Crowley's Shocking Loss! Is Socialism On The March?
Shock loss in the Democratic primary in New York. Self-described socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knocked out long-time establishment incumbent Joe Crowley. Are we on the road to socialism...or is something more at play?
Shock loss in the Democratic primary in New York. Self-described socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knocked out long-time establishment incumbent Joe Crowley. Are we on the road to socialism...or is something more at play?
Shock loss in the Democratic primary in New York. Self-described socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knocked out long-time establishment incumbent Joe Crowley. Are we on the road to socialism...or is something more at play?
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
And Daniel, good to see you.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
Very good.
Did you stay up late watching the returns last night?
Big elections going on.
I did stay up and watch the returns.
Oh, you did?
Yeah, I watched it on the table.
I waited until morning.
So, because generally speaking, I don't think world events turn on a dime, but they're important, and they send out messages.
Certainly, the news media picked up on a message.
28-year-old young lady that claims she's a socialist, probably is a believer in socialism, and you read what she believes in.
Yes, a lot of socialistic viewpoints against an incumbent, established incumbent, Joe Crowley, and he loses.
He's been there for 10 years in leadership position, thought he could be a speaker, but he didn't want a debate her.
There were three debates, and he showed up once and took things for granted.
So that does happen.
But the big question that we have today is, is this a big deal?
How significant is this?
And I think there are some issues.
Who supported the challenger?
And what kind of a congressman was Crowley?
Crowley was sort of a typical average mainstream Democrat, which means he has no philosophy other than a leaning left philosophy and trying to appeal to everybody.
Because in many ways, he was a crony capitalist.
I think he probably got money from the big guys.
So he played the ball game.
And in that sense, a challenger that comes along and says, hey, what is this guy?
He's just establishment.
That's what, you know, that's the Trump position, the anti-establishment position to help Trump.
And that was an issue there.
To me, the sad part is, why is it, isn't it sad that, yes, there's, she actually used language that we might have used, you know, this establishment stuff.
But she also said, socialists, socialists.
That's what my university professors told me to say.
Socialism on the rise.
We have, look at what Bernie Sanders has done.
And look, Maxine Waters.
I mean, she's in the news all the time, and she's a socialist, too, and she's driving the wedge in there to become a little bit more aggressive on how you deal, you know, in a personal sense.
So there is something significant going on here.
And just to say that everything Crowley ever did, I don't think there were many things on votes we agreed on.
But then again, when you have a challenger like this, the language at least suggests, hmm, maybe she's challenging the right thing.
But what we would like to talk about, what I would like to direct our conversation, is what should be the answer?
Is the answer to the mess we have socialism?
And obviously, we don't buy into that.
So what did you conclude after staying up late at night and watching these elections and finding out that Joe Crowley lost?
It was fascinating.
It wasn't supposed to happen.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is her name.
She had worked for Bernie Sanders for president.
She interned at the late Senator Ted Kennedy's office.
So I think one of the things that shows up the top, we were talking about this before we started, is it shows that the mainstream in both parties are completely bereft of ideas.
Crowley thought he was going to skate by.
He had, I think he raised $3 million to her $300,000 or something like this.
Huge, disproportionate amount of money that he raised.
And with no real ideas.
His foreign policy was always very hawkish, extremely pro-Israel.
He always has been.
And Ocasio-Cortez is actually noted for being skeptical about these recent Israeli killings of Palestinians.
So there's a challenge there, but it just shows, I think, that the mainstream of the two parties, as you always say, are just sort of like one blob.
That's right.
And for the people to sort them out, maybe the people who identify with socialism and more stuff, okay, that sounds good.
Challenging the establishment.
Moving, a problem is out there and they recognize it, but moving in the wrong direction.
I always argue that the chaos that we have now is a tremendous opportunity for the libertarian message.
And sometimes we don't hear the libertarian message from the libertarian party.
So we'd encourage them to really address this and explain why this crony capitalism shouldn't be tolerated in any way.
But I was looking at the number of votes, and it reminded me about the few votes that I got.
There was a significant election way back in 1976 in a special election.
Just a couple thousand or maybe no, I think it was 1,300 that made the difference of me getting into a runoff, figuring that if I had not had 1,300 votes, I wouldn't have gotten into the runoff and I'd have never been in office.
And oh, just think how terrible the world would have been if I had never been in the office.
But it happened to my surprise, to tell you the truth.
But anyway, there were less than 30,000 votes.
Oh, you know what?
No, I'm talking about this race last night.
Less than 30,000.
And she won by 14%.
But I think that's just a couple thousand votes different.
So here, Crowley, you know, the leader in the Democratic Party, the establishment, he has all this money.
And so in a way, it's good that the money isn't the ultimate factor.
But galvanizing people and declaring they understand the problem, which she did, she complained about things, but coming up with the wrong answer, that's not too encouraging.
The best we could hope for for somebody like this is that she turns out to be a principled progressive, and maybe she'd have a good idea here and there, but we don't know a whole lot about our foreign policy.
