Psyche: How to interpret historical analogies

Historical analogies can also be invaluable and enlightening, as long as we remain wary of those using them, and of their reasons. If we are conscientious about the past, we want to learn from it, pay respect to our predecessors, and derive proper lessons from how they might have dealt with their own challenges and hard times. One of the intuitive ways we react to a confusing, frightening present is to reach back into the history we know to find ways to render the current moment legible. All this is normal and natural. [...]

Historical analogies are not the same as historical comparisons. A comparison might be more direct or straightforward, between two events that are inherently similar. Natural disasters such as earthquakes can happen at varying moments in history and aren’t necessarily dependent on human activity. But they will interact differently with society given changing social circumstances, political leadership and economic development. In that sense, a hurricane ravaging a medieval landscape will be different from the exact same-sized and same-speed hurricane hitting a modern city. We will be comparing between the effects of, and response to, an otherwise similar pair of events. (Of course, we can also compare between the frequency and strength of hurricanes today and those of hurricanes in the past, establishing a link between natural disasters and anthropogenic global warming.) Likewise, when the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world, the influenza pandemic of 1918 emerged as a tool to help us think through the challenge. The diseases are different, but the human body is pretty much the same, and pandemics, by their nature, have repetitive features. A comparison between the two health crises will focus on the changes in the world – and perhaps specifically in public health policy – that have taken place over the past century. [....]

So historical analogies, done in good faith, can make crucial points about the present and help to clarify where we stand on moral and political issues. The problem begins when we begin to substitute historical analogies for historical analysis – or, even more problematically, when we come to believe that history ‘repeats itself’. This sort of cliché has become a bane of our public discourse, especially regarding the sorry state of the US. [...]

We need to recognise the limitation of all analogising from the past. History does not repeat itself; and this means that everything that happens is new in some fundamental way. Analogies are good in so far as they are useful in helping us begin to think historically, rather than trying to formally define whether, for instance, Trump, or Bolsonaro, or Modi, or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, are fascists. If we came to the conclusion that these current-day wannabe autocrats are not fascists, would that mean that the imperative to seek out better leadership would become less urgent? If we conclude that they are fascists, would that make a real difference in terms of how people experience this era or what we can do? In all likelihood, the necessary political action remains the same, either way. Thinking historically is not about finding discrete past events that might resemble things happening today, but rather trying to understand how the world came to be what it is – and how it could be different.

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The Guardian: Think Republicans are disconnected from reality? It's even worse among liberals

The survey, published by the thinktank More in Common as part of its Hidden Tribes of America project, was based on a sample of more than 2,000 people. One of the study’s findings: the wilder a person’s guess as to what the other party is thinking, the more likely they are to also personally disparage members of the opposite party as mean, selfish or bad. Not only do the two parties diverge on a great many issues, they also disagree on what they disagree on.

This much we might guess. But what’s startling is the further finding that higher education does not improve a person’s perceptions – and sometimes even hurts it. In their survey answers, highly educated Republicans were no more accurate in their ideas about Democratic opinion than poorly educated Republicans. For Democrats, the education effect was even worse: the more educated a Democrat is, according to the study, the less he or she understands the Republican worldview. [...]

What could be going on? Bubble-ism, the report suggests. Even more than their Republican counterparts, highly educated Democrats tend to live in exclusively Democratic enclaves. The more they report “almost all my friends hold the same political views”, the worse their guesses on what Republicans think. [...]

There are other promising signs of middle ground. In response to the violence and death in Charlottesville, Virginia, big donors to the feuding parties, George Soros and David Koch, jointly funded the After Charlottesville Project to curb online calls to violence. The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Texas senator Ted Cruz have co-sponsored a congressional bill preventing lawmakers from entering lucrative second careers as corporate lobbyists. Conservatives and liberals united to push for ex-felons in Florida to win the right to vote in 2018, and, this year to push modest but significant reform of our draconian criminal justice laws through Congress.

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The Guardian: Here's the real reason Trump is attacking 'the squad': he's scared of their politics

As the 2020 election campaign begins, Trump and the Republicans have not been coy about their strategy. They intend to foment hatred of “the other” among their predominantly white base, to weaponize false accusations of antisemitism against progressive politicians, to pour kerosene on the fires of the culture war and fight – against women’s rights, LGBT rights, reproductive rights – with renewed vigor. [...]

