“Yesterday’s radicalism is today’s moderation to us,” is the message of many Democrats. Just consider that some of their members have recently made extremist rabble-rouser Maxine Waters (shown) their party’s standard bearer, labeled avowed socialist senator Bernie Sanders a “neoliberal shill” and a “moderate,” and have called a race-card-playing NYC socialist who aims to abolish ICE “the future of our party.” It’s an extremist shift that, while reflecting a dangerous long-term descent into dystopia, may mean that the Democrats don’t have much of a near future (the midterms).
Poor Bernie Sanders likely never expected that ever-shifting leftist goalposts could reduce him to water-boy status. But as the Washington Free Beacon reports, “Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) is facing rebuke from progressive activists and the far left of the Democratic Party for declining to call for the abolishment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).”
For example, left-wing journalist and Intercept co-founder Jeremey Scahill blasted the septuagenarian Green Mountain State socialist as being on the “wrong side of history” (as usual, a liberal is confusing history with current events). Then there are the following tweets, as presented in the Beacon:
As for the New Republic piece referenced in one of the tweets above, author Sarah Jones noted that Sanders is not true to his ideology because he doesn’t “call for the nationalization of private industries.”
This is an important statement. While socialism polls well with the young, few understand what it actually is. It isn’t merely “government helping people,” as the common Millennial line goes. Rather, it was defined in The Communist Manifesto (1848) as involving the government ownership of the means of production — as being a transitional phase to communism.
In other words, it’s precisely what most people think communism is. Yet the latter is supposed to be the stage at which there is no government and people live voluntarily in a state of equality and economic bliss, as wholly unrealistic Marxist doctrine holds. Why do you think the USSR stood for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?
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There’s another lesson here. While Sanders (or another socialist) may not openly call for the nationalization of industries, what are his actual long-term intentions? Does he really not know what socialism is? Or does he know too well that stating his true agenda wouldn’t yet play in Peoria?
Regardless, Bernie is going Bolshevik bust while the Left is now feeling the Bern — for a younger socialist. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 28, is being hailed as the Democrats’ “future.” She’s now all the rage after an upset win over the fourth-most-powerful congressional Democrat, Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY), in New York City’s 14th district primary race. In fact, foul-mouthed Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said straight out Tuesday that Cortez “represents the future of our party” (video below).
Of course, with the culture shapers — the leftist-controlled media, academia, and entertainment — undermining virtue and increasing ignorance (or, as some put it, pulling society left), this may be true over the long-term. But many liberals apparently believe that Cortez represents their immediate future, too. Thus have so-called mainstream Democrats, such as Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), echoed Cortez’ call to abolish ICE. This likely reflects a grave miscalculation.
It’s not that Cortez is a phony, campaigning in NYC as a “Bronx girl” while having grown up in the tony suburb of Yorktown Heights. It’s not that an ex-co-worker has accused her of having stolen tips as a waitress. Phoniness and corruption are almost résumé enhancers in today’s Democrat Party. It’s that her win likely had little to do with her socialism and anti-ICE position — it was bigotry that carried the day.
When Crowley won his first race 20 years ago, his district was more than 80 percent white. But after two redistrictings, it’s now 70 percent non-white, a figure no doubt even higher among its Democrat electorate. Moreover, as I wrote Monday, “She had the right profile: a young, female Hispanic in a district … in which the incumbent was a wizened old white fellow (Crowley is 56 and looks 66). It helped that she’s attractive and articulate, but she shamelessly played the group-identity card, too, sending a message that no one should vote for an old white male. She even retweeted the picture of an attorney who expressed the sentiment that ‘all white people are racist.’”
Note also that for Crowley-Cortez race, only 11.8 percent of registered Democrats turned out to vote.
The reality is that the Big Apple represents the rest of America politically the way it does scenery-wise. Do you think you can extrapolate a political occurrence in one far-left NYC district, one determined by 12 percent of its voters and ethnic patriotism, to most other political races? If so, I have a forested mountain range in Manhattan to sell you.
As for poor ol’ Bernie, he shouldn’t be surprised that he’s now becoming the Democrat Party’s past. As I also explained Monday, in a different article, about how the Left always eats its own:
Leftists often end up being consumed by the monsters they help create because a left-winger is the quintessential person who marries the spirit of the age and, as author William Ralph Inge put it, finds “himself a widower in the next.” Being relativists unmoored from the unchanging and thus having not principles but preferences, leftists’ goalposts ever shift. So today’s cutting-edge liberals can be on tomorrow’s cutting block, having fallen out of fashion. The progressives may end up “regressives,” and even if they do change with the times, can find themselves condemned merely for having a past that didn’t measure up to the ideological present.
So Bernie may never be our V. Lenin. But he can console himself in the knowledge he may end up being this time’s Leon Trotsky.
Photo of Rep. Maxine Waters: AP Images
