"Rejection of genuine expertise is both a precondition and a function of autocracy. Joseph Stalin’s regime outlawed genetics as 'pseudoscience'..."

"... while he himself was declared an expert in all fields, from linguistics to biology. Contempt for expertise is not the only autocratic force at work in the case of S.B.1 [the Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and hormones for transgender children]....  I expect the court to uphold the Tennessee law.... [I]t won’t stop with trans care. Governments at different levels will be emboldened to meddle in what should be private, family decisions. In and out of government, people who know what they are talking about will be supplanted by people who perform their loyalty most loudly. Quackery will continue its ascent; expert consensus, not only in medicine but in all the disciplines that enable us to know and navigate the world, will be marginalized...."

Writes M. Gessen, in "The Supreme Court Just Showed Us What Contempt for Expertise Looks Like" (NYT).

Why did Gessen write "genuine expertise" if not to admit that experts can go wrong? Obviously, autocrats have their "experts" too, and respecting them has done great harm. I think first of Josef Mengele, who earned a cum laude doctorate in medicine from the University of Frankfurt for a thesis dealing with genetics and who conducted genetic research at Auschwitz. That doesn't make genetics a "pseudoscience," but it does show that we'd be fools to think there's a binary choice between deference to experts and marginalizing them.

Here's the Wikipedia article about the Soviets' banning of genetics. I can see that those who did the banning regarded themselves as experts:

"Once considered revolutionary, the notion of empathy and advocacy for the poor is now a central tenet of Roman Catholic social teaching."

"Once considered revolutionary, the notion of empathy and advocacy for the poor is now a central tenet of Roman Catholic social teaching.... Father Gutiérrez’s theology was not without its detractors. It was criticized by scholars living in capitalist countries for its use of Marxist social analysis to expose unjust political systems in the third world, many of them supported by first world powers.... More recently, his theology found favor with Pope Francis.... [T]he pope declared that liberation theology can no longer 'remain in the shadows to which it has been relegated for some years, at least in Europe.'... [Father Gutiérrez wrote:] 'Latin American misery and injustice go too deep to be responsive to palliatives.... Hence we speak of social revolution, not reform; of liberation, not development; of socialism, not the modernization of the prevailing system. "Realists" call these statements romantic and utopian. And they should, for the rationality of these statements is of a kind quite unfamiliar to them.'"

From "Gustavo Gutiérrez, Father of Liberation Theology, Dies at 96/Once considered revolutionary, his notion of empathy and advocacy for the poor has become a central tenet of Catholic social teaching" (NYT).

"First, starting in the early 1970s, he led the effort to import into American circles the critical perspectives of Western Marxism..."

"... a diverse set of ideas, popular in France and Germany, arranged around the notion that culture was closely related to a society’s economic base, though not completely constrained by it.... Then, in the mid-1980s, he [applied] that same arsenal of ideas to... a critique of postmodernism, which, beginning in the 1970s, had taken hold in academic departments to describe what many saw as the breakdown of grand narratives about history, culture and society. In response, Mr. Jameson argued that postmodernism was itself just one more grand narrative, albeit one that tried to disguise its own status.... Postmodernism, he said, was special in that it signified the commoditization of culture itself, replacing history and progressive visions with irony, cynicism and pastiche, or mixing and matching cultural artifacts and forms without respect to their historical contexts. It meant... that 'our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and a perpetual change that obliterates tradition.'" 

From "Fredric Jameson, Critic Who Linked Literature to Capitalism, Dies at 90/Among the world’s leading academic critics, he brought his analytical rigor to topics as diverse as German opera and sci-fi movies" (NYT).

"The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity."

"It holds that Israel is an 'imperialist-colonialist' force, that Israelis are 'settler-colonialists,' and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors.... It casts Israelis as 'white' or 'white-adjacent' and Palestinians as 'people of color.' This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the 'oppressed' to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an 'oppressor' to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as 'white' and 'privileged'; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of 'exploitative capitalism' and in the Middle East through 'colonialism.' This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts...."

