DSA bigwig struggles to explain what ‘taxing the rich’ means in embarrassing interview: ‘Privileged idiot’

There's something almost quaint about watching a socialist movement's national spokesperson get asked to define its one signature applause line and just... not be able to do it. "Tax the rich" fits on a bumper sticker. It fits on a picket sign. Apparently it does not fit inside an actual sentence when a reporter asks what income threshold, what rate, what mechanism. That's not a gotcha question. That's the whole platform.

The Oslo Accords stumble is almost funnier, honestly, because it wasn't even the hard question. You don't need a policy shop to know the basic outline of the most talked-about Middle East peace framework of the 1990s. If you're going to build a national profile partly around foreign policy opinions, you probably ought to know the name of the thing everyone before you was arguing about.

We'd normally let a rough interview go. Everybody has a bad day on live radio. But this isn't a nervous staffer, it's a "bigwig," someone put forward as a face of a movement that wants real governing power in this country. The gap between the confidence of the slogans and the thinness of the substance behind them is the story here, not the gaffe itself.

Slogans are cheap. Governing is not. If the people fronting this movement can't explain their own headline policy in a five-minute interview, why would anyone hand them the actual levers of the economy to find out?