These proposals are popular, and not only among liberal Democrats, but across a wide swath of the American public. A poll conducted earlier this year found that 60% of independent voters supported Ocasio-Cortez’s 70% top tax-rate proposal, as did 45% of Republicans. Polls consistently show a clear majority of Americans back Medicare for All. Even as sweeping a proposal as the Green New Deal enjoys more support than opposition among likely voters, Obama-to-Trump voters, and moderates. There is an obvious desire among the broader public for the kind of transformational politics that the members of the Squad have brought to Congress.

Indeed, while much of the media coverage of the various Squad members have focused on their identities, their appeal goes far beyond matters of representation. Of course, representation is important, and the Squad, comprised of women of color, represents not only important “firsts” – the first Muslim-American congresswomen, the youngest ever member of Congress, the first black female representative from Massachusetts. They represent what America looks like today far better than the pale, greying gerontocracy that rules the country. At 45, Pressley is the oldest member of the Squad; Nancy Pelosi, for comparison, is 79, and Trump, 73.

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Axios: Trump's new impeachment problem

Why it matters: This has the potential to fundamentally change the conversation around impeachment, which has so far mostly focused on possible instances of obstruction of justice as laid out by Robert Mueller's findings. [...]

Our thought bubble: Does racism fit the definition of high crimes? Congress gets to define the term. And if past is prologue, one of Andrew Johnson's articles of impeachment was a non-criminal high misdemeanor of speaking ill of Congress. [...]

What to watch: It's too early to tell whether other members of the Democratic caucus, including Green's colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, will take up impeachment with him now that he's renewing bigotry as the reason.

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CNN: Why can't Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just get along?

That comment echoes what Pelosi said of AOC (and her closest allies, including Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts) in an April interview with USA Today. "While there are people who have a large number of Twitter followers, what's important is that we have large numbers of votes on the floor of the House," Pelosi said. [...]

Take climate change. In an interview with Politico earlier this year, Pelosi referred to it as her "flagship issue." In forming the select committee aimed at considering the best possible legislative solution to the crisis, Pelosi said this: "I want everybody to be in on the act because this is deadly serious." [...]

And that's part of the broader issue here: Pelosi bristles at the idea that she and AOC are on some sort of equal plane because the New York congresswoman has almost 5 million Twitter followers. That's all well and good to Pelosi, but is nothing when compared to serving as the Speaker of the House (and the first woman to hold that role to boot)!

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The Guardian: The new left economics: how a network of thinkers is transforming capitalism

There is a dawning recognition that a new kind of economy is needed: fairer, more inclusive, less exploitative, less destructive of society and the planet. “We’re in a time when people are much more open to radical economic ideas,” says Michael Jacobs, a former prime ministerial adviser to Gordon Brown. “The voters have revolted against neoliberalism. The international economic institutions – the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund – are recognising its downsides.” Meanwhile, the 2008 financial crisis and the previously unthinkable government interventions that halted it have discredited two central neoliberal orthodoxies: that capitalism cannot fail, and that governments cannot step in to change how the economy works. [...]

The new leftwing economics wants to see the redistribution of economic power, so that it is held by everyone – just as political power is held by everyone in a healthy democracy. This redistribution of power could involve employees taking ownership of part of every company; or local politicians reshaping their city’s economy to favour local, ethical businesses over large corporations; or national politicians making co-operatives a capitalist norm. [...]

And yet, outside McDonnell’s circle and the transatlantic radical left, the new economics has gone largely unnoticed – or been casually derided. The black holes of Brexit and the Tory leadership contest are partly responsible, sucking attention away from everything else. But so is the radical nature of the new economics itself. Transforming or ending capitalism as we know it – the new economists differ as to which is the goal – is a difficult idea for most British politicians and journalists to take on board. After half a century accepting the economic status quo, they associate any leftwing alternatives to it either with out-of-date postwar social democracy – aka “the 70s” – or with leftwing authoritarianism, with present-day Venezuela or the Soviet Union. [...]

Contrary to his usual portrayal as a statist ogre, McDonnell believes there are limits to how far the left can increase taxes and government spending. In his view, many voters are unwilling, or simply unable, to pay much more tax – especially when living standards are squeezed, as now. He also believes that central government has lost authority: it is seen as simultaneously too weak, short of money thanks to austerity; and too strong – too intrusive and domineering towards citizens. Instead of relying on the state to create a better society, one of McDonnell’s close allies argues, leftwing governments, at both the municipal and national level, “have to get into changing how capitalism works”. [...]

