By Don Frost
There is a myth abroad in the land that the Democratic Party is being forced, reluctantly, to the Left. This is attributed to the surprise victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a New York City congressional Democratic primary. She, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, is a Socialist who claims to be a “democratic Socialist,” as though there’s a meaningful difference. Naturally, the Left-leaning media goes into paroxysms of joy and she now is the darling of worshipful daytime and night-time talk show hosts.
Some observations are in order. First, the voter turnout was a mere 8 percent, so her win over a 10-term incumbent is hardly an indication of overwhelming support for Socialism and the Left’s eagerly anticipated “workers’ revolution.” Most likely the incumbent, Joseph Crowley and his supporters, took his re-election for granted and she, thus, stumbled into the winner’s circle, which shocked her probably more than it did him.
Second, the press insists her win “moves the Democratic Party to the Left,” but this is nonsense. Recall how Sanders and Hillary Clinton battled furiously to “out-Left” each other in the 2016 Democratic primaries. The Democratic Party has been the party of the Left since President Franklin Roosevelt preached the gospel of government as the solution to all problems, foreign, domestic, and personal. Roosevelt taught his successors, in Congress as well as the Oval Office, that they could retain power by bribing people for their votes via the simple expedient of taxing them, then giving it back to them (minus the cost of the burgeoning bureaucracy) in the form of more and more entitlements.
But, as Winston Churchill observed, “There is nothing government can give you that it hasn’t taken from you in the first place.” Contemporary American Democrats duck this inconvenient truth by promising to take it from someone else (corporations and “the rich”) and then giving it to you.
Norman Thomas was a six-time presidential candidate on the Socialist Party ticket in the ’30s and ’40s. In a 1944 speech attributed to him he said, “The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But, under the guise of ‘liberalism,’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program until one day America will be a Socialist nation without knowing how it happened. I no longer need to run as a presidential candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform.”
Snopes, the rumor-busting website, says it is wrong to attribute the quote to Thomas. But authorship of the quote really isn’t relevant. As Snopes research found, the quote has been around since at least 1951, and whoever said it or wrote it remains a mystery. So the Democratic Party’s adoption of Socialist principles was noted and exposed at least 67 years ago, if not by Thomas in 1944, then by some other insightful observer seven years later.
A Gallup poll taken in 2016 showed that 55 percent of people between 18 and 29 years old have a positive view of Socialism. Again, no surprise here. As Churchill observed, “Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart. Any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.” Ocasio-Cortez is 28.
The essentials of her Socialistic belief system includes free Medicare for everyone, free college, the abolition of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and guaranteed work and housing. Putting a price tag on all this federal largesse is difficult. But the nonpartisan Urban Institute took a crack at it when Sanders was seeking the White House and proposed “free Medicare for all.” The institute figured that single plank in his platform would cost $3.5 trillion a year more than the current $3.8 trillion. Toss in her other “free” this, “free” that, and “free” other things and every man, woman, and child in America would be sentenced, literally, to a lifetime of working to support government.
As Margaret Thatcher observed, “The problem with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money.”
There are many problems with Socialism, not the least of which is its contempt for self-interest, the driving force that made America the richest nation in the world and whose people enjoy the highest standard of living. But Socialism is also a tough philosophy to buck. It purports to be a system of government whose sole purpose is to provide for its people, to help, to guarantee fairness, to assure that everyone’s needs and desires are met, all anxieties are soothed. It sounds so noble, so altruistic, so kindly.
That’s why there is a certain giddiness in the Left-leaning media about the Ocasio-Cortez win. Socialism is doing for others. Capitalism is doing for yourself. Clearly the mainstream disseminators of news have forgotten what happened to countries that practiced Socialism completely unencumbered by capitalism: Russia, China, Cuba. It was a dismal failure and now those countries are struggling to recapture the power – the magic – of the personally invigorating reality of capitalism. North Korea, another pure Socialist nation, remains a backwater.
Churchill had many damning observations about soul-numbing Socialism. A favorite is this: “There are two places where Socialism will work: In heaven, where it is not needed; and in hell, where they already have it.”
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