Civil War on the Left, Ch. 66: Peak Superficiality?

One of the great things about being a leftist is that you don’t really need to proceed often beyond extremely superficial thinking to feel good about yourself and your cause. Two items today highlight this infantilism of the left:

Trending on Twitter:

(Hat tip: Bethany Mandel)

Remember how OJ has been looking for “the real killer” for 25 years now? Meanwhile, leftists have discovered “the real moderates” among Democrats, and guess what mom? The real moderates are AOC and Bernie! No, really! From The Intercept:

“It’s easy to call what AOC is doing as far-lefty, but nothing could be farther from the truth,” Nick Hanauer, the venture capitalist and progressive activist, told MSNBC in January. “When you advocate for economic policies that benefit the broad majority of citizens, that’s true centrism. What Howard Schultz represents, the centrism that he represents, is really just trickle-down economics.”

“He is not the centrist,” continued Hanauer. “AOC is the centrist.”

Ohhhh-kay. But this passage is the most fun part:

Take Ocasio-Cortez’s signature issue: the Green New Deal. Former George W. Bush speechwriter — and torture advocate — Marc Thiessen claims that the Green New Deal will “make the Democrats unelectable in 2020.” The Economist agrees: “The bold plan could make the party unelectable in conservative-leaning states.” The Green New Deal “will not pass the Senate, and you can take that back to whoever sent you here and tell them,” a testy Diane Feinstein, the senior and supposedly “moderate” Democratic senator from California, told a bunch of kids in a viral video.

But here is the reality: The Green New Deal is extremely popular and has massive bipartisan support. A recent survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University found that a whopping 81 percent of voters said they either “strongly support” (40 percent) or “somewhat support” (41 percent) the Green New Deal, including 64 percent of Republicans (and even 57 percent of conservative Republicans).

So why are Democrats not wanting to vote yes on the Green New Deal resolution? Because they know polls like this one are total nonsense. Polls show that the Medicare-for-All idea is similarly popular—until you tell people that it will require raising taxes and maybe canceling your existing insurance, whereupon support collapses. Likewise and actual policies for the Green New Deal fantasy would cause public support to crater. Sen. Dianne Feinstein may be very liberal, but she’s no idiot when it comes to politics, even the demented politics of California’s greenery.

Popcorn, people, popcorn.

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