Yet the problem for the left with settling for “a different capitalism”, however temporarily, is that it may simply enable capitalism to regroup, and then resume its Darwinian progress. Arguably this is exactly what happened in Britain during the last century. After the politically explosive economic slump of the 1930s – the precursor to today’s crisis of capitalism – during the postwar years many business leaders seemed to accept the need for a more egalitarian economy, and developed close relationships with Labour politicians. But once the economy and society had been stabilised, and rightwingers such as Thatcher started making a seductive case for a return to raw capitalism, the businessmen switched sides.

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The Atlantic: AOC’s Generation Doesn’t Presume America’s Innocence

The anti-war movement inverted this moral logic. In the 1969 book that helped make him famous, American Power and the New Mandarins, Noam Chomsky argued that “by any objective standard, the United States has become the most aggressive power in the world.” Invoking some of the most notorious fascist crimes of the 1930s and 1940s, the anti-war leader Jerry Rubin declared, “Vietnam is the Guernica, the Rotterdam, and the Lidice of the 1960s.” This antiexceptionalist discourse—which denied America’s moral superiority over the adversaries it had long contrasted itself against—even penetrated the Democratic Party. In 1971, George McGovern—who the Democrats would nominate for president the following year—called Richard Nixon’s bombing of Southeast Asia “the most barbaric act committed by any modern state since the death of Adolf Hitler.”[...]

The generational divide is evident in polls. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that Americans over the age of 65 were 37 points more likely to say the “U.S. stands above all other countries in the world” than that “there are other countries that are better than the U.S.” Americans under 30 split in the opposite direction. By a margin of 16 points, they said some other countries were better. A similar divide separates liberals and conservatives. While conservatives affirm America’s superiority by a margin of almost 10 to one, liberals reject it by more than two to one. [...]

Ocasio-Cortez’s comment about concentration camps is only the latest example of this broad challenge to American exceptionalism. She didn’t claim that Trump’s detention centers are the equivalent of Auschwitz. But she denied that America is a separate moral category, so inherently different from the world’s worst regimes that it requires a separate language. On Tuesday night she retweeted the actor George Takei, who wrote, “I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America.” This was another act of linguistic transgression. When remembering the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II, Americans have generally employed the term internment camps—largely, the historian Roger Daniels has argued, to create a clear separation between America’s misdeeds and those of its hated foes.

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Vox: Democrats’ impeachment dilemma, explained

Pursuing articles of impeachment against Trump would be politically explosive. Democrats know the Republican-led Senate under Mitch McConnell won’t take the next step after impeachment — a trial in the Senate — and they doubt the public would support them. In March, just 36 percent of voters polled by CNN supported impeachment. That number dropped to 34 percent after the Mueller report’s release, according to a Morning Consult poll released Monday. [...]

On one side, there’s a handful of Democrats, including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (MI), Ilhan Omar (MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Al Green (TX), and Steve Cohen (TN), who have been vocal about their belief that Trump is unfit for office. Many of them have signed on to articles of impeachment. On the other side, a number of moderate Democrats believe impeachment is a distraction from issues like infrastructure and health care — the very things that got them to a Democratic majority in the first place. And then there’s a bunch of people in the middle who aren’t ruling out impeachment but want more information before they make a decision. [...]

Even Democrats skeptical of impeachment took notice of the 10 specific episodes in which Mueller investigated Trump for obstruction of justice. Part of Mueller’s reason for not charging Trump himself was clearly the Justice Department’s longstanding practice not to indict a sitting president. Instead, Mueller wrote that Congress gets to decide what happens next. [...]

Even though Trump’s 40 percent public approval rating is extremely low, Pelosi and the majority of her caucus only want to move toward impeachment if there’s something so bad that Republicans can also get on board. They remember when Republicans who impeached President Bill Clinton in the 1990s reaped the political consequences in the 1998 midterms, when they lost seats in the House and made few gains in the Senate. Historians later concluded that backlash against Republicans for Clinton’s impeachment resulted in the GOP’s weak showing in the midterms.

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CityLab: What Can European Socialists Teach the American Left?

