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The Socialist cuckoos and the Democrats — 41 Comments

1. They’re like the Ringwraiths Neo. Slaves to the Ring of Power.

2. In another cuckoo-like move, however, the Party pretends to be interested in the good of others. Perhaps certain members even think they are interested in that.

   It’s been ages since I’ve seen the movie, but there is a scene in Dr. Zhivago where the communists have won the revolution, the fighting is winding down, and the good doctor & (and his girlfriend?) have returned to live in his very modest apartment.

   Then the communist political officers show up at his apartment and declare that he has too much while others have too little. A small crowd of followers-on cheer this us versus them mentality, and the doctor is summarily evicted out into the cold winter night, and new tenants installed.

   This IS a direct interpretation their political philosophy. (Of course, different socialist, Marxist, anarchist or communist people have somewhat different philosophies.) It isn’t just some figurative and hyperbolic rhetoric.

3. So we’re relying on Carville for smidgeons of sanity, are we?

   Oh well, guess everything’s relative…

   …but it would be far more encouraging were Carville himself not such a hate-filled, raving lunatic (and proud of it, too)…

   Whoda’ thunk it a year or so back?… but Fetterman’s by far the better man.

4. IMO this turn to Marxism isn’t a fad, its been growing here since 1960s, the universities are all but totally taken over, sure High Schools are as well.

   My theory is the primaries are low voter turnout and as said passionate intensity know that so small numbers ( I wouldn’t discount fraud as well) a few can make a big mark.

5. “So the 10% or 15% who do turn out and vote are the ones filled with that “passionate intensity” of the far-left fanatic.

   10-15% may be enough to seize power.

   But not nearly enough to hold on to power.

6. O’Brien doesn’t recognize that there is a limit to his grasping for power. When you’ve stripped it from all the serfs then what? You now can only amass more by taking it from the other O’Briens who are equally voracious and unprincipled as you are. Now what? The infighting will be brutal, Byzantine, and never ending. Uneasy is the head that wears the crown.

7. It happened in Austin TX, it’ll happen in Newark. What happened to the old Bolelshiviks when Stalin came to power?
   Neo all systems of governance have lifespan.

8. Lifespans

9. Thus the tendency to paranoia, which often in time develops into extreme paranoia.

   Stalin would be the pin-up boy for this, though some of the Roman Emperors would also be in the running.

   Later in his life, Pasternak never understood why he was still alive; why HE survived while so many of his friends and fellows perished. (Goes without saying that constant thoughts like this can cause a person a lot of anxiety…)

   Turns out…that Stalin liked his poetry. A lot…or at least enough.

   One cheer for sentimental mass killers?

10. Geoffrey,
    It’s the old vote your way in, shoot your way.out.

11. Hopefully not wishful thinking:

    As Democratic rule grows more and more unpopular in large cities, and it will because it doesn’t work, democrats will lose votes in those cities – assuming the votes are counted reasonably fairly.

    While this will not be nearly enough to flip these cities, it will impact other elections. If the vote in, say, Philadelphia or Milwaukee goes from 80-20 democrat to 70-30 it will impact senate and even some house races.

    Carville is right to be worried.

12. Mike Plaiss on June 26, 2026 at 7:43 pm

    I’m thinking of the previous post on Newark with mention of Detroit. There’s been some upswing of Detroit for nearly a decade already. But how long was the Democrat decline? 40, 50 or 60 years??
    There’s no reason to feel optimistic near the beginning of one these declines.

13. There is a substantial proportion of Democrats who will vote for the Democrat on the ticket. Period. So can “Democratic” Socialists successfully infiltrate? You betcha.

14. I waiting to see if Carville sticks with his position. Democrats who raise objections often surrender when there is push back. I think Carville won’t, but am prepared to be disappointed.

    I think turnout is so low in these elections because the areas are non-competitive. If the Democrats always win, and Democrats are the good guys, why bother voting? Everything will continue as it always was. I feel a bit that way in Utah, I know that my vote won’t make a difference, and nothing would go terribly wrong if I didn’t vote. But I do vote, both because I don’t think Utah is as stable as it looks, and because I was raised that way.

