What a difference a few weeks make. It was less than a month ago that socialism, not the coronavirus, dominated national political discussions. Today, the coronavirus has wreaked havoc on society and financial markets and drastically altered the political landscape.
This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, the nation’s preeminent annual conservative conclave, took place over the course of four days in late February and unwittingly became a leading indicator of how much the world would change.
Titled “America vs. Socialism,” CPAC 2020 promised to do battle with the socialist agenda advocated by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and his colleagues on the Left. The conference featured no fewer than four events highlighting the evils of socialism and the urgency of defeating it.
Sanders was at the time the front-runner in the Democratic presidential race. He had won or effectively tied for first place in the first three state contests (Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada) in the Democratic race.
Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s top economic adviser and the director of the National Economic Council, was one of many speakers to deride the socialist agenda at CPAC. “I want you to put socialism on trial.” He said, “I want to convict socialism. … It’s never worked. It’ll never work.”
When Trump later spoke to a packed ballroom at CPAC, he stirred up the crowd by asking whether they would prefer that he run against Sanders or former Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 general elections. Sanders was hands down the audience’s choice.
Amid the fun and fanfare, Trump did not forget to make his case against the socialist future advocated by the Democratic candidate he then seemed likely to face. He stated:
As it turned out, Democratic primary voters did not want a socialist candidate either. Over the past few weeks, they chose Biden over Sanders in one state after another. With Tuesday’s results, Biden has all but sealed up his party’s nomination.
Meanwhile, on March 7, CPAC’s organizers announced that one of its attendees had tested positive for the coronavirus. Within days, four members of congress announced self-quarantines due to brief contact they had with this VIP at the conference.
Since then, the coronavirus outbreak has taken hold of American consciousness and upended daily life. At the beginning of March, only 70 cases had been reported in the United States. Today, there are over 7,000 cases.
Trump, for his part, has been busy trying to contain the virus, calm financial markets, devise bailout packages for individuals, small businesses, and industries — rather than talking about socialism’s mass failures.
After all, not only will Sanders’s socialist revolution fail to win the day, it has lost much of its sizzle amid the coronavirus pandemic. Yet neither Sanders nor his army of supporters are going away. Socialism is now just as popular as capitalism among young adults in the U.S. Additionally, prominent lawmakers such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, true believers of a radical leftist agenda, endorsed Sanders over other Democratic presidential contenders and represent real constituencies in the Democratic Party.
In due time, the coronavirus will pass, and life in the U.S. will return to normal. In due time, we will also return to the debate about central planning versus free enterprise, government control versus personal liberty, and America versus socialism. Let’s hope that the public will stand ready once again to convict the misguided ideology and its policy disasters.
Ying Ma is the author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto and the former deputy director of the Committee for American Sovereignty, a pro-Trump super PAC. Follow her on Twitter @gztoghetto.