First, the Northern Europeans are focused on building strong national and local institutions that can make markets and drive societal benefits, not just change policy. Cities like Copenhagen and Hamburg, for example, have created public asset corporations that dispose of publicly owned lands and buildings in ways that spur large-scale urban transformation, particularly around historic harbors and downtowns. The revenue from such regeneration is then used to fund infrastructure, affordable housing, and other societal benefits. These regeneration efforts show a mature balance between public- and private-sector interests—a stark contrast to the tax-break scramble over landing Amazon’s HQ2, or New York City’s Hudson Yards private megaproject. [...]

Second, the Northern Europeans are devolutionists—they use the nation-state to provide a platform for local market realities, political priorities, and social needs. Denmark, for example, has a decentralized government system, enabling municipalities to operate as strong partners with the national government. According to a 2009 OECD review, local governments in Denmark account for over 60 percent of government spending, the highest level among OECD peers. Copenhagen’s ambition to be the first major global city to generate zero carbon emissions is enabled by a strong fiscal foundation, coupled with mechanisms that give local officials input in national policy that would be unprecedented in the United States.

Along with that local power and legitimacy comes more voter participation: While the U.S. suffers from voter turnout of 20 percent or less in local elections, Copenhagen has consistently experienced turnout of 70 percent. Accordingly, local capacity is likewise strong. The knowledge and decision-making capacity of the public sector is robust, with a steady supply of highly educated public servants across technical, environmental, social, and business fields. The supply stems from the free tuition public sector educational system (which also greatly benefits the private sector).

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Vox: This is an emergency, damn it

The release prompted a great deal of smart, insightful writing, but also a lot of knee-jerk and predictable cant. Conservatives called it socialist. Moderates called it extreme. Pundits called it unrealistic. Wonks scolded it over this or that omission. Political gossip columnists obsessed over missteps in the rollout.

What ties the latter reactions together, from my perspective, is that they seem oblivious to the historical moment, like thespians acting out an old, familiar play even as the theater goes up in flames around them.

To put it bluntly: this is not normal. We are not in an era of normal politics. There is no precedent for the climate crisis, its dangers or its opportunities. Above all, it calls for courage and fresh thinking.[...]

But 2 degrees is not the worst-case scenario. It is among the best-case scenarios. The UN thinks we’re headed for somewhere around 4 degrees by 2100. Believing that we can limit temperature rise to 2 degrees — a level of warming scientists view as catastrophic — now counts as wild-haired optimism, requiring heroic assumptions about technology development and political transformation.[...]

The left will never win the money game. The right’s billionaires are united in advocating for their interest in lower taxes, less regulation, and less accountability. The left’s are more likely to pick vanity causes or candidates. They love social causes but are far less likely than their counterparts on the right to focus on economic issues or redistribution, in part because many of them are quasi-libertarian tech bros who believe they are smarter than governments and better able to “change the world” if left to their billions.

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Independent: The key takeaway from Finland's universal basic income experiment is that countries need to learn from each other

In a nutshell, giving people a universal income did not help them get into jobs, but they did feel somewhat happier than those in the control group.

The general reaction to this is that the experiment has been somewhat disappointing. You would expect people to be more willing to take on a job if they knew that they would still keep their state benefit, but this has not happened. And the difference in happiness, while statistically significant, is not that huge.

But I take away a rather different lesson. It is that the idea of doing randomised trials is a really sensible way of evaluating social policies. If this technique were more widely applied, it would be possible to fine-tune welfare support systems so that they gave taxpayers better value for their money, and recipients a higher quality of benefits. The universal basic income is an idea that has generated a lot of global interest. For example, the opposition party in India wants to do something similar. But this is the first proper national randomised trial on a national basis anywhere in the world to see whether it works. [...]

Finland has done a randomised trial of a particular welfare policy. We should learn from this. And governments throughout the developed world should carry out more such studies about other social policies before they launch some politically-attractive new initiative – and find it doesn’t work.

