The American public should be appalled by the radical lurch to the left that the Democratic Party is now taking.
On issue after issue, leading Democrats now openly promote positions that liberal Democrats just 10 or 15 years ago once strongly rejected as being too extremely left-wing. This is true in at least six issue areas: abortion/infanticide, healthcare, environmental edicts, taxation, socialism, and anti-Semitism.
It may be facile for conservatives to attack the term “socialist,” but more and more Democrats are embracing not just its tenets but the label itself. Perhaps this is largely because polls show that increasing numbers of young voters, ignorant of history, view socialism as a novel idea with potential, or even a good thing. Still, for Democratic officeholders and serious candidates to embrace the label — even as, for example, Venezuela’s socialist disaster forces people to starve in the streets — is a sign that reason and bedrock American values are in increasingly short supply.
Enough has been written elsewhere about the so-called Green New Deal, “eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from every sector of the economy,” that Americans should already see it as a danger to our way of life and our liberty, given the centralized command and control required and the out-of-thin-air financing: “The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit. There is also space for the government to take an equity stake in projects to get a return on investment.” This would surely both bankrupt the economy and make us serfs to government planners.
The “Medicare for all” plan that at least six likely Democratic presidential contenders have embraced is so outlandish that center-left policy-wonk columnist William Galston this month called it an “unforced error [that] could give President Trump his best chance to win re-election in 2020.” He wrote that one main “version of Medicare for All means private insurance for none. Even if you like your private plan, you can’t keep it. And many Americans do like their private plans, which is why they find proposals like [this one] so troubling.” Democratic Sen. Michael Bennett of Colorado, wisely aghast, notes that it could take away the current plans held by 180 million Americans.
On taxes, it was just over three decades ago that many leading Democratic officeholders embraced a top income tax rate of 28 percent, and later, not even former President Barack Obama dared propose raising the top rate above 40. Now, suddenly, when a radical such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., proposes a 70 percent rate, leading presidential contender Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., says she thinks this and other Ocasio-Cortez approaches are “fantastic.” Voters may not have enough memories of Jimmy Carter’s horrendous “misery-index” economy, the last time the United States had a 70 percent rate.
The overwhelming anti-Zionism and increasing anti-Semitism, or tolerance thereof, among American liberals is beginning to receive greater notice. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for example, has finally had to criticize Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., for the latter’s anti-Semitism, but she won’t remove her from key committees despite her continued questionable behavior. The opposition to anti-Semitism thus seems only rhetorical, with no teeth.
Finally, there’s the frightening Democratic radicalization on abortion. In the 1970s and 1980s, mainstream Democrats said abortion should be available for two trimesters, but not in the third. In the 1990s, former President Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal, and rare” was the mantra. In 2000, a partial-birth abortion ban passed the House without objection and passed the Senate with 14 Democratic votes. But now, Republicans can’t even get Democrats to allow a straight vote on banning infanticide after a baby has been born, in either the House or Senate. And Democrats are cheering as laws permitting infanticide are passed in New York state and endorsed by Virginia’s Democratic governor.
For those who missed them, these were the words of Gov. Ralph Northam: “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
This is horrifying.
No wonder wise old Democratic hands such as former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell are saying their party’s crazy-left turn could get President Trump re-elected in response.
There are still enough Americans with enough common sense to be angered by ideas so radical as to dangerously undermine American civil society. That’s the direction Democrats are going in. They ought to reverse course, and soon.
