The Democratic Party belongs to Bernie Sanders now. It’s a stunning statement to write, given that this would have been unthinkable as recently as 2016.
When the Vermont senator and self-described “democratic socialist,” who wasn’t even a registered Democrat, first announced his 2016 primary challenge against establishment favorite Hillary Clinton, he was written off as an outsider, a long-shot, a fringe candidate. Socialist healthcare? Free college? Canceling student debt? These far-left policy proposals were dismissed at the time by Clinton and the Democratic establishment. Now, they’re widely held positions among elected Democrats.
And after Sanders’s successful performance in the Iowa caucuses and narrow victory in New Hampshire, he’s now the Democrats’ 2020 front-runner. That’s right: In just three years, Sanders went from a fringe radical to one of the leaders of the Democratic Party. That should terrify every person who believes in capitalism in any form, supports the limits of our constitutional system, and fears unchecked executive power.
Sanders’s policy platform truly is, by his own admission and design, revolutionary.
According to calculations from the Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl, Sanders’s total proposed spending amounts to a whopping $60 trillion to $85 trillion over a decade. The scale of this expenditure is almost impossible to capture. But the entire federal budget for 2019 was $4.5 trillion. And when Clinton, nobody’s idea of a small-government conservative, ran for president in 2016, she campaigned on just roughly $2.8 trillion in added expenditure. (I say just, but that’s still … a lot.)
Sanders would have the government take an almost unprecedented role in controlling our economy. Were his full agenda ever to be enacted, federal spending would account for roughly half of the economy. Sanders would nationalize entire industries, from healthcare to the internet. The half of the economy that would remain in private hands under his proposed agenda would still be subject to heavy regulation, government control, and taxation.
Of course, those who seek to quiet the alarm bells ringing in every sane person’s head are quick to point out that, thankfully, much of Sanders’s agenda would never pass a Republican-controlled Senate, or even a Democratic-controlled one for that matter. They’re not wrong. But what they discount is both how much can be accomplished through unilateral leveraging of executive power and just how openly contemptuous Sanders is of the Constitution’s constraints.
Imagine, for a moment, the nightmare that would be a Sanders administration.
Perhaps it’s socialist darling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who gets tapped for commerce secretary, what with her well-demonstrated ample economic knowledge. (She recently cited the imaginary economist “Milton Keynes.”) Maybe Sanders appoints his longtime aide David Sirota to a major economic role — you know, the same aide who praised former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s “economic miracle” and glowingly reviewed the socialist policies that have turned Venezuela into an economic nightmare. And we all know there would be a job in his administration for Sanders’s longtime ally, Elizabeth Warren, who has simply never met a regulation she didn’t like and has a long list of companies she is ready to subdue with federal power.
The idea of what Sanders and his allies would do with the expansive power of our federal bureaucracy is frightening. There’s little doubt that even with a stubborn Congress, they could reshape the country irreparably, especially considering the extra-constitutional lengths Sanders has already declared himself willing to go.
As the Washington Examiner editorial board noted:
No Congress could completely thwart Sanders’s revolution, that much is clear. Our only hope would be the court system keeping his power in check.
Then again, Sanders idolizes President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, glowingly praising his New Deal, big-government agenda. And of course, FDR pushed this agenda through by threatening to pack the Supreme Court. Sanders may respect the courts’ independence even less than Roosevelt did.
And Sanders’s true beliefs are almost certainly even more radical than what he lets on. He claims to be a “democratic socialist” yet has an affinity for socialists both authoritarian and elected alike.
His true ideology is likely much closer to communism than he would ever let on. From honeymooning in the Soviet Union to defending communist Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro, the senator’s actions belie his lip service to democracy. For Sanders, the ends undoubtedly justify the revolutionary means.
And if voters usher him into office, well, no one can say they didn’t see it coming.
