If you were paying attention on election night, you might have heard Zohran make two claims in his victory speech that often code as conservative: Excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception….We will leave mediocrity in our past.  The minute I heard those words, and the talking heads’ murmuring that it was odd for a socialist to talk up excellence and talk down mediocrity (aren’t socialists supposed to care only about equality, and a leveling equality at that, which drives down the quality of everything), I remembered a passage in Marx’s Capital. In the last pages of his chapter on original accumulation, Marx discusses the earliest days of capitalism or last stages of feudalism, when farmers still […]