupid that she doesn’t understand that she just made the case against Marxist revolution in America. (In fact, the entire history of the immigrant experience in America makes that same case.)
She is so self-absorbed that she doesn’t understand that trying to identify with black people by ranting about the struggles of the working poor carries demeaning assumptions about that audience that you would only make if your own mind were immersed in stereotypes about black people (as the minds of Democrats typically are).
She is so immature that she doesn’t realize that the fact that she worked some “blue collar” hours as a student a few years ago hardly qualifies her as an expert on poverty and the working class, since almost every young person starts his working life in some kind of low-level service industry job. Does she think middle class people’s children get summer jobs as corporate CEOs? Half my university students here in Korea work at a café, restaurant, or bar, for Pete’s sake. What does that prove?
Most of all, she is so power-hungry that she doesn’t realize that the work she names as examples of the bottom of the food chain (where blacks apparently belong) — “folding clothes, cooking, and driving other people around on a bus” — is hardly demeaning by comparison with being elected to Congress. On the contrary, it’s the person who would run for Congress in today’s political climate in America who ought to be ashamed of having forsaken legitimate, honest work that actually contributes something of value to the community, in favor of being a self-important busybody with totalitarian fantasies and a greedy, uneducated snout stuck permanently in the public trough.
As Mrs. Limbo said to me yesterday, AOC is doing politics as a reality TV show, “playing” the innocent young congresswoman for fame and glamor. Think of her “meteoric rise” as Miss Kardashian Goes to Washington — which makes her a perfect match for Trump’s White House Apprentice schtick, and an apt sign of these politically deflated times.
Meanwhile, the party that has long exalted an accused rapist and serial flasher as its most successful president of the past fifty years, is now acting all squeamish because Joe Biden, who has been an elected Democrat since at least the Jefferson administration, a presidential candidate, and a twice-elected Vice President of the United States, is suddenly being called out on his lifelong, well-known habit of being a little “disrespectful of women’s personal space” — “personal space” being the antiseptic post-feminist substitute for modesty.
Democrats are fun.
