It used to be said that you could tell a lot about a leftist’s politics by asking them when they thought the Soviet Union went bad. Anarchists and social democrats said 1917, Trotskyists 1928, Maoists 1956, and if you were in the Communist Party (CP), the answer was never.
There’s a similar dynamic at work in left narratives about the Democratic Party. Did it go bad with Bill Clinton and the Third Way in the 1990s? Or with Carter’s embrace of austerity? Or, as some more conspiratorially inclined parts of the left have argued, when JFK was assassinated? Or has the party never been anything more than “history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party”? Where you draw the line says a good deal about your politics.
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