Wyoming could use a little democratic socialism

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or someone who believes what she believes could win an election in Wyoming.

Ocasio-Cortez is the 28-year-old who shocked the Democratic Party by defeating a longtime Member of Congress said to be in line to become Speaker of the House.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has a compelling life narrative. Her father is from the Bronx, her mother from Puerto Rico. Her father died early. The family struggled. To avoid foreclosure on the family home, she worked two jobs, one as a Manhattan bartender, the other as a waitress in a taqueria. Her mother cleaned houses and drove a school bus.

These experiences and her travels across America where she visited Flint, Michigan to see how children had been poisoned by lead in the drinking water and Standing Rock where she saw firsthand the injustices committed by big oil against Native Americans kindled her interest in politics. Returning to New York, she found she had been invalidly purged from the voting lists.

She was, therefore prevented from voting in the 2016 presidential primary. Angry about the system, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez joined the Bernie Sanders campaign as a volunteer organizer.

And then she decided that she would challenge Rep. Joe Crowley in the 2018 Democratic Party primary. No one gave her much of a chance except the voters she met. They weren’t particularly impressed that Crowley had raised 3.4 million dollars compared to her $194,000. But they were impressed with her message because it was about them, their lives, and their struggle.

In spite of the financial gap, when the smoke cleared, the voters decisively chose her view of the country’s needs over the views of the ten-term incumbent she ran against, giving her a 15-percentage point victory over Rep. Crowley.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a democratic socialist. She is not a socialist as her GOP detractors would have you believe. They know the difference. They hope you don’t.

A socialist is one who supports government ownership of all lands and business operations as opposed to private ownership. Ocasio-Cortez does not.

Instead of employing labels, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez defined herself by the positions she took on the issues that mattered to the voters. For example, calling healthcare a “human right,” she told the voters that if elected, she would work for universal healthcare. Medicare would be available for everyone.

Just like the founding fathers who wrote Wyoming’s constitution, she believes a college education should “nearly free as possible.” (See Article 7, Section 16 of the Wyoming constitution). If it’s a part of our Constitution, it can’t be too radical. Right? Of course, our lawmakers simply ignore that provision.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez believes that anyone who works fulltime should earn a living wage that allows them to feed and house their families without relying on public assistance. She’d be appalled at how many Wyoming people work multiple jobs with no benefits and still can’t make ends meet.

She also opposes our nation’s burgeoning “for-profit” prison system and would undoubtedly oppose the proposed immigrant prison being built in Uinta County.

With the exception of Mary Throne, most of the candidates think issues that matter most to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s constituents in Queens and the Bronx don’t matter here. Simply because candidates conspire to ignore the real-life issues confronting struggling families does not mean they don’t matter. They do.

Over time, the legislature has stripped Wyoming working families of job related protections and have created a forced labor supply for employers who refuse to pay livable wages or provide essential benefits such as healthcare. Wyoming workers can be fired without any cause whatsoever. Employers can cheat workers out of earned wages with impunity. The state’s right-to work law renders it virtually impossible for workers to organize and exercise collective bargaining rights.

What Wyoming politics needs is a healthy dose of Alexandria Occasion-Cortez. A candidate willing to run the sort of campaign here that she ran in New York would force other candidates to address these issues and Wyoming working families would be the better for it.