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Nabisco's animal crackers will be freed from their imaginary confinement. The company's newly redesigned boxes will no longer depict animals in circus cages.
That's not good enough for Daisy Alioto, who laments in Vox that "the symbolic significance of changing the animal cracker box design does little to dismantle the elements of capitalism that exploit animals, people, and the environment." Corporate PR departments, take note: Nothing short of full socialism is good enough.
This has been quite the summer for lazy, poorly-executed attacks on capitalism. The ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America are surging in the wake of the Bernie Sanders moment, and fresh new faces like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have emerged to challenge a Democratic Party that they believe is too centrist and market-friendly. The New York Times' David Leonhardt handed the reins of his newsletter over to Bhaskar Sunkar, publisher of the socialist magazine Jacobin, for a week. The guys behind the popular far-left Chapo Trap House podcast released a book about awesome socialism is (for a much-deserved takedown, see this Politico review).
As a prominent center-left publication that often publishes reasonably pro-market articles—and appears to represent the neoliberal perspective so despised by the hard left—I'd like to see Vox take the threat of a resurgent socialism a little more seriously. A recent article about the DSA's hot new candidate, titled "Why Conservatives Love to Hate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez," certainly could have used some reframing. How about, "Why Conservatives Who Criticize Ocasio-Cortez Are Right About This One Thing, Even If I Am Generally Not On Board With Conservatism"? Would that be so hard?
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