Writes Simon Sebag Montefiore in "The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False/It does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians" (The Atlantic).

Much more at the link.

"For more than a decade, the dominant form of American feminism has maintained that differences between the sexes—whether in libido, crime rates, or even athletic performance..."

"... largely result from female socialization. Anything else is biological essentialism. The feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon recently declared that she did not want to be part of 'a movement for female body parts … Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies. We do not need to be liberated from our chromosomes or our ovaries.'..."

Writes Helen Lewis in "The Feminists Insisting That Women Are Built Differently/An emerging strand of feminism zeroes in on the differences between male and female bodies" (The Atlantic).

"As [Christopher] Rufo sees it, critical race theory is a revolutionary program that replaces the Marxist categories of the bourgeois and the proletariat with racial groups..."

"... justifying discrimination against those deemed racial oppressors. His goal, ultimately, is to get the Supreme Court to rule that school and workplace trainings based on the doctrines of critical race theory violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act.... Rufo insists there are no free speech implications to what he’s trying to do. 'You have the freedom of speech as an individual, of course, but you don’t have the kind of entitlement to perpetuate that speech through public agencies,' he said. This sounds, ironically, a lot like the arguments people on the left make about de-platforming right-wingers. To [Kimberlé] Crenshaw, attempts to ban critical race theory vindicate some of the movement’s skepticism about free speech orthodoxy, showing that there were never transcendent principles at play. When people defend offensive speech, she said, they’re often really defending 'the substance of what the speech is — because if it was really about free speech, then this censorship, people would be howling to the high heavens.' If it was really about free speech, they should be."

From "The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness/How the right is trying to censor critical race theory" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT). 

Here's a good comment over there: "The problem with your argument is that Critical Race Theory is presented at schools and workplace sessions as the TRUTH, not just an (unprovable) social science theory. And it would be very uncomfortable (if not career or social suicide) to question this theory in front of one’s bosses and peers."

That makes me think of Justice Jackson's famous line, one of the most important points about freedom of speech: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." 

The problem is compelled speech. To be compelled to assert belief in what you do not believe is a severe intrusion on individual free speech, and that seems to be what is happening in these workplace training sessions. Is there some way to present the insights of Critical Race Theory as ideas to be understood and weighed against other ideas and debated instead of compelling attendance at events where the ideas are dictated and participants are forced to attest to the dictated beliefs?

BLM describes itself as explicitly atheist?

You can’t be a Christian and an atheist at the same time. BLM describes itself as explicitly atheist (and neo-Marxist). Fundamentally incompatible world views. https://t.co/4ZjT0vcy4s

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 25, 2020

I googled my question Does BLM describe itself as explicitly atheist? I'm not seeing that. Is this just an inference from the idea that it's Marxist? The phrase "explicitly atheist" should be based on more than an inference. And it's an inference on an inference on an inference if we have to infer that Black Lives Matter is Marxist and to be Marxist is to be an atheist.

I googled Is Black Lives Matter explicitly Marxist and I'm not getting a clear answer that it's Marxist, so my working assumption is that the group is not explicitly Marxist.

It does seem to be the case that 2 of the founders have described themselves as "trained Marxists." Here's an editorial from a month ago in The Washington Times, "The matter of Marxism: Black Lives Matter is rooted in a soulless ideology" that reports the quotes and makes some inferences:

"For the past few months, Trump and the conservative propaganda apparatus have struggled to make the old race-and-gender-baiting rhetoric stick to Biden."

