The measure of how tethered Democrats are to reality and American values may be the degree to which former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper gains traction in the race for the party’s presidential nomination.
It must be admitted that Hickenlooper is more than a little quirky. He has said he once drank fracking fluid to prove its safety; he did a TV ad walking into a shower while fully dressed, and he took his mother (by mistake, he said) to see the famous X-rated movie “Deep Throat.”
Quirks, though, can be forgiven. What distinguishes Hickenlooper is his open opposition to his party’s crazy-left movement towards socialism. The country desperately needs at least semi-centrist Democrats to remain viable within their party, so as to ward off the radicalism that could lead to economic collapse while abridging liberties in the name of “social justice.”
When Bernie Sanders, the longtime, benighted admirer of the Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba, made a big speech Wednesday advocating that the United States adopt a “revolutionary” system of “democratic socialism,” Hickenlooper responded forcefully.
“The Democratic field has not only failed to oppose Sen. Sanders’ agenda, but they have actually pushed to embrace it,” he said at the National Press Club. “Democrats must say loudly and clearly that we are not socialists.”
Nobody will confuse Hickenlooper for a disciple of Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek. He advocates what he calls “regulated capitalism,” pushed for several major tax-hike measures while he was governor, and proposes spending $100 billion annually in “climate financing” to developing nations.
But he has a long history of supporting fossil fuel drilling. He opposes the absurdly expensive “Green New Deal,” “Medicare for all,” and supposedly “free” college for all (meaning financed by taxpayers). In May, he wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal in which he declared he is “running to save capitalism.”
Don’t take this as an endorsement of Hickenlooper — he leans too far leftward on far too many issues for me. But he’s kind of the canary in the coal mine. If Hickenlooper’s modest nods to centrism are no longer welcome in the Democratic Party, the country is in trouble. It is not democratic socialism but democratic capitalism that has made this the most economically powerful nation on earth. While Communist and socialist nations like the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Venezuela mire their people in collapse and despair, the world’s free economies thrive.
When a true economic centrist, Bill Clinton, served as president alongside a conservative Republican Congress, the American economy boomed as the federal budget was balanced. On the other hand, Democrats can point to no examples of far-left or socialist economies that are powerhouses. Even when they cite Sweden, they err entirely. Sweden’s socialism led it into two decades of stagnation, culminating in a financial crisis in 1991-92. It responded by adopting near-Kempian supply-side tax cuts, deregulation, and privatization. Only then, when it abandoned economic leftism, did it become a model for prosperity.
Americans, including Democrats, should learn from our own successes and those of the Swedish free-market revolution. If the alternative to conservative free marketers were somewhat centrist Democrats in the mold of Joe Lieberman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Bob Kerrey, or Hickenlooper, then the United States wouldn’t be at the risk of a disastrous experiment if voters rewarded Democrats with the White House.
But if all the Democratic candidates but Hickenlooper stampede toward socialism and its derivatives, then voters are being asked to risk today’s record-low unemployment for a hideously expensive, outrageously reckless promise of Sanders’ entirely unnecessary “revolution.”
