Krystal Ball

"While the ruling class may be good at foreclosing on middle class homes, giving closed door speeches to Goldman Sachs, and profiting off of climate catastrophe, they're not always so great at figuring out this whole politics thing. Their ego and undying faith in their own brilliance will never allow them to see what is so patently obvious to all of us: no one outside of your tiny enclave wants you. And your candidacies will only enable and inflame the exact populist movement you are so desperate to quash. Prepare to see many more billionaire tears in the days to come."

"To state it simply: [[Bernie Sanders|[Bernie] Sanders]] is a revolutionary and Warren is a reformer... [[Elizabeth Warren|[Elizabeth] Warren]] has been unequivocal that she is a capitalist and believes in markets. She identifies this as the most significant ideological split between her and Sanders."

"Sanders’ message of political revolution lands with a thud among those who are comfortable. Warren, Biden, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and “not sure” all outperform Sanders among those earning more than $100,000... It makes sense, though, that those who have struggled the most under our system would be the most receptive to revolutionary change. Why maintain the rules of the current order when those rules have made your life a struggle?"

"The one overlap between Sanders and Warren is their relative appeal to young people. This stands in contrast to Biden, for whom the greatest predictor of support is age. The older you are, the more likely you are to be ridin’ with Biden. This suggests that the progressive tussle between Warren and Sanders is about more than a competition for Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) endorsement; it’s really about the future of the party... Already, progressives are setting the pace for new and popular policy ideas. Reformer, or revolutionary? The policies may be similar, but the results could be dramatically different."

"Polls show 70 percent of Americans support Medicare-for-all, 74 percent support a wealth tax such as the one proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent marginal tax rate finds comfortable majority support. But … socialism! Surely not..."

"[[Donald Trump|[Donald] Trump]] would have us believe that these are our only two choices: We can either have smash-and-grab capitalism, where so many hands in the cookie jar has resulted in so many government scandals, and where the top 1 percent have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, or we can have what’s happening in Venezuela, where the economy has collapsed and humanitarian and political crises have ensued..."

"Trump's dig on socialism means he's scared, [[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez|[Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez]] said after his speech. What really scares the pro-plutocrats on both sides of the political aisle about her, Sanders and other democratic socialists is that they have become messengers for a compelling message with an actual vision — the simple idea that it's up to government to intervene and equalize the playing field between the capital that owns the politicians, the system and the rewards, and the general public toiling to provide those rewards."

"Everybody deserves to live a life of dignity, with their bare-minimum needs met in... 'the richest society in history of the world.' It’s an idea whose time has come..."

"We really are watching the utter destruction of even assemblance of commitment to the 'international rules based order'. This has collapsed completely in real time. [...] I really do think, and there has been lots of things that you can point to, but in the modern era it really starts to come unglued with the Iraq war and the bullshit pretext we used to go in. It's no accident that [[Vladimir Putin |[Vladimir] Putin]] pointed to the Iraq war and what we did there as his excuse for why it's okay for him to do what he does. [[Benjamin Netanyahu |[Benjamin] Netanyahu]] uses the Iraq war and the toll that took on civilians as his excuse to do what he is doing in Gaza. [...] I'm not going to deny there were horrors that we committed during the Iraq war [...] [but] it really does pale in comparison to what is unfolding in Gaza right now. But we started this started this unraveling in the modern era with the Iraq war and now we have just seen a complete disillusion of even the ability to have a pretext of commitment to these supposed higher values. Is an extraordinary and horrifying thing to watch in real time."