Just as Trump transformed the Republican Party, transformation is happening on the Democratic left, too.
It’s called: outright socialism.
Evidence from just yesterday:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former campaign organizer for Bernie Sanders, pulled off a stunning upset in New York City on Tuesday by defeating U.S. Rep. Joseph Crowley, D-N.Y., who was considered a kingmaker and an all but shoo-in.
Ocasio-Cortez, 28, who is from the Bronx, is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and ran a low-budget campaign where she was outspent by an 18-1 margin.
Most young Americans who support socialism, according to polls, don’t even know what socialism is. They view it as “being nice”, or “having compassion” or even as enjoying social media.
What they fail to grasp is that there is nothing to share, and nothing to be nice with – and no social media created by profit-making companies – unless we maintain capitalism.
Without capitalism, socialism – voluntary or coercive – is impossible, because socialism can neither create nor maintain wealth.
Yet socialist campaigns, like the victorious Democratic primary in New York last night, seek to obliterate capitalism. Which leaves us all equally poor and even starving, except for a tiny minority of rulers. That’s all socialism is. It’s the oldest scam in history, yet it always manages to masquerade as something refreshing and new.
America is different from the rest of the world. One difference is that any other country that turned to socialism had little or nothing to lose. Venezuela wasn’t exactly rich and prosperous before the socialists turned it into a starvation prison camp. Russia in 1917 was hardly the United States (even of that era). Ditto for Cuba.
Strictly speaking, it’s not right to say that past countries who became socialist had nothing to lose. Because socialism always made a bad or inadequate situation much worse.
But these other countries had a heck of a lot less to lose than the United States, with its status as the most prosperous and liberty-loving nation in all of human history.
Socialism will destroy both our prosperity and our individual rights. Because once the government declares everything material its property, it logically follows that the government will declare everything else – our minds, our bodies, what we read, what we think, what we say – its property as well. There’s no escaping this fact.
I don’t know if America will become a complete socialist country. But it’s more likely than ever before. America still has two major parties, the only two with any chance of winning the presidency or dominating Congress. For several decades now, the balance has been close, at times even a tie. One of those two major parties is moving totally in the socialist, even totalitarian direction. It’s not just the sustained, hostile and incredibly irrational reaction to President Trump showing this. It’s the evidence of elections toppling their decisively left-wing – Obama-like and Pelosi-like figures – in favor of outright, complete socialists.
The Democratic Party is becoming too socialist even for an Obama or a Hillary Clinton. And Democrats represent about half the electorate. I don’t want it to be a fact, but it’s a fact.
Careful what you wish for, American socialists. Because once ownership of property is entirely in government hands, then all the prosperity you’ve come to know – and that your parents and grandparents knew – will diminish faster than you ever thought possible.
As we remove the incentives of self-interest, pride, productivity and accountability that go along with private property and for-profit ventures from our society, we will fast become like Soviet Russia of the past and Venezuela or North Korea of today.
The difference is that America has a far, far longer way to fall than those countries ever did. America’s movement toward socialism versus Venezuela’s or Russia’s is like the difference between jumping off a five-story building or an Empire State Building.
Human experience and history have no precedent for a fall of that magnitude.
I hope like anything it will never happen. But the Democratic Party endeavors to take us decisively and unequivocally in that direction. Donald Trump was merely their excuse for what they wanted to do all along.
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