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Politico: Trump’s National Emergency Is Great News for Future President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The notion that a president of the United States can simply circumvent the national legislature out of pique, declare something that has been going on for years as an “emergency,” and then implement policies our elected representatives did not vote for, allocate money for or in any other way authorize is totally antithetical to representative democracy and the checks and balances system. If Trump is correct constitutionally, which he isn’t, then what did the Founders create a Congress for in the first place? I’d like to think that the Supreme Court will call a stop to this nonsense in a 9-0 decision, as they did in 1974 when they forced the executive branch to turn over to Congress tapes of President Richard Nixon’s private conversations. Unfortunately, I’ve lost so much faith in conservatives’ ability to draw any red line against Trump that I find it easy to believe that the conservative majority of the court will go along with this, anyway. As a result, Congress will no longer matter. As a result, the Supreme Court will no longer matter, either.[...]

For a decade now, the right has warned about a progressive “dictator” like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton forcing the United States to pursue policies that the majority does not want. Now they are making it so much easier for the next Democratic president to do exactly that. Shortly after learning of Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency to build his beloved border wall, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said a left-wing president might just as well declare an emergency to impose any policies they want, too. As Elizabeth Warren tweeted: “Gun violence is an emergency. Climate change is an emergency. Our country's opioid epidemic is an emergency.” You see where this is headed.

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UnHerd: It’s time to tax the super rich

When asked how she intended to fund her Green New Deal, she noted that tax wouldn’t be such a crazy idea; the top marginal tax rate for much of America’s history had been around the 60-70% mark and perhaps the “tippy-top” earners on “$10,000,000 or more” ought to pay that much again. Income inequality in the US now exceeds what it was in the 1920s; only the top 1% have seen any real wage growth in the last 30 years, and it’s among the 0.1% that the increase is most pronounced. If you are in that micro-percentile, you can expect to earn 198 times what someone in the bottom 10% earns.

Not to be outdone, Elizabeth Warren, the presidential candidate and Democratic senator from Massachusetts, proposed a wealth tax on “ultra-millionaires” – 2% on accumulated wealth greater than $50,000,000, and 3% on wealth greater than $1,000,000,000. (I find writing out the actual numbers much more expressive than the near-euphemistic “million” and “billion”; more comparable to what each of us see when we check our online bank accounts). [...]

Ever since, the trend has been for top rate of income tax to fall – and for inequality to widen. When Margaret Thatcher came to power, she dropped the top rate from 83% to 60%. It fell further to 40% under Labour, went back up to 50% after the crash, before George Osborne cut it back from 50% to 45% (with no concomitant easing of his austerity agenda). Osborne later boasted that the measure had recouped £8 billion – apparently because so many top-earners had decided to keep their money in the country. Closer analysis suggest this was more likely the result of clever accounting on the part of the rich (deferring payment from one year to the next) and the actual effect was minimal.[...]

But it’s also true that setting your tax rate low can be utterly disastrous. The infamous Kansas Experiment saw Republican governor Sam Brownback eliminate state income tax and slash taxes for the highest earners in an attempt to boost investment. It resulted in a complete collapse in state revenues, school closures, prison riots, and subsequent shamefaced capitulation. It turns out that sometimes, asking people for less money means that you receive less money.

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FiveThirtyEight: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wants To Raise Taxes On The Rich — And Americans Agree

A new poll from The Hill and Harris X found that 59 percent of registered voters supported imposing a 70 percent tax rate on every dollar over the 10 millionth a person earns in a year. (Tax rates that apply only to income over a certain threshold are called marginal tax rates.) The idea even received bipartisan support: 71 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents and 45 percent of Republicans said they were in favor. In contrast, the Republican overhaul of the tax law that President Trump signed in 2017 — which decreased the marginal tax rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent on married couples earning over $600,000 — has far less public support. A September Gallup poll found that only 39 percent of Americans approved of it.

It’s perhaps not surprising that Americans would support higher taxes on top earners given that tax rates on high income brackets were once much higher than they are today. The top marginal tax rate was as high as 94 percent in the 1940s, and throughout the 1970s, Americans in the top income bracket (which in 1970 was $200,000 and above, or about $1.3 million in today’s money) were taxed at a 70 percent rate, according to the Tax Policy Center. It wasn’t until 1981, when Congress and President Ronald Reagan implemented one of the largest tax cuts since World War II, that the top marginal tax rate fell to 50 percent. Over the course of Reagan’s term, tax reforms eventually cut the top marginal tax rate down to 28 percent.

