Justice Democrats

Voters who cast ballots in the midterm elections overwhelmingly support giving unemployed Americans green jobs and charging companies pollution fees for greenhouse gases, a new poll found.

In a nationwide YouGov survey, 38 percent of respondents said they “strongly” support giving any unemployed American who wants one a job “building energy-efficient infrastructure.” Forty-six percent said they strongly support levying pollution fees on “companies that emit high levels of greenhouse gases.”

Add in the people who said they “somewhat” back such policies, and the support levels surge to 66 percent for both ideas. Subtract those who somewhat or strongly oppose the policies, and the net support for a polluter fee came to 48 percent, and the net support for such green jobs came to 54 percent.

The survey of 3,215 people who said they’d voted in the midterms, conducted between Oct. 27 and Nov. 7, found that 22 percent neither supported nor opposed the green jobs idea or didn’t know. That figure was 16 percent for the polluter fees.

Democrats were more likely to back both ideas. Seventy-five strongly supported a polluter fee and 56 percent favored the green jobs proposal ― numbers that jump to 90 percent and 83 percent, respectively, when those who somewhat support the policies are added.

Just 15 percent of Republicans strongly supported a polluter fee and 18 percent felt similarly about green jobs. But much larger percentages somewhat backed the ideas. In total, 40 percent of Republicans expressed at least some support for a polluter fee and 48 percent at least somewhat endorsed the green jobs policy.

“It’s encouraging that 40 percent of Republicans would support and only 36 percent would oppose a polluter fee,” said former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), now the executive director of RepublicEn, a group that urges Republicans to support a carbon tax.

As for the jobs plan, Inglis said, “Given that we are at or near full employment, the green jobs concept seems a bit distant from our current reality.”

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

The question of how socialists should conduct themselves in office is a longstanding debate on the Left; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bona fides as a qualitatively different type of leftist elected official is a more recent one. It’s far too soon to make any definitive statements about Ocasio-Cortez’s time in office — she doesn’t even officially start for another two months. But given her actions this week, even her skeptics from the Left have to give her credit.

A few days ago, Ocasio-Cortez admitted she would not have enough money to secure an apartment in Washington, D.C., until she started drawing her congressional salary — a powerful statement about the role class plays in who is able to run for office (not to mention the affordable housing crisis in Washington). The median net worth of a member of the House was at least $900,000 in 2015.

More significantly, on Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez spent her first day on the Hill at an illegal demonstration in aspiring Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office to push for a serious resolution to global warming.

Rhetorically, Ocasio-Cortez tried to walk a fine line, careful not to criticize Pelosi too directly. “We need to tell her that we’ve got her back in showing and pursuing the most progressive energy agenda that this country has ever seen,” Ocasio-Cortez said of Pelosi, before high-fiving demonstrators. But she also said that addressing climate change “gets kicked from session to session and so what this just needs to do is create a momentum and an energy to make sure that that it becomes a priority for leadership.”

Ocasio-Cortez has drafted a resolution calling for House Democrats to create a new committee that would have the power to draft a “Green New Deal” bill by 2020 — one that would create a public works jobs program and transition the country toward renewable energy. Significantly, the resolution demands that no member of Congress — from either party — who accepts donations from the fossil fuel industry would be permitted to sit on the committee.

While the first part of the bill is easy for almost any Democrat to agree to in theory, the second part, in naming a specific enemy, forces party leadership to pick a side: big donors or victims of climate change?

Regardless of the specific demands, which in this case are necessarily constrained by the rules of the House, Ocasio-Cortez’s willingness to stand with protestors from a little known group inside the head of her own caucus’s office before she is even sworn in indicates that she is prepared not only to buck protocol and take on high-ranking national Democrats, but to use her office as a center of organizing for progressive causes.

Ocasio-Cortez also went up against the New York Democratic establishment on Tuesday by taking an aggressive stance against Amazon’s announced plan to move 25,000 high-paid tech workers into Queens. In this, Ocasio-Cortez joins fellow democratic socialist Lee Carter in questioning the corporate incentives model of economic development.

Last week, as a freshman class filtered through the halls of Congress for orientation, Fox News sounded the alarm about four of the elected members and the “radical new Democratic ideas” they’d come to advance: free health care, free college, the abolishment of ICE and an infrastructure project designed to address impending climate catastrophe that they’re calling the “Green New Deal.”

Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are emblematic of a midterm election in which more women, more people of color and more progressives were elected than ever before. All four also happen to be Justice Democrats, a group that’s quickly gained currency under the leadership of a handful of determined alumni from Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign.

And now the group (technically a political action committee, but one that doesn’t accept corporate donations) is getting even more attention for announcing its intention this past weekend to challenge even more incumbent Democrats during the party’s upcoming primaries.

“We need new leaders, period,” Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff and one of the chief architects behind Justice Democrats’ success, said on a phone call with reporters this past weekend. “We gotta primary folks.” Entrenched leadership in Washington has recoiled in horror at the group’s blunt declaration, but it should have surprised no one. This is exactly what many progressives have been saying for the last two years — and it’s the reason Ocasio-Cortez is in Congress at all.  

The three leaders of Justice Democrats — Chakrabarti, Alexandra Rojas and Corbin Trent — met back in 2015, when the only thing they had in common was the fact that they each dropped everything they were doing and went to work for Sanders not long after he declared his candidacy. “I wasn’t entirely sure he had all the right solutions but I knew he was talking about the right problems,” Chakrabarti tells Rolling Stone.