Jacobin At Last Finds the One Good Liberal
By This is just surreal:
I’m curious whether Kilpatrick thinks that, say, the massive expansion of Medicaid that passed under the last Democratic administration wasn’t a “concrete, material” benefit or whether he thinks “many” American liberals didn’t support it. Equally divorced from any material reality either way!
The text does not improve matters:
One of the most surprising moments of the debates thus far was after Elizabeth Warren gave a speech about enduring racism, calling for more anti-discrimination laws (“we need to start having race-conscious laws”). Yang, the son of immigrants, fired back: “With respect, you can’t regulate away racism with a whole patchwork of new laws that are race specific.” Instead, he reframed the debate towards concrete redistribution, invoking the socialist Martin Luther King Jr in a way that no candidate other than Sanders ever does:
There is no way we can prevent this tsunami from wiping out African American net worth unless we put straight cash into their hands sometime between now and 2053. And it’s not just them. It is truck drivers, it is retail clerks, it is call center workers, it is accountants, it is bookkeepers. We are in the midst of the greatest economic transformation in the history of our country. And it’s going to hit black people the hardest. We have to stop nibbling at the edges and start solving the real problem.
Warren was speechless. And so was most of the audience. It was utterly shocking — a rebuttal you’re not used to hearing from a twenty-first-century Democratic candidate.
Yes, unlike Andrew Yang Elizabeth Warren has never thought to advocate concrete redistributionist policies, which we know because she supports race-conscious remedies to discrimination, unlike…Martin Luther King? She’ll never understand economic populism, like Andrew Yang, or Tucker Carlson. Apparently spending this much mental energy wrestling with a straw man called “liberalism” turns your mind into mush.
…I didn’t see most of the debate live and didn’t see this exchange, but looking it up note as well that far from being “speechless” Warren immediately raised her hand to respond. Although I’m sure the figurine of Margaret Thatcher that stands in for “Elizabeth Warren” in Kilpatrick’s mind was stunned into silence by Andrew Yang’s brilliance:
Andrew Yang: "There is no way we can prevent this tsunami from wiping out African-American net worth unless we put straight cash into their hands sometime between now and 2053." https://t.co/0GxKJz7e8Y #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/I6VYyrtKvG— ABC News (@ABC) February 8, 2020