Wanting the wealthy to pay more in taxes isn’t a new idea to American politics either. According to a Gallup poll from 2016, since 1992, Americans have largely felt that upper-income earners don’t pay enough in taxes. For the last quarter century, a majority of Americans — between 55 percent and 77 percent — have believed that top earners pay too little. And a 2017 Ipsos/Reuters poll found that 3 in 4 Americans said that wealthier Americans should pay more in taxes.

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The Guardian: Who's afraid of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Their fear is not irrational. Ocasio-Cortez has been using Twitter masterfully, as a way of directing the national political conversation. The Politico article compares her technique to that of Donald Trump, and this isn’t completely wrong: the president has long used his Twitter account to keep the media talking about whatever he wants them to be talking about. Democrats have long failed to keep pace – they end up reacting to whatever Trump says, rather than setting the agenda themselves. In Ocasio-Cortez we see (at last!) what it might look like for lefties to retake control – to begin talking about what we want to talk about rather than whatever nonsense Trump is spewing this week. [...]

If Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t made the remark, there would be no discussion. But she did, and so now there’s a discussion! Now Nobel prize winners are publicly pointing out that high taxes are good, and moderate Democrats are being pressured to endorse “radical” ideas. As the New York Times reported, she is pushing the Democrats to the left whether they like it or not. She has realized what Republicans have known for a long time: if people are talking about your agenda, even if they’re talking about how bad and silly it is, you are making that agenda more plausible. (It’s often called “shifting the Overton window”.) Yes, the National Review will squeal that X tax hike won’t be enough to pay for Y program. But you have got them on the defensive. [...]

This is concerning, of course. In order to get Democrats in Congress to move left, there have to be primary threats. This, historically, is one way socialists have won victories in the United States: they have forced the major political parties to move leftward in order to neutralize the socialist threat. It’s not surprising that Ocasio-Cortez is being asked not to “undermine” fellow Democrats, but it’s encouraging that so far she seems to be going her own way. Politico says that while she is cordial to her fellow party members, she does not give in: [...]

Conservatives cannot stop talking about Ocasio-Cortez. Sean Hannity literally repeats her agenda on live television and then thinks he’s the one winning! She drives them up the wall, and it’s fantastic. But there’s one person who never mentions her: Donald Trump. Strange, isn’t it? Trump mocks everyone on Twitter. But he has never once sent a tweet about her, even though they both have major presences on the platform. I suspect I know exactly why: he realizes that she’s better at this than him. He may be able to make jokes at the expense of Elizabeth Warren, but Ocasio-Cortez is better at online repartee than almost anyone else. He is wise to keep away from tangling with her. Just recently, when Joe Lieberman made a patronizing comment about Ocasio-Cortez not representing the future of the party, she gave a brief but devastating retort that made him look like an out-of-touch fogey. (I doubt he even understood it.)

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The Atlantic: What Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 60 Minutes Interview Actually Reveals

But in a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday night, the new congresswoman downplayed her rebellious reputation. Yes, she wants Democrats to be more progressive, but it seems she plans to work within the party rather than launch public attacks from the left. [...]

The 60 Minutes spot was Ocasio-Cortez’s first high-profile interview since taking the oath of office late last week and was likely her longest serious sit-down to date. It’s unusual for a freshman representative to land such a prominent interview, but since her improbable primary win over the summer, she’s been the subject of countless stories in both the mainstream and the right-wing press, fed in part by her unusually transparent approach to public relations. The frenzy has created a feedback loop, with Ocasio-Cortez winning media attention because of all the media attention she’s already received. Still, the 60 Minutes interview did provide some substantive details about how Ocasio-Cortez plans to work in Congress.

Ocasio-Cortez positioned herself as a principled insider rather than a purist outsider. She articulated goals that fall within the mainstream of the post-2016 Democratic Party: “I want to be able to tell my grandchildren that we established a single-payer [health-care] system, tuition-free universities, and that we saved our climate for their future, because we decided to be courageous in the moment and make it happen.” [...]

With the biggest megaphone of all the House progressives, Ocasio-Cortez can help chart the course for the Bernie wing of the party in the House. It will have to decide whether it wants to be a thorn in Speaker Pelosi’s side, like the GOP’s hard-line Freedom Caucus under John Boehner and Paul Ryan, or play nice in public in the hope of influencing leadership behind closed doors. The new congresswoman’s interview suggests she’s got a plan, at least for herself: She’d rather become an influential insider than stay an outside agitator.

