Instead of a desire to be an exceptional, faithful nation, a shining city on a hill, the Democratic camp seems to be offering the complete opposite, a cesspool of everything else that has been before and has failed, just with shiny new repackaging. Quin Hillyer captured a handful of these most recent accounts that should cause Americans to recoil from this insanity (btw, there's some great links throughout this piece that I'd encourage readers to check out)...
So let's look at them one by one, starting with an open embrace of socialism...The American public should be appalled by the radical lurch to the left that the Democratic Party is now taking.
On issue after issue, leading Democrats now openly promote positions that liberal Democrats just 10 or 15 years ago once strongly rejected as being too extremely left-wing. This is true in at least six issue areas: abortion/infanticide, healthcare, environmental edicts, taxation, socialism, and anti-Semitism.
It may be facile for conservatives to attack the term “socialist,” but more and more Democrats are embracing not just its tenets but the label itself. Perhaps this is largely because polls show that increasing numbers of young voters, ignorant of history, view socialism as a novel idea with potential, or even a good thing. Still, for Democratic officeholders and serious candidates to embrace the label — even as, for example, Venezuela’s socialist disaster forces people to starve in the streets — is a sign that reason and bedrock American values are in increasingly short supply.Working along the socialist lines are environmental edicts (what Levin calls eco-statism)...
Enough has been written elsewhere about the so-called Green New Deal, “eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from every sector of the economy," that Americans should already see it as a danger to our way of life and our liberty, given the centralized command and control required and the out-of-thin-air financing: “The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit. There is also space for the government to take an equity stake in projects to get a return on investment." This would surely both bankrupt the economy and make us serfs to government planners.And onto a favorite, socialized healthcare ('cause Obamacare wasn't disastrous enough)...
The “Medicare for all” plan that at least six likely Democratic presidential contenders have embraced is so outlandish that center-left policy-wonk columnist William Galston this month called it an “unforced error [that] could give President Trump his best chance to win re-election in 2020.” He wrote that one main “version of Medicare for All means private insurance for none. Even if you like your private plan, you can’t keep it. And many Americans do like their private plans, which is why they find proposals like [this one] so troubling.” Democratic Sen. Michael Bennett of Colorado, wisely aghast, notes that it could take away the current plans held by 180 million Americans.Then another familiar tune to Big Gov's out-of-control spending, higher taxation...
On taxes, it was just over three decades ago that many leading Democratic officeholders embraced a top income tax rate of 28 percent, and later, not even former President Barack Obama dared propose raising the top rate above 40. Now, suddenly, when a radical such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., proposes a 70 percent rate, leading presidential contender Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., says she thinks this and other Ocasio-Cortez approaches are “ fantastic.” Voters may not have enough memories of Jimmy Carter’s horrendous “misery-index” economy, the last time the United States had a 70 percent rate.Can't mention aOC without her radical sorority sister, which brings us to a resurgence of anti-Semitism...
The overwhelming anti-Zionism and increasing anti-Semitism, or tolerance thereof, among American liberals is beginning to receive greater notice. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for example, has finally had to criticize Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., for the latter’s anti-Semitism, but she won’t remove her from key committees despite her continued questionable behavior. The opposition to anti-Semitism thus seems only rhetorical, with no teeth.And finally, we get to out-doing the golden Democratic calf of convenience, abortion, with an even more ancient evil: infanticide...
Finally, there’s the frightening Democratic radicalization on abortion. In the 1970s and 1980s, mainstream Democrats said abortion should be available for two trimesters, but not in the third. In the 1990s, former President Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal, and rare” was the mantra. In 2000, a partial-birth abortion ban passed the House without objection and passed the Senate with 14 Democratic votes. But now, Republicans can’t even get Democrats to allow a straight vote on banning infanticide after a baby has been born, in either the House or Senate. And Democrats are cheering as laws permitting infanticide are passed in New York state and endorsed by Virginia’s Democratic governor.I wish I could say this is all make-believe, some nightmarish fantasy, but such is not the case. These are the damnable realities being brought to life by a Democratic Party determined to drag the country down a path of annihilation. Even older Dems see it, and are trying to warn newer generations from it, but I fear far too many are not heeding their advice...
For those who missed them, these were the words of Gov. Ralph Northam