With self-declared Socialist candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) surging ahead of fellow far-left radical Hillary Clinton in the race for the 2016 Democrat presidential nomination among New Hampshire’s crucial primary voters, the Democrat Party is now officially the acknowledged vehicle for open proponents of Big Government anti-constitutional extremism. Clearly, something major is happening here — the Democrat Party is essentially becoming the Socialist Party, while most of the GOP establishment settles for socialism lite. And except among the Republican base, some independents, and so-called “blue-dog Democrats,” much of the public seems fine with it all. That should trouble anyone who values liberty or the U.S. Constitution.
As recent events show clearly, the Democrat primary is fast becoming a race to the far-left extreme. In fact, the platforms of both Clinton and Sanders are much more in line with Karl Marx’s ten planks of the Communist Manifesto than with the U.S. Constitution — and just one long-shot Democrat 2016 contender so far has had the courage to call out the radical leftist extremism coming from the party’s two leading candidates. Yet, the self-styled Socialist from Vermont, despite bragging about his plans to confiscate and redistribute even more wealth while nationalizing wide swaths of what remains of the embattled economy, is still surging ahead. Some analysts are now even saying he might win the nomination.
Apparently many Democrat voters never had a real history lesson on the horrors of socialism, or an economics lesson on the inevitable failures, misery, and death produced by central planning. Indeed, despite advocating for a philosophy that has resulted in at least a hundred million deaths over the last century alone, Sanders even appears to have real grassroots support — at least in statist strongholds — and has drawn the largest audiences so far this campaign season. Almost 30,000 people came out in Portland, Oregon, to see him speak, for example, followed by another nearly 30,000-strong crowd in Los Angeles. Some 15,000 went to watch Sanders speak in Seattle. And in New Hampshire, a recent poll shows Sanders rocketing ahead, with support from 44 percent of likely Democrat primary voters versus 37 percent for Clinton.
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Just one Democrat candidate in the 2016 race has even mentioned the radical shift of Democrat politicians to the socialist extreme. “The party has moved way far to the left, and that’s not my Democratic Party,” said Jim Webb, a former Democrat U.S. Senator representing Virginia, during an interview on Fox News. “We need to bring working people back into the formula.” Polls put Webb’s support at between one and two percent so far, and virtually nobody sees a credible path for the ex-senator to secure the 2016 Democrat nomination in the face of the Sanders and Clinton juggernauts.
And yet, despite his harsh words about his party, Webb is hardly an advocate of small government, the Constitution, or moderation of any sort. He has supported, among other Big Government lawlessness, federal funding for abortionists, brutal UN population control policies, government “stimulus” of the economy, homosexual “marriage,” EPA regulation of CO2 (the gas you exhale), cap and trade, amnesty for illegal immigrants, higher taxes, more spending, ObamaCare, and much more. Less than a generation ago, his positions would have been considered on the extreme fringe of the fringe even among Democrats. Today, Webb is the “moderate” in the 2016 Democrat race.
As if more evidence of the Democrat Party’s increasingly open shift to becoming America’s proud socialist party was needed, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who called Sanders a “good Democrat,” apparently does not know what distinguishes the views of the party she ostensibly leads from socialism. In late July, ultra-left MSNBC host Chris Matthews asked the congresswoman: “What’s the difference between a Democrat and a socialist? I used to think there was a big difference. What do you think it is?”
Unsurprisingly, like a good politician, she avoided the question. “The more important question is what’s the difference between being a Democrat and being a Republican,” Wasserman-Schultz responded, without really explaining what that alleged difference might be. But Matthews was persistent. “You’re the chairman of the Democratic Party,” he said. “Tell me what’s the difference between you and a socialist.” Wasserman-Schultz again went back to the alleged differences between the GOP and Democrats without ever answering the question, claiming falsely that Republicans might phase out Medicare when she knows as well as anybody that no establishment Republican would even think about that.
The reason Wasserman-Schultz failed to answer the simple question is almost certainly because there is, essentially, zero difference between socialists and the Democrat Party today, except the name perhaps. In fact, earlier this year, Communist Party USA boss John Bachtell boasted in a column that his Marxist-Leninist organization, a tentacle of the murderous Soviet regime in America for decades, “utilizes” the increasingly radical Democratic Party to advance its totalitarian objectives in the United States. Writing in the Communist Party propaganda mouthpiece People’s World, Bachtell said fending off what he calls the “ultra-right” — essentially anyone to the right of Obama, whom American communists openly backed in both elections — requires the CPUSA to continue utilizing the Democrat Party as a “vehicle.”
Outside analysts are starting to notice the trend, too. “If the Democratic Party once felt the need to distinguish itself from socialism, that no longer seems to be the case,” wrote Jason Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. “[Sanders] may have an affinity for a political ideology that has given the world everything from the Soviet Gulag to modern-day Greece, but in this age of Obama, the senator is just another liberal with a statist agenda.”
Of course, part of Sanders’ meteoric rise from cooky socialist nobody to leading 2016 contender can likely be explained by the fact that the establishment has been promoting Clinton as the presumptive nominee. Less than half of Americans trust her, according to polls, and she is currently being swamped with perpetually expanding scandals — Benghazi, e-mails, investigations, and more.
But there is another crucial factor as well: A sizable segment of the American public was betrayed by its government “educators” and its “news” providers, which have systematically worked to obscure the long and brutal history of socialism in the world. Whether it was Adolf Hitler’s “National Socialist” (Nazi) party or Stalin and Mao’s international brand of socialist terror, the fruit of socialism everywhere and always has been death, oppression, tyranny, mass-murder, starvation, and destruction. Yet, according to polls, almost half of Americans today would vote for a socialist candidate.
Meanwhile, establishment Republicans touted by the media as “moderate” are moving further and further to the left. George W. Bush and his wildly mischaracterized “compassionate conservatism,” for example, saw a massive expansion of the cost and power of the federal government. His brother Jeb Bush, meanwhile, currently touted as a “frontrunner” by the establishment for the 2016 GOP nomination, continues to support the nationalization of education via Common Core and virtually every Big Government program in existence today. Ohio Governor John Kasich is even running for the nomination on a “compassionate conservative” Big Government platform, and Donald Trump, the leading contender in polls, has a long history of advocacy on behalf of Big Government and even Democrat politicians.
The United States has already traveled a long way down the road to socialism outlined by Karl Marx in the infamous Communist Manifesto, as Charles Scaliger documented in a comprehensive 2014 article on the subject for this magazine. Progressive income taxes, central bank monopoly on currency and credit, and government schools are just some of the hallmarks. A brief perusal of Communist Goals, as entered into the congressional record in 1963, reveals that many of them are now official federal policy broadly accepted by both major parties. Under Obama, those trends toward tyranny have been accelerating.
America is currently witnessing the Democrat Party drop the mask as it goes full socialist. And with the GOP establishment drifting further and further to the lawless left, broader and broader swaths of middle, mainstream America are increasingly being demonized by their government, the bipartisan establishment, and its propaganda organs as “extremist” merely for opposing the dangerous extremism coming out of the federal government. The irony, of course, is that the establishment is extremist by any objective measure.
It is time for the American people to wake up while they still have the ability to stop totalitarianism in its tracks. Sanders’ and Clinton’s Democrat Party may be too far gone, but the Constitution can still guide America back to its foundations of liberty, God-given rights, and limited government.
Photo of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.): AP Images
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at: [email protected]
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