Less than seven years ago, Alexander Vindman played left-wing darling on MSNBC as he testified in full military regalia against Donald Trump during his first impeachment. If progressives published a Tiger Beat, then Vindman would have graced its cover with David Cassidy-like frequency (with his twin Eugene enjoying the Shaun Cassidy role). But tastes among leftists like little kids change rapidly. Then, they flew the Ukrainian blue and yellow in solidarity; now, they hang Palestinian flags. MSNBC calls itself MS NOW. And people who described themselves as “progressives” go by “democratic socialists.”
This demonstrative politics prefers purity to victory.
Underdog Angie Nixon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, upset Alexander Vindman in the Florida U.S. Senate primary on Tuesday. The anti-Trump energy that Vindman used to catapult from obscurity to celebrity propelled the broader movement in ways unanticipated and chaotic. Most conspicuously, this showy, oppositional mindset convinced a mainstream political party to respond to Trump by moving to the fringe. This demonstrative politics prefers purity to victory. Not the winner’s circle but a position farthest from their devil figure amounts to the place to stand.
Nixon certainly seems very different from Trump. The few similarities manage to loudly announce their differences.
Like Trump Tower’s namesake, she exhibits an entrepreneurial spirit. She founded something called Melanin Market. Like the Art of the Deal author, she writes books. Along with her adolescent daughter, she co-authored a “Moxie McGriff” series of children’s books about how magical shampoo gives a black girl suffering from low self-esteem a superpower afro to battle the monsters (code for homeless people?) destroying public libraries. Like the hotel and golf course magnate, she delves into the hospitality business. She runs Jacksonville’s Café Resistance, which describes itself as “a vibrant community hub” that aims to “showcase Black Art” and “provide space for education, activism, & empowerment.” Its insignia features two raised clenched fists — the same salute embraced by communist revolutionaries — that together make the shape of a heart. It seems to lack the popular appeal of the golden arches or the swoosh.
In business, they call it a “market niche,” and possibly Nixon enjoys profits exploiting it. In politics, we call those who find a market niche “losers.” Five percent of the market wins in business. Fifty-plus-one does it in politics. The socialist formula ultimately relies on — what else? — bad numbers that inevitably sink fringe candidates who do not run in fringe districts or states. (RELATED: Why All Leftism Is Now Far Left)
Socialists imagine that the MSNBC-MS NOW model, in which one rushes to the extremes to attract the attention of two of the tens of millions watching television, works in politics. It does not. It works in media. Sometimes. It works in business. Sometimes. Voters do not inhabit the extremes. That’s what makes extremes the extremes. They operate, like Café Resistance, away from the mainstream.
More than a century ago, the left went through a periodic makeover in which people fresh from describing themselves as “populists” and “progressives” marched under the socialist banner. Aside from victories in such places as New York and Milwaukee, these socialists pretty much got trounced everywhere else. (RELATED: The Marxist-Islamist Alliance Feeds On DSA Naïveté)
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Sympathetic academics asked the question: “Why no socialism in the United States?” German philosopher Werner Sombart concluded, “All socialist utopias come to nothing on roast beef and apple pie.” In the United States, too many people work too hard to grow the wealth pie to fall too much for the notion that we must instead obsess over the same slices for all with the equality fixation of soccer moms cutting the orange slices for halftime.
An added handicap limits this current crop of socialists. At the beginning of the 20th century, the King Kong of socialist publications, Appeal to Reason, published out of Girard, Kansas. Socialism’s leader, Eugene Debs, hailed from Terre Haute, Indiana, and worked for the Vandalia Railroad. These star-spangled socialists cited the Bible and the Founding Fathers to advance their cause and lampooned, in the words of Appeal to Reason, “diamond bosomed college professors who talk about socialism destroying ‘incentive.’”
One saw signs of this red-white-and-blue socialism in Graham Platner’s ill-fated campaign for U.S. Senate in Maine. Most Democratic Socialists of America-adjacent candidates stress socialism and not America. They recall the Marxists who wanted to run America by running down America. (RELATED: Meet America’s New Un-Americans… the DSA)
Socialism rooted in a foreign or fringe soil, like Nixon’s Melanin Market or Darializa Avila Chevalier’s rooting choice of Senegal in the World Cup, cannot nationally get to fifty-plus-one. That it can in the Democratic Party underscores its mania for virtue-signaling and not winning.
Socialism remains an idea passionately held by a small minority and regarded as alien by the vast majority. So long as America remains to some degree democratic, it will avoid, to a great degree, socialism.
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