15. O’Brien is a fictional character. Orwell, being a socialism, could not accept that what he saw in the USSR, and more directly in Spain, was not a natural outgrowth of the system, and so put malignancy into his villains’ souls.
    OTOH, one trait of such states is that the malignant do tend to find it easier to assume power in them.

16. 10-15% may be enough to seize power.

    My rule of thumb was 30%. But less might work if nobody cares.

17. I think when Yeats said “the best lack all conviction” he meant “the best of an otherwise bad lot.” There were no good choices, just choices that were less bad than the worst, i.e. those filled with passionate intensity.

18. This is a first for me: thinking about Carville without loathing. However, it seems to me that Democrats have been despicable Communist Lite since ~ 1968; now the 100 proof version has emerged.

    I think the only good Democrats are those with some element of conservatism, but they seem to be extinct.

19. Socialists are indeed cocoos, parasitic, only interested in having the unwitting host feed their offspring, even as the cocoo chicks kill the host’s own. The adult cocoos build no nests nor feed their own.

20. Communist countries are economic prisons. They all have to stop their citizens from trying to escape to other freer nations. Remember the Berlin Wall? No one is trying to get in.

    Every high school student should have to read “MIG Pilot.”
    “Tells of MIG-25 pilot Viktor Belenko’s escape from the Soviet Union, the events he precipitated in Washington, Moscow, and Tokyo, the secrets he disclosed, and the impact of his flight on world affairs.” A primer on the horrors of the Communist USSR and how difficult it was for Boreshenko to believe what he saw when he was taken to a shopping mall outside D.C. Our standard of living far exceeded his dreams.

    The Commies’ argument about the failures is always that it just hasn’t been done correctly. Thery will get it right. I hear that arrogant assurance in Mondami’s voice that he has the knowledge to make it work. He doesn’t!

    Communism is an atheist myth about creating a paradise on Earth. It sells well among the lay abouts, artists, failed poets and others who find the world won’t pay them what they think they’re worth. And yes, they will resort to violence to achieve their ends just like a common criminal who shoots his victim to get his wallet.

    Communism – NO!!!!

21. Mary Catelli:

    I think that although Orwell remained a socialist, he was well aware of the problems inherent in socialism. I wrote a post on the subject; please see this.

22. @Mike Plaiss: As Democratic rule grows more and more unpopular in large cities, and it will because it doesn’t work, democrats will lose votes in those cities – assuming the votes are counted reasonably fairly.

    Not to mention that as the super blue cities and states drive out normal Americans, those blue states will lose seats in the House, while red states gain.

    That will be important in the 2030s.

23. There is one bird I don’t tolerate here at DuckSpa, this:

    “ The brown-headed cowbird is a North American brood parasite that lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, leaving the host species to raise its young.”

    There were starting to be a lot of them. They would flock here feeding on the ground with a male lookout on the roof. The lookout would attack my dog. I started blasting the lookout off the roof with a hose and eventually they stopped coming here.

    On the other hand, one of the ravens was following the lawn mower around the other day, I guess to see what turned up.

24. “That’s the best I can do for an explanation for such tremendous voting apathy on the part of most people there.”

    I’d venture that there’s a significant element of “why bother” to it as well.

    When you live in an area where the cheat machine has been in full force for at least a century, it would be hard to justify wasting your time to cast a vote that won’t matter worth a damn anyway. Whoever controls the vote counting apparatus will just create however many votes they need to achieve the outcome they want anyway, so what’s the point?

    By the time you get it down to 10 to 15% turnout, you don’t even need to work very hard at cheating any more.

25. On birds – first, there is an app bird lovers should know about. Merlin – it identifies birds by their calls and twitters. Very cool, works well.

    I few years ago I put up a couple of good sized finch feeders to attract goldfinch – beautiful bird, as yellow as a canary. And it worked. Got lots of them. Not long after, my Merlin app kept identifying a bird I’d never heard of – the brown headed cowbird. At first I thought that was cool – a new bird in my yard. Then I googled it and the first hit was, “How to get rid of brown headed cowbirds”, for the reason Chases Eagles posted above. Goldfinch nests seem to be their favorite target, and sure enough I have much fewer goldfinch now.

