House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley’s loss at the hands of a millennial socialist barmaid in New York has shocked Democratic Washington.
But Republicans merely seem amused by the lopsided victory that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won over Crowley’s amply funded campaign. They assume, with good reasons, that candidates like Ocasio-Cortez, the sort that reject private ownership of business and want to abolish immigration enforcement and even law enforcement altogether, cannot win on a national scale.
They expect to capitalize by, amongst other things, winning more seats in Congress if there is a bitter clash among Democrats between traditional social democrats and out-and-out socialists.
But complacency would be a big mistake for Republicans. They must not take the principles that made America great for granted, for if they do they will eventually be eroded by Ocasio-Cortez’s brand of sub-Marxism. New generations of voters will not necessarily be aware of socialism’s egregious and dangerous flaws. They have no experience, and many have little understanding, of the baneful effects of that pernicious ideology when it is installed in government. As the socialism of Ocasio-Cortez and the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., increasingly seizes the imagination of the ill-educated, Republicans cannot assume that liberty will always be more appealing to the public than the siren song of egalitarianism.
The Democratic Party is changing. Its dramatic losses in recent years have radicalized it. Democrats do not represent more than two dozen rural districts. This means that their overwhelming number in Congress now and in the future will be elected in cities where politics are drifting ever further leftwards.
In the next decade, voters in those cities will choose between traditional liberals like Crowley and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and young radicals who want to abolish the police and support expropriation (excuse us, “democratization”) of private business.
A win for these radicals will help Republicans in the short run. But it won’t help the nation if Democratic voters embrace the millennial progressivism that has turned academia into a source of national shame. For eventually, almost no matter how unfit for government an opposition becomes, voters get bored with incumbents and throw them out.
[Kellyanne Conway: Democrats’ tilt toward socialism will boost Republicans]
Before this happens, conservatives must make fundamental arguments they haven’t had to make before now and defend institutions the worth of which hitherto seemed self-evident. They must argue for the morality of freedom and markets, which have ended extreme poverty for more than 80 percent of the world’s poor since 1970. They must be able to explain how economic freedom helps countries such as China, which gave up on communist economics in the late 1970s and has quickly risen to challenge the U.S. for global supremacy.
Conservatives must be able to cite from memory the many examples of the inevitable failure of collectivism and central planning. They must be able to explain how socialism lends itself to violent coercion, perhaps citing current events in Venezuela. They must be able to explain why profit is a good thing and why social institutions that exist independent of government, especially churches, should be encouraged as beneficial to all. They must make the case for traditional families as the fundamental building block of society, upon the strength of which society leans more heavily than it leans on a stable government.
Americans have been historically impervious to socialist ideas. But any people can lose its grasp on its own history. This country has been so prosperous and otherwise successful for so long that its inhabitants can take these blessings for granted. It is in such assumptions that simplistic utopian ideas germinate and grow, especially if one of the two major parties is nurturing and watering them.
Absent a strong and vigorous defense of this nation’s bounteous heritage of liberty and the rule of law, a well-fed people may someday go back to scavenging socialist garbage from the dustbins of history. It’s up to conservatives to take up the arguments now and make sure this never happens.
