loves his own data projections of the Trump coalition’s demographic doom. Maybe sentimental patriotism sets in with age... I have a year on McElwee. Or it could be that reverential regard for our common past comes with experience. Even a one- man movement-maker like McElwee owes a large share of his success to his forebears. There would be no ascendant socialism for him to steer, for instance, if 86-year- old activist and political scientist Piven crafted voter registration reform in the first half of the Clinton administration and has since reemerged as a leader of the Sanders-fueled socialist resurgence. In the 1960s, she and her late husband Richard Cloward devised a platform that would vastly expand welfare benefits, and they decided the sole impetus for all meliorative policy was activist uprising. Their so-called Cloward- Piven formula – while still too radical for most liberals – has a growing body of adherents in the under-30 set, and still serves as a unifying bête noire for Republicans in disarray. Piven, who was born in Canada but moved to Jackson Heights, Queens as a small child, must love America – at least as much as Bill Ayers, I reason – what with all the work she’s put into convincing its revolutionary fringes theirs is the best plan for the nation. As it happens, I’m wrong: “Attachment to abstractions like nation, flag, and the symbols of patriotism can lead to tragic delusions,” Piven told me, when I asked what in Frances Fox Piven hadn’t helped found the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982.
Constitution was just drafted by a bunch of dead white men and is not relevant to modern life.”
Even Socialists Get Sick of Feta Among other pied pipers leading these worryingly woke youth is Internet socialist Sean McElwee , who, at 26, runs a leftist think tank and launches viral “thought campaigns” straight from his Twitter feed to the platforms of far-left progressive politicians. The resiliently unpopular – per his think tank’s own polling data – but rabidly retweeted push to “Abolish ICE” was born on McElwee’s feed. The Green New Deal was his dream before he handed it off to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom he prefers to oldster Bernie Sanders. Automatic voter registration is the next big craze, McElwee believes. Before he was planting his far-left policy ideas into progressive candidates’ stump speeches, he attended the evangelical King’s College during Dinesh D’Souza’s brief tenure as its president and worked for deficit hawk Dave Walker’s Comeback America Initiative. His leftward drift came later. Does McElwee love America? I asked via his preferred medium – Twitter. And he said, “The thing I love about America is that racial attitudes and economic attitudes are highly correlated, which means it’s harder for a right- wing populist party to emerge.” My follow-up questions – among them, a simple “Huh?” – remain unanswered. But I think he’s saying he
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