26. “I few years ago I put up a couple of good sized finch feeders to attract goldfinch”

    On our rural property, the summer before last I noticed some bluebirds on the property. I like bluebirds and wanted to encourage them so that winter I built a cedar bluebird house and mounted it on a pole in the “yard” (really a meadow right now, but when the house gets built, it will be the yard).

    Last summer, nothing, but this year I’ve seen them flying to and fro and apparently have nested in there. Very satisfying to see the effort pay off.

    I was watching “Jeremy Clarkson’s farm” a few days ago and saw him mention that app when he was working with someone cataloguing the types of birds on his farm. Didn’t think much of it then, but now that I’ve heard it mentioned twice, I’m going to look into it. I know the calls of the common birds both here and on my rural property, but sometimes I hear calls I don’t recognize.

27. We have two bluebird boxes in the back yard. Last year, the bluebirds used both. this year, the southern one was taken over by tree swallows. After the first broods, the swallows and the bluebirds traded boxes. The tree swallows have now departed, but the bluebirds hang around all year.

28. ” Power is not a means, it is an end. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

    I think this drives the DSA for sure.

29. I find it interesting that there are many RINOs, but I can’t think of any present day DINOs.

30. There is a species of American which produces offspring but depends on the taxpayers’ dole to financially support them.

31. One thing not enough mentioned, where NY is concerned, is that so far as I know, the city has NEVER had honest elections. Well, maybe in the founders’ day, but not for long after. I grew up in the suburbs, going back to when Ike was in the WH. And I literally never met any adult who thought the city’s, or Long Island’s, politics wasn’t fixed. After all, Tammany Hall is synonymous with political corruption. And it was dominant before the Civil War.

32. Interesting suggestion over at LI that the time is ripe for going after the unconstitutionality of rent control. Nothing like turning commie boy’s big tactical rent control win into a catastrophic strategic defeat.

33. Unconstitutional how, Chases? I was (ineffectively!) musing yesterday on how to apply the takings clause of the 5th amendment to rent control, but can’t fully see my way through the maze (due, I’ve no doubt, to my own ignorance). Still, the despotic face of rent control appears a ripe target for such a constitutional attack. We should wonder then, how come no such attack has been successful to date.

34. We currently have seven active and four inactive barn swallows nest sites. One is new this year. The young are slightly staggered. One nest is only used during the second brood. After the young gang up and leave, the parents are not here for few days. Then they start the next crop. At peak and everyone has fledged, there can be 30-40 of them flitting about. And crapping on everything.

    The first brood gangsters come by from time to time, to turn the place into a complete circus.

    The ravens have never been here in the summer before. They have to cross through the DuckSpa Air Defense Zone and they come under constant attack. When the wind is with them, they make a fast transit. When it is against them not so much. There is also a sharp-shinned hawk that occasionally enters the ADZ so I assume there is a nest somewhere nearby.

35. Mr Plaiss said:

    >Hopefully not wishful thinking:
    >
    >As Democratic rule grows more and more unpopular in large cities, and it will >because it doesn’t work, democrats will lose votes in those cities – assuming the >votes are counted reasonably fairly.
    Sadly I fear the cities (NYC in particular) are going to experience very hard times. Flight of capital started in 2020 and is going to accelerate as Mamdani and his cohort wreck the city in a fashion that even Mayor Dinkins and his buddies couldn’t achieve. Will it spring back? I am not hopeful of that. People speak of virtuous cycles but what Mamdani and his DSA types are kicking off is the opposite a cycle of depravity. Each time they grab at capital to keep their promises going more of it flees to places that do not do such things. Throughout the 20th century, NYC was a thought leader because of its industry and journalism. They are happily slaying the golden goose of industry, and journalism, publishing, and trends no longer have the physical restrictions they once had. NYC’s final remaining value is as a place to visit, and if the city degrades to 1980 levels of behavior, it will not even be that.
    To quote from Lazarus Long one of Robert Heinleins characters

    “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

    This is known as “bad luck.”

