The Democratic primary looks like it’s over. Thankfully, the chances that Bernie Sanders will become our first openly socialist president seem increasingly distant.
Last night, establishment candidate Joe Biden delivered the killing blow to the Sanders campaign with victories in states such as Mississippi, Missouri, and, importantly, Michigan. The former vice president now has a commanding delegate lead over Sanders, and the socialist senator looks to have no real path to the nomination at this point.
In short, Biden just rescued America from socialism.
To be clear, Biden’s administration would almost undoubtedly be chock-full of establishment liberals who promote costly, job-killing regulations, seek to raise taxes, and expand government control of healthcare. He would push for the erosion of Second Amendment rights and stack the federal benches with left-wing judges to boot.
But a Biden presidency would be far from the socialist disaster that Sanders had planned for all of us. It would be fairly standard Democratic fare, perhaps checked by a Republican Senate.
Whether you plan to vote for President Trump over Biden or not, we should all feel reassured that the Democratic option isn’t the nightmare scenario.
I like Joe Biden. I will support Donald Trump in 2020 because I support most of his policies and I refuse to vote for a pro-abortion candidate. But I like Joe Biden and the Democrats have done the country a service by rejecting Bernie Sanders.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) March 11, 2020
Sanders sought not simply to tilt our economic system toward more taxation and welfare but rather to usher in a radical socialist takeover, not unlike that which destroyed the once-wealthy South American nation of Venezuela.
Sanders’s agenda is truly radical and would have involved a government takeover of more than half the economy. As I’ve previously written:
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.
Biden’s win also prevents a dangerous shift in the Overton Window — the boundaries of mainstream American political thought. Even for Democrats, socialism is still a bridge too far.
Thanks to our ultratribal and partisan culture, half the country would have rallied around Sanders, socialism and all, had he won. His long-standing support for Communist dictators and socialist economic philosophy alike would both have been normalized and even accepted due to tribal loyalties and loathing of Trump. This would have represented a truly dangerous shift in American politics, paving the way for an entire generation of radical socialists to rise to the top of the Democratic Party going forward.
Of course, the battle against socialism isn’t over. Young voters across the country will still support Sanders’s message, and they have new leaders such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat. But there’s little doubt that last night at least delayed this shift.
Biden is far from a harmless centrist. Before joining the Obama administration, anyone would have considered him a left-wing liberal. He has endorsed many plans that would harm or impede the economy, such as the California regulation that has predictably killed thousands of freelance jobs. But at the very least, things would be worse if Democrats had nominated an out-and-out socialist. A Biden presidency would be bad, but it doesn’t threaten the foundation of America as we know it.