We do know more about our economic policy, and we're not going to get any help there.
It's more and more freebie stuff, and don't worry about paying for it.
She agrees with the Republicans.
Deficits don't matter.
So they're going to get together and they're going to spend it.
And I don't even know if she'll be voting against any of the militarism around the world.
That remains to be seen.
Yeah, and I think this is kind of a continuation in a way, maybe this is a bright spot of the Paul Trump-Sanders phenomenon, where people are attracted to, quote, outsiders, people that are offering ideas.
Now, we disagree with these ideas, certainly that Sanders and she proposed in many cases.
But the idea, I think it just shows once again how bereft of idea, how there's no intellectual debate going on in the two main parties.
It seems to me that this has really now come down to a war of ideas, so to speak, between socialism and capitalism.
There's Democratic Socialists of America, is the group that she's affiliated with, and the libertarians are the only ones offering real solutions.
Yeah, and that's what we have to encourage and get more of that out there is to show the difference.
I still think the ideas are important.
It's out there, but it's not in Congress and these political campaigns, as you point out.
But the fact that she is comfortable and won an election, but not hiding her association with socialism.
That used to be automatically negative in politics.
All of a sudden, I don't know, you know, Bernie Sanders, I'm a socialist, and the kids rallied.
I think that is a reflection of the horrendously bad ideas from our universities that teach this stuff.
You know, whether it's pure socialism or redistribution of wealth or whether it's the cultural Marxism, which is an addition to this, and they know the problem.
We recognize the problem.
It's just that the answer coming from another type of authoritarian, it's just a wrong way to go because we're so convinced that we don't need more government.
We need less government.
We need a better understanding.
I don't think we're going to have less government by nickel and diamond.
We have to have people understanding what the libertarian philosophy is all about, what free markets are happening, why people shouldn't all of a sudden shift over.
Tariffs are the answers.
There's an imbalance in trade, and this is it.
We're going to put on tariffs, not realizing that there could be a real downside to such a policy.
Yeah, and I think the best way to break it down, I always explain it too, and I just explained it to my son a while ago.
It really is, you can talk about socialism versus libertarianism, but break it down how you always do, authoritarianism versus freedom.
Socialism is authoritarianism because you have to coerce people to give up their money.
They give up what is theirs.
You have to force them.
You have to use aggressive force against people.
Whereas libertarianism pro-freedom is the opposite.
And I think it's a shame that socialism, that authoritarianism, is getting so much traction among young people today.
But I think the Trump phenomenon has made things more difficult for libertarians.
Yeah, it is.
I think the tone doesn't help us.
And that sets us back a bit.
But I want to mention something else that you brought to my attention, and that is a poll that has been done that we might be able to glean a little bit of a positive understanding of what's going on and some encouragement.
And that has to do with who really supports more government.
I think that was mainly on foreign policy, aggressiveness, foreign policy.
It turns out that the younger people tend to be less aggressive with military force around the world.
Is that basically a good generalization of that?
Where the older generations are more inclined to be hawkish, and they were probably more influenced by World War II and the other wars that they endorsed, unnecessarily, like Vietnam and Korea.
Yeah, and this was an annual thing that the Chicago Council on Global Affairs does, an annual study.
And here's a quote from it.
They found that millennials, which is the generation born in like 82 and later, quote, much less alarmed about major threats overseas.
And each successive generation from the post-World War II generation is less likely to prioritize U.S. action overseas, U.S. intervention overseas.
I think we have a graphic that we can just look at a couple of them and see.
As we feel bad about socialism winning in New York, we can at least sort of feel a little better.
And this is a, apologies, this is a, this graphic is difficult.
We'll just look at a couple of them.
But if you look for the first one, conducting airstrikes against Assad's regime.
The silent generations of post-World War II, 59% support.
The Boomers, 49, Gen X, 48.
Then the millennials, the young people we're talking about now, only 35%.
And that goes down to North Korea using troops in North Korea, 72 to 68 to 60 to 64, and so on.
So there are some exceptions that are a little surprising.
But generally speaking, they seem to be less interested in jumping to war for these things.
See, I think ideas do have consequences because there's been a few of us who have talked about non-interventionist foreign policy, and there's been some coalitions, some progressive Democrats and the libertarians and the libertarian Republicans have talked about less involvement overseas.
So I would say those ideas have permeated in and is reflected in a poll like this.
And to me, that shows that ideas do have consequence.
A good idea is going to have a good consequence.
But it takes time.
And I get very impatient myself.
Well, that's it.
Why are we there?
Why don't we bring them home?
But I have to keep after it.
Whether it's getting people to understand why you have to have the audit of the Federal Reserve, now more people understand.
They're amazed.
We've talked about it, as others have, that there's trillions of dollars that went to the Pentagon.
It was never audited.
Not only do we have this huge debt, saying about, but the money that we spent, we don't know where it went, especially when it goes to the Pentagon.
And that's a good thing to reflect on.
But unfortunately, and you mentioned Trump, he has come up, he's challenged it, and sometimes it's exciting how he challenges his status quo and political correctness, but he's not very challenging on thinking that debt is bad.