36. I’m so old that I remember what happened to Hitler’s supporters among the SA once he decided they had reached their limit of usefullness. (Does Night of the Long Knives mean anything to anyone nowadays?) Same thing with the Trotskyites (and Trotsky himself) once Lenin decided he and his cadre of supporters were no longer of use. And let’s not forget about the mass purges of the officer corps conducted by Stalin in order to cement his control over the Soviet Army. And then we come to Mao, whose bloody rise to power in Communist China may take the prize for numbers of victims. History is filled with people who pledged loyalty to a group in order to attain power and, once having attained it, turned on that group, purged (at least and murdered frequently) its leadership and took over. How the geniuses in the democrat party, like the Clintons, Schumer, Pelosi, and the rest of them thought they would avoid a similar fate is a combination of narcissism and hubris not often observed previously in American politics. However, given the very small numbers of actual voters supporting the neo-communist Mandami wing of the party, there is hope that cooler-headed, more traditional democrats will see the peril to which their party has been exposed and vote for non-DSA candidates. I am amused, nonetheless at how stupidly naive the younger residents of New York City have shown themselves to be in light of their claim to intellectual sophistication. It’s as if they were on the TV show, “Survivor” and voted themselves off the island. Their understanding of the “socialism” they think they want is basically a system where they get to take other people’s stuff, never imagining that their stuff will be confiscated at the first opportunity.

37. What is a “real, normal” Democrat?

    The party of Big Labor? Long ago corrupted and rendered powerless except for a few surviving, protected dinosaurs in Education and Transportation. Working class have long been abandoned by the big-city Dems.

    The party of social welfare programs and The Great Society? Those policies spawned many of our current woes – and can now be seen as earlier steps on the road to socialism.

    The party of social and sexual revolution? Again, those are more obviously seen now as precursors to militant DEI and identity politics – used to dissolve families, divide the country, and supplant merit and free markets with a society of isolated citizens at the mercy of commissars.

    Before that the Democrats were the party of Slavery and Luddite opposition to industrialization.

    So please tell me who all these “normal” Democrats are?

    My guess is the DSA has made inroads because many Dems literally cannot draw the line between themselves and the DSA.

    They have spent decades chanting about “sticking it to the Man” and basking in the reflected glow of the Blank Panthers and other violent revolutionary groups.

    Many “liberal” New York Dems are probably now struggling to explain to their radicalized grandchildren that those were only slogans – that revolution was about sticking it to all those Archie Bunkers by building housing for the poor in working-class neighborhoods – It didn’t mean that THEIR fancy co-op apartment should be confiscated and redistributed.

    After living with my own New York Jewish tribe for decades, and seeing this up close – I don’t have much sympathy for them.

38. It seems the DSA parasites got the votes from precincts that were wealthy ,educated and white. Voting for their own demise .

39. Working class have long been abandoned by the big-city Dems.

    Industry has moved out of the cities. I had a long discussion with Grok about that a couple of days ago. My starting point was sweaty jobs:

    1. Mining
    2. Steel
    3. Farming
    4. Trucking
    5. Manufacturing (Auto, etc.)
    6. Textiles and apparel

    All except Farming used to be strong union professions, not so much anymore. The union management is now college educated, maybe Ivy, and spend perhaps a year in some arranged job to get their union card. The strong unions these days are basically in government, doing what used to be considered white collar jobs. Big cities have little to do with any of the sweaty stuff.

40. Revised list of sweaty jobs:
    Sweaty Jobs

    Resource Extraction / Primary Production
    1. Mining (including oil & gas extraction)
    2. Lumbering / Logging
    3. Fishing (commercial)
    4. Farming & Ranching

    Heavy Industry & Processing
    5. Steel (and primary metals)
    6. Manufacturing (auto, machinery, etc.)
    7. Textiles and apparel

    Distribution & Trades
    8. Trucking and Railroads
    9. Construction (and building trades)

    Many of these have been offshored or strangled by regulation. Democrats are not friendly with any of them.

41. @ Selfy > “I find it interesting that there are many RINOs, but I can’t think of any present day DINOs.”

    If speaking of government and civil leaders (I seldom hear RINO applied to voters), they are ALL “Democrats in Name Only” — while pretending to be solicitous of the Demos (public), they are only interested in their own power (IOW their sole true interest is the welfare of the elites).

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