"But voters don’t appear to believe that Biden is an avatar of the 'radical left.' They don’t think Biden is going to lock up your manhood in a 'testicle lockbox.' They don’t buy that Biden’s platform, which is well to the left of the ticket he joined in 2008, represents a quiet adherence to 'Kenyan anti-colonialism.' Part of this is that Biden has embraced popular liberal positions while avoiding the incentive to adopt more controversial or unpopular positions during the primary. But it’s also becoming clear that after 12 years of feasting on white identity politics with a black man and a woman as its preeminent villains, the Republican Party is struggling to run its Obama-era culture-war playbook against an old, moderate white guy.... 'Joe Biden is a puppet of the radical left,' Trump said [in his Oklahoma rally], before acknowledging that 'he's not radical left. I don't think he knows what he is anymore. But he was never radical left.'... When the Fox News host Laura Ingraham warns that Biden 'will just melt for the macchiato Marxists,' you can sense the weariness of a tired stand-up comic clinging to a set that no longer makes anyone laugh.... ... Republicans struggle to land a punch on an elderly white man with suspicious hair, a reputation for exaggerations and fibs, questionable policy judgment, and a track record of racist remarks who is running a nostalgic campaign for a bygone era...."

From "Trump Is Struggling to Run Against a White Guy/The president is having a difficult time deploying his traditional culture-war playbook against Biden" by Adam Serwer (in The Atlantic).

By the way, I thought I was looking at Nixon...



... when I saw that oddly cropped image of Biden (at the link).

"The younger militants tend to have been influenced by the cultural Marxism that is now the lingua franca in the elite academy. Group identity is what matters."

"Society is a clash of oppressed and oppressor groups. People who are successful usually got that way through some form of group privilege and a legacy of oppression. The big generational clashes generally occur over definitions of professional excellence. The older liberals generally believe that the open exchange of ideas is an intrinsic good. Older liberal journalists generally believe that objectivity is an important ideal. But for many of the militants, these restraints are merely masks for the preservation of the existing power structures. They offer legitimacy to people and structures that are illegitimate. When the generations clash, the older generation generally retreats. Nobody wants to be hated and declared a moral pariah by his or her employees. Nobody wants to seem outdated. If the war is between the left and Trumpian white nationalism, nobody wants to be seen siding with Trump.... Liberal educated boomers have hogged the spotlight since Woodstock. But now events are driven by the oldsters who fuel Trump and the young wokesters who drive the left...."

Writes David Brooks in "Liberal Parents, Radical Children/The generation gap returns" (NYT).

That caught my eye because of the term "cultural Marxism." Earlier this month, I blogged a NYT column titled by Yale history-and-lawprof Samuel Moyn titled "The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme Is 100 Years Old/'Cultural Marxism' might sound postmodern but it’s got a long, toxic history." I guess that "long, toxic history" bit didn't scare Brooks off using the term. Interesting! From the Moyn piece:

According to their delirious foes, “cultural Marxists” are an unholy alliance of abortionists, feminists, globalists, homosexuals, intellectuals and socialists who have translated the far left’s old campaign to take away people’s privileges from “class struggle” into “identity politics” and multiculturalism....

The defense of the West in the name of “order” and against “chaos,” which really seems to mean unjustifiable privilege against new claimants, is an old affair posing as new insight. It led to grievous harm in the last century.... “[C]ultural Marxism” is not only a sad diversion from framing legitimate grievances but also a dangerous lure in an increasingly unhinged moment.

“Politics was part of our life. People don’t seem involved or passionate anymore; politics is something distant."

And: "I was a Marxist with all the love, all the passion, and all the despair one can expect from a bourgeois who chooses Marxism."

2 quotes from Bernardo Bertolucci, from his obituary in the NYT. The director of "Last Tango in Paris" and "The Last Emperor" breathed his last this morning at the age of 77.

The obituary reminds us that some reviewers at the time, back in 1973, did not admire "Last Tango in Paris" and that the NYT own critic, Grace Glueck, called it "the perfect macho soap opera." I'm more familiar with the rave review of all rave reviews by Pauline Kael...

The film critic Pauline Kael proclaimed it “the most powerfully erotic movie ever made” and likened its premiere to the first performance of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”

... so I'm going to take the trouble to read "I Won't Tango, Don't Ask Me," by Grace Glueck (March 1973).