And the debt keeps growing.
And I think that people who emphasize and look at this have to realize that you do have to cut something.
But right now, they're not in the mood for it.
Now, if they're challenging the status quo of the Joe Crowley, who fits in well into the bipartisan stuff that goes on in Washington, and it's replaced by a socialist that wants more spending, that's not going to happen.
But then if you look at this statistic, there's room for us to start talking about spending less money.
There was a bill that I introduced along with Barney Frank on numerous occasions that we said this was before that mess was going on in the Middle East that calmed down there.
But we wanted to, you know, at least emphasize Europe should take care of themselves.
You know, bring troops home from there and start that movement in that direction.
But right now, we're not moving in that direction.
We're in more countries bombing more bombs.
We did the program on how often we drop a bomb.
So it's still a mess, but I think that it means we have to work harder on the ideological positions in order to convert people.
But we're up against the major media, the politicians, and the university professors.
University professors have influence.
And sometimes their political activism on campus to telling kids when to demonstrate, you know, and how, even in grade school and high school, how they can get kids out of school to demonstrate on political issues where they're taking the wrong position, you know, like demonstrate against the Second Amendment.
That'll save the world, you know, this sort of thing.
That to me is very discouraging.
Here's something that's really interesting about the race.
And I think if you look at it in a nutshell, this is it, ideas aside, which we've already talked about.
But Ocasio-Cortez, the challenger who's now won, 76.9% of her contributions were under $200.
Small Donors Win Big00:02:07
Almost 80% of her contributions were smaller than $200.
Average donation size, $14, $14.
Crowley, under $200, only 2.1%.
Nothing, nothing.
So it was all coming from big corporations.
It's ironic because this young lady campaigned on campaign finance reform.
It looks like the market's taking care of it itself.
She came through with some new ideas and was able to attract a lot of money.
You know, this supports my idea that there's not, you know, there's too much bipartisanship because he's acting like a Republican.
Hillary wasn't a candidate for the poor.
I mean, she was a hawk.
And I made the statement.
It got some news.
She could run as a Republican, you know, with her foreign policy and her spending.
And so they're appealing to the same people.
But what are the perception?
The perception are that only Democrats care about the poor.
If you want a handout, you know, you got to vote for the Democrats.
And yet they're getting as much.
I think when you look back at the details of this presidential race, Trump didn't have to go begging and pleading like other candidates, but she was getting a lot of support from Wall Street and from the military people, the military-industrial complex.
And Trump was an unknown.
So they went with her and they were shocked as well.
Oh, our friend of this establishment lost the election.
Now you get nearly hysterical.
But they're not really that different from the Republicans on where they get their support.
Yeah, and it'll be interesting to see what happens when she gets in Congress.
You know, if she does win, she should win the general election, I would think, with the district she has.
How will she vote?
What will she do?
Will she be, you know, some of her rough edges shaved off by the allure of power?
But, you know, I think if we're ready to conclude, I would just say that, you know, we do have to work with progressives whenever we can.
And we have progressives on the board of the Ron Paul Institute who we've worked with for years, and we cherish their friendship.
Battle Of Ideas00:02:41
But it is a battle of ideas, and I think we do have better ideas.
I think freedom is much better than authoritarianism, and I think history has proven us right.
So we can engage them, and we can sell our ideas, and I hope we can do a better job of it, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And, you know, I think this struggle over the political system and who gets elected is very important.
But what amazes me is how much anger there is out there.
I keep thinking that it is really getting tough when you see the Maxine Waters and other people being so angry about what's going on because I always believed it was only economics and people who were starving and there were breadlines or a Vietnam War going on before they would get up.
But I sense that there's more anger and more people fearful of what's happening and fearing the future is worse than I have ever sensed it.
Otherwise, when you had some of these conditions like a Great Depression and World War II, people seem to have to come together and fight the battle.
But not now.
There's more dissension.
But I think what's happening is that people are realizing that there is still a lot of problems that we have.
The problems are out there and there's the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and they hide them.
There's no breadlines, but there's a lot of people dependent on government handouts and that the lower 40% of the people probably have been in depression.
And the depression has been hidden from most of the people and that's why there is this anger and the socialists can come along and play on that.
Of course I think what we should do is play is try to get people to understand where the problem comes from and that the enemy is not free market crony capitalism.
That's what happens.
They blame the capitalism of the type of capitalism we have now and say that's the reason we have to have socialism and they never use it as a justification for why we need more free markets and less government.
And we have to dispel that myth because right now these socialists are winning because they've labeled the current system on us who believe in free markets, which is absolutely not true.
Freedom is a lot different than the way they describe it.
Freedom means that the individual has the right to their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, something that the founders wished we were, they wished that they would place it in our system and that we would preserve it.
Anyway, I think that if we're seeking peace and prosperity, we have to look toward the principles of liberty and not allow people to slip so casually and carelessly into believing socialism is the answer.
It's not.
That's authoritarianism, and we have a lot too much authoritarianism the way it exists.