By Edwin Cooney
One of my finest friends in all of California asked me the other day to read a column in the New York Times by Barbara Ransby, a professor of African American studies and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. So, I did just that and discovered that she's convinced that The Squad, consisting of course of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna S. Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, "is the future of the Democratic Party." My really fine friend and the learned professor may well be right, but the bald truth is that the current Democratic Party has some pretty heavy lifting to do well before The Squad reaches sufficient growth to run the party of Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Obama. This heavy lifting includes the following bulky pieces of social, political, and safety-securing projects:
First, a consensus has to be reached on the most effective way to protect people in theaters and shopping centers as well as our children in school classrooms against armed gunmen. Second, our domestic economic condition has to be broadened to increase the purchasing power of the middle and poorest classes of American society. (Note: $15 an hour is a good start!) Third, the immigration “hurricane" out of Central America needs to be quelled and, at the same time, Donald John Trump must be packed off to permanent political oblivion to either Trump Tower or to his Florida paradise, Mar-a-Lago.
What kind of a political instrument the Democratic party will be by year 2024, ’28, ’32, ’36 or even by ’40 has little relevance to the current state of our economic or environmental conditions. However, Dr. Ransby is right when she predicts that "The Squad" may well serve as a vehicle by which to break the almost traditional political logjam in Washington. Dr. Ransby goes on to describe an attitude of this burgeoning movement that in no way suffers fools gladly. The Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, Tlaib squad will show no tolerance to anyone insufficiently courageous or progressive to meet their standards or that of their legislative backers. Under their transformative notion of progressivism, it won't be enough to be poor, hungry, deprived of sufficient health care, environmentally poisoned, or "of color” unless you share The Squad's priorities and activism. Therein, as I see it, lies the long-term flaw in the potential workability of Barbara Ransby's description of The Squad’s successful future.
The longer I study history and observe the present, the less captivated I am with anyone's doctrine. The point most people miss, as I see it, is that doctrines of both the right and the left have the fatal flaw embedded in them of circumstantial applicability. That's why Franklin Roosevelt, our most successful president when it came especially to domestic affairs, insisted that when in a crisis, it's best to try anything and everything that might work rather than merely following anyone's political or social doctrine. Accurate assessments of people’s living conditions, not political doctrines, are what effectively changes America's state of well-being.
About the time Andrew Jackson, our eighth president, was in his second term of office in the mid-1830s, our society began to shift from an agricultural to an industrial society. This shift had nothing to do whatsoever with Andrew Jackson's administration. In order to successfully function, we needed to perfect forces sufficient to meet our national benefit. (Note: not even capitalism was introduced as a doctrine. It was a natural process of societal function that most steadily and successfully met our national domestic needs. Growing markets rather than the increasingly outdated shopkeepers' milieu began to serve a growing nation's demands. Look as hard as you will and you'll find no reference to capitalism or any other political “ism” in the Constitution of the United States. Capitalism grew out of the inventiveness of 19th Century men and women and it will have staying power beyond whatever results from the activities of "The Squad."
There is another aspect of this that is important to mention. Willful hatred of or opposition to The Squad is not likely to kill its force or spirit. The Squad's antecedents, such as the members of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, the participants in the successful 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns, and the crusaders of the "Black Lives Matter” movement responded to people's needs and demands rather than bending to the conclusions and guidelines of academic think-tanks.
As stated above, political doctrine is limited in its capacity to alter history on the sheer strength of its logic. Let's take for instance the three greatest goals enunciated by Ronald Reagan back in 1980. They were as follows:
1) A balanced budget by 1984. (Note: When Mr. Reagan left office, his national debt was three times that of Jimmy Carter’s!)
2) "God would be back in the classroom," as prayer would be restored to the public schools. (Note: since that really couldn't happen, conservative doctrinaires substituted the voucher program. It was an idea they surely would have resisted back in 1960, with all their fundamental Protestant might, had John F. Kennedy suggested such a program to fund Catholic schools.)
3) There was the vital need for military superiority over the Soviet Union. (Note: Conservative columnist Bret Stephens writing in the Times just today says that Jimmy Carter's 1979 tough decision to send missiles to Europe had more to do with winning the Cold War than Ronald Reagan's much lauded decision to withdraw those missiles in 1987.)
As I see it, political doctrines constitute little more than a lazy person's effort to grasp multifaceted political and social complexities.
As for "The Squad," I'm guessing it will have more than its fifteen minutes of national fame, but by the time the best aspects of it finally become law, Barbara Ransby won't recognize much of its original form!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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