IF, as my male filmgoing friends assure me, there is such a thing as a “woman's picture,” i.e., one that plays up to the romantic sexual fantasies of housewives, then “Last Tango in Paris” can surely be regarded as its male counterpart — the perfect macho soap opera. From the film's beginning, when its he‐man heel‐hero, Paul, engages a compliant Parisian playgirl, Jeanne, in a genital collision, through the very end, where Jeanne reacts to his aggressions with a violence that metaphorically expresses her own sexual rage, its fantasies comfortably reinforce the misogynist stereotypes that have always enabled men to regard women as something less than emotional peers....

[I]n keeping with the conventions of art and pornography in the Western world, [we never clearly see Paul (Marlon Brando) naked, and] the camera focuses frequently and frontally on Jeanne in her birthday suit....

[The two characters] embark on a game plan: They will meet at the apartment for sex only, avoiding all reference to their outside lives. This stylized — well, tango—is led, of course, by Paul. And it is he who is free to break the step, revealing fragments of his barren emotional life with the depth of a Holden Caulfield while abruptly dismissing any attempts on Jeanne's part to give voice to hers....

In the apartment, masochist Jeanne takes sex from sadist Paul as, in his hostility, he dispenses it. And often (as in the now famous butter‐and‐sodomy scene) it hurts. (Male fantasy: Women may protest, but they really wallow in rough handling; it's good for their souls.) At one point in the throes of aging adolescence, Paul, bids Jeanne insert her fingers in his anus to explore a notion he has about death; at another, he dangles a dead rat before her horrified face. But he has his tender moments; in one, he gives Jeanne a bath with a paternal condescension that might suit a 3‐year4old. (Male fantasy: Treat women as little girls; it fulfills their need for protection.)...

The rage that led to [[SPOILER ALERT] Jeanne's shooting Paul to death] is motivated, but again the act itself is focused on Paul.... [W]hat Bertolucci is really saying is (male fantasy): See what happens when you strip yourself bare for a woman? 

"The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme Is 100 Years Old/'Cultural Marxism' might sound postmodern but it’s got a long, toxic history."

This is from Yale history-and-lawprof Samuel Moyn (in the NYT).

According to their delirious foes, “cultural Marxists” are an unholy alliance of abortionists, feminists, globalists, homosexuals, intellectuals and socialists who have translated the far left’s old campaign to take away people’s privileges from “class struggle” into “identity politics” and multiculturalism....

Some Marxists, like the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci and his intellectual heirs, tried to understand how the class rule they criticized worked through cultural domination. And today, it’s true that on campus and off, many people are directing their ire at the advantages that white males have historically enjoyed....

A number of the conspiracy theorists tracing the origins of “cultural Marxism” assign outsize significance to the Frankfurt School, an interwar German — and mostly Jewish — intellectual collective of left-wing social theorists and philosophers. Many members of the Frankfurt School fled Nazism and came to the United States, which is where they supposedly uploaded the virus of cultural Marxism to America. These zany stories of the Frankfurt School’s role in fomenting political correctness would be entertaining, except that they echo the baseless allegations of tiny cabals ruling the world that fed the right’s paranoid imagination in prior eras....

The defense of the West in the name of “order” and against “chaos,” which really seems to mean unjustifiable privilege against new claimants, is an old affair posing as new insight. It led to grievous harm in the last century.... “[C]ultural Marxism” is not only a sad diversion from framing legitimate grievances but also a dangerous lure in an increasingly unhinged moment.

"The Madison Reunion will be a nostalgic homecoming for lefty activists who called Madison home in the 1960s. But it won’t be the only game in town."

Isthmus reports.

“We heard about the Madison Reunion being organized from people telling us, ‘I don’t see anything I’m interested in here, this isn’t the radical Madison I know.’ It’s organized as an academic conference,” says Sarah White, a member of the local Gray Panthers and an organizer of the Radical Perspectives teach-in....