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The Atlantic: The Democratic Party Wants to Make Climate Policy Exciting

The Green New Deal aims to get us there—and remake the country in the process. It promises to give every American a job in that new economy: installing solar panels, retrofitting coastal infrastructure, manufacturing electric vehicles. In the 1960s, the U.S. pointed the full power of its military-technological industry at going to the moon. Ocasio-Cortez wants to do the same thing, except to save the planet. [...]

For the first time in more than a decade, Democrats can approach climate policy with a sense of imagination. They can also approach it with a sense of humility, because their last two strategies didn’t work particularly well. When the party last controlled Congress, in 2009, Democrats tried to pass a national cap-and-trade bill, a type of policy that allows polluters to bid on the right to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It failed to pass in the Senate. Starting in 2011, President Obama tried to use the EPA’s powers under the Clean Air Act to fight carbon-dioxide emissions. After President Trump was elected, he terminated that effort by executive order. [...]

Yet Obamacare didn’t survive because those new rules worked. They did work, but, in fact, voters hate them. Instead, Obamacare survived because it gave two new superpowers to voters. The first was the power never to be denied health insurance for preexisting conditions, and the second was free or cheap health insurance through Medicaid. The reason Americans jammed the Capitol Hill switchboards last year to protest the repeal—and pulled the lever for Democrats in November—wasn’t that they valued Obamacare’s elegant cost-control mechanism. They wanted to keep their superpowers.

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Quartz: The Auschwitz Museum hits back at Lindsey Graham’s Holocaust mansplaining

Ocasio-Cortez argued that the point of the museum was to keep the era’s lessons alive—including impact of authoritarianism and the forces that drive families to seek asylum elsewhere. Her position was soon reiterated by an organization uniquely positioned to understand the Holocaust’s horrors: the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which maintains the historical site in Poland where Nazis killed an estimated 1.1 million people between 1940 and 1945 through execution and mistreatment.

“When we look at Auschwitz we see the end of the process,” the museum replied on Twitter to Graham. “It’s important to remember that the Holocaust actually did not start from gas chambers. This hatred gradually developed from words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanisation & escalating violence.”

This is not the first time that historians of World War II’s ugliest crimes have spoken out against the Trump administration and its supporters. Japanese-Americans who survived US internment camps vehemently criticized the administration’s policy of family separation at the border earlier this year. In October, a Holocaust historian who specializes in the origins of genocides published an essay in the New York Review of Books noting “troubling similarities” between 1930s Germany and the US today, including a growing policy of isolationism and the failure of lawmakers on the right to curtail or criticize their side’s worst impulses.

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The Atlantic: The Left and the Right Have Abandoned American Exceptionalism

One difference lies in the way they talk about America. Obama consistently acknowledged America’s racist history. He would never have declared, as George W. Bush did in his second inaugural that, “From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this Earth has rights and dignity and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of heaven and Earth. Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a slave.” I suspect Obama would have gagged on the words. [...]

Ocasio-Cortez does not. She depicts American history less as an arc of progress than as a circle, in which America repeats—rather than rises above—its past. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE’s) treatment of people of color, she told The Intercept, continues an American tradition: “The very first immigration policy law passed in the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1800s, and so the very bedrock of U.S. immigration policy, the very beginning of it was a policy based on racial exclusion.” She told New York magazine that, “child separation is a barbaric new iteration of what is going on, but for a very long time.” [...]

What explains the change? One obvious answer is Donald Trump. When Obama spoke about American history as a narrative of unfolding progress, his own election served as Exhibit A. And while he acknowledged the conservative backlash it sparked, he described that backlash as temporary, a “fever” that would eventually “break.” But Trump shows that, far from breaking, the fever has intensified. Which raises the possibility that the real historical aberration was not the racist reaction to Obama’s presidency, but his presidency itself. [...]

In different ways, Obama and Bush both spoke about America as embodying a set of ideas. Now neither Republicans nor Democrats are as likely to do so. Donald Trump doesn’t care about human rights. For him, America isn’t an idea; it’s a nation. And when it pursues universal ideals—by admitting refugees, eschewing torture, agreeing to environmental norms or aiding other nations—it gets ripped off. For Ocasio-Cortez, human rights matter intensely, but the United States has no special claim to embodying them. It’s hard to imagine her saying, as Obama often did, that “in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

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