One By One They All Fall

Democratic socialism just got a Rocky Mountain high.

Democratic socialist Melat Kiros shocked Colorado and the world by unseating Democratic U.S. Representative Diana DeGette in the primary in the Centennial State last week.  DeGette, who was a staunch liberal in the House and had replaced the late liberal icon Pat Schroeder in that district, has been in Congress for so long that voters in the district believed that DeGette had gotten too establishmentarian and too cozy with corporate interests.  She served for nearly thirty years, as long as Milat Kiros (below) has been alive.

Meanwhile, Michael Bennet, Colorado's senior U.S. Senator, had hoped to return home to be the state's next governor, so dissatisfied with Washington that he wanted to give up on serving in Congress.  He'll have to stay in the Senate unless he wants to retire from public life altogether; Colorado Democrats had other ideas and chose Attorney General Phil Weiser to be the Democratic gubernatorial nominee instead.  Weiser is seen as more progressive than Bennet, and many voters likely saw Bennet as another centrist Democrat who was too much part of an establishment that includes outgoing governor Jared Polis, who earned the enmity of many Colorado voters for commuting the sentence of Tina Peters, a county clerk who tried to cheat in 2020 to help Donald Trump.  

Call it the Mamdani effect.  Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City, is pursuing a progressive agenda to help more New York City residents with everyday expenses and the quality of life and he's off to a roaring start in getting things done.  More progressives and democratic socialists are interested in running for office and pursuing and proposing similar policies.   Centrists, who never seem to have any new ideas worth considering - or never seem to have any new ideas period - are falling left and right.  Voters can't take them anymore, and for Democratic primary voters that goes double.

There have been bumps in the road - Harlem Democrats just nominated for their U.S. Representative a black Hispanic Muslim woman who supports ending prisons, opposes interracial marriage, and called Joe Biden a rapist - but for every wacko we get, we get thoughtful democratic socialists like my congresswoman, Analilia Mejia.  (I'm still working on pronouncing her name right.)   And for every proposal to abolish or defund the police or to rename streets and parks for Marcus Garvey, there are proposals to expand child care, mandate paid maternity leave, and expand public transportation.  It remains to be seen, though, how many of these democratic socialists can win general elections.   Just because their saner ideas are popular with many in the general electorate doesn't mean they're popular with everyone.

I mean, if you try to explain to the average Middle American with a flag on his porch and a brass eagle over his front door how free child care works in Denmark, he just might tell you to move there. 😕