[There will be] a dozen workshops planned for Saturday, June 16, ranging from “Women Unmasking Power & Building Movements” to “The New Left’s Radical Legacy For Today.” There’s also a kickoff event the night before, including Max Elbaum reading from his book Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che.

“I’d say there’s a Marxist throughline to what we’re doing that you haven’t heard in a few decades,” White says....

The approach at the teach-in will be hands-on, with an emphasis on connecting older radicals with young people who are active today. “It’s about passing the torch,” White says. “We’re old, we can’t march in the streets anymore, we have to pass the torch to other people. People are really eager to engage in dialogue with young activists.”

That’s why there are several panels on high school activism....

IN THE COMMENTS: Referring to the topic — from an earlier post — of ambiguous headlines ("crash blossoms"), rehajm writes:

Women Unmasking Power & Building Movements

There’s your crash blossom.

And I said:

Good observation.

And now I'm picturing a building that shits.

And I realize that I can picture a building that shits, because I've seen a lot of great anthropomorphized buildings drawn by one of my favorite artists Mark Beyer. Example:



From "Life and Times of Thomas House," by Mark Beyer.

"The abbreviation ‘Ms.’ is simple, it is easy to write... For oral use it might be rendered as ‘Mizz’..."

"... which would be a close parallel to the practice long universal in many bucolic regions, where a slurred Mis’ does duty for Miss and Mrs. alike."

So said The Sunday Republican, a Springfield, Massachusetts newspaper in 1901. And:

In his 1949 book, “The Story of Language,” the linguist Mario Pei wrote, “Feminists … have often proposed that the two present-day titles be merged into …‘Miss’ (to be written ‘Ms.’), with a plural ‘Misses’ (written ‘Mss.’).”

I'm reading all that in a NYT obituary for Sheila Michaels, whose claim to fame is that she "introduced" the term that she did not coin "into common parlance."

Ms. Michaels first saw the word written in the address her friend's copy of News & Letters, which the NYT calls "a Marxist publication."

The Marxists... appeared to have had a handle on “Ms.” and its historical meaning.

For Ms. Michaels, something in that odd honorific resonated....

The Marxism? The "bucolic" sound? The NYT implies it was (at least in part) the latter.

"Once a marker of a business with suspicious tax practices, the phrase 'cash only' has come to signify hipster entrepreneurialism at places like Stumptown Coffee at the Ace Hotel in Midtown Manhattan or the Emerson Bar in Brooklyn."

"... Many of the new alternative currencies have the look and feel of the regular legal tender accepted at such places. Most include anticounterfeiting measures like holograms and serial numbers. But they are more eye-catching. At the Effra Social, a Brixton pub, Ewan Graham, 31, an architect, was impressed upon examining one of the district’s special pound notes for the first time. 'I’d be more inclined to save money if it all looked like that,' he said. The back of the note displayed a Karl Marx quote about capital and its 'occult ability to add value to itself.' The £10 note, meanwhile, pictured David Bowie, a Brixton native (stardust, or other powdery substance, not included). It’s easy to imagine such notes being fetishized as audiophiles do vinyl...."

And it's easy to imagine suspicious tax practices... even by "hipsters"!

The article — in the NYT — is "Do You Have Change for a Bowie? The Advent of Artisanal Cash."

"Mugabe describes himself as both a practicing Catholic and a Marxist, but his birthday party was held at the Elephant Hills golf resort..."

"... near Victoria Falls, just up the road from the haunts of Cecil. Mugabe was honored with seven birthday cakes. One was so large that it had to be carried in by eight men; another was described as the size of a mattress. The celebration reportedly cost a million American dollars, in a country that now suffers up to ninety-five per cent unemployment and underemployment, according to the C.I.A.’s World Factbook. (Mugabe conceded during his last election, in 2013, that at least sixty per cent of his countrymen were jobless). Three-quarters of Zimbabwe’s population lives below the poverty line. 'It’s sad when wildlife is abused, but the Zimbabwean people have been suffering decades of abuse under the wily old Mugabe, who seems never to relent and never to go away,' Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, told me last week."

From "Cecil the Lion and Robert Mugabe," by Robin Wright in The New Yorker.

I don't understand the "but" in the first sentence — "a practicing Catholic and a Marxist, but his birthday party," etc. I mean, I understand it, but it assumes the reader thinks a certain way, and I don't.

"Marxism in this country had even been an eccentric and quixotic passion."

"One oppressed class after another had seemed finally to miss the point. The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having. The minorities seemed to promise more, but finally disappointed: it developed that they actually cared about the issues, that they tended to see the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus as real goals, and only rarely as ploys, counters in a larger game. They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of 'brotherhood.' And then, at that exact dispirited moment when there seemed no one at all willing to play the proletariat, along came the women's movement, and the invention of women as a 'class.'..."

Wrote Joan Didion, in "The Women's Movement," July 30, 1972.

"Is it really worth it to accumulate debt for such an epistemically poor education?"

I thought it would be helpful to isolate the last question in the last paragraph of an op-ed in The Daily Californian titled "Occupy the syllabus":

So, if you have taken classes in the social sciences and humanities, we challenge you: Count the readings authored by white males and those authored by the majority of humanity. Then ask yourself: Are your identities and the identities of people you love reflected on these syllabi? Whose perspectives and life experiences are excluded? Is it really worth it to accumulate debt for such an epistemically poor education?

I got there via Instapundit, who wrote:

U.C. Berkeley Students Complain About Having To Read Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault. In course on classic social theory. And if that makes it hard for you to focus on the course material, cupcakes, you don’t belong in college"

And I must add 2 things:

1. What a bad line drawing at the first link. I especially love the flatness of the disapprobation on the face of this lady:

 

2. What's this comfortably left-wing enclave known as Berkeley coming to when a professor can't get to the end of a lecture on Marx without tripping up trying to joke his way out of a challenge about the exclusion of underincluded identities?

For example, when lecturing on Marx’s idea of the “natural division of labor between men and women,” the professor attributed some intellectual merit to this idea because men and women are biologically distinct from each other, because women give birth while men do not. One student asked, “What about trans* people?” to which the professor retorted, “There will always be exceptions.” Then, laughing, the professor teased, “We may all be transgender in the future.” Although one might be tempted to dismiss these remarks as a harmless attempt at humor, mocking trans* people and calling them “exceptions” is unacceptable.

"He said that, unlike Marxists, he rejected the assumption that individuals were motivated solely by the prospect of selfish, material gain."

"Rather, he insisted, 'behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences' that can also include altruism, loyalty and spite."

From the NYT obituary for Gary Becker, the great economist of "everyday life."

NYT columnist Frank Bruni, 49, is teaching a college class and the students don't get his allusions.

They didn't know the Jane Fonda movies "They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?" and "Barbarella." They hadn't heard of Vanessa Redgrave or Greta Garbo.

Or at least they looked like they didn't. Should we trust Bruni's interpretation of the blank expression on their face? Did it mean "I don't know what you are referring to?" or "Boring!"

The school is Princeton, Bruni reveals in paragraph 4, which means, of course, the students aren't dumb. They're just fractured, lacking shared experience, which Bruno concedes might be good:

No single, potentially alienating cultural dogma holds sway. 

Oh? Young people may not know the grand old actresses that swan about forever in the mind of Frank Bruni....



... but I think the young people are actually quite aware of the sway of a single, potentially alienating cultural dogma.

Cue inevitable discussion of Brendan Eich and Bill Maher's talk of the "Gay Mafia."

"Did you bristle at the journalism at all, like why do we need the New York Post if the Times is gonna publish a headline saying you were a leftist?"

WNYC’s Brain Lehrer asked Bill de Blasio (the Democratic candidate for mayor of NYC).

De Blasio, admitting that the NYT headline saying that he "Was Once a Young Leftist" fit his own description of himself, in 1990 as being for “democratic socialism,” but that "I always described my philosophy of being made up of a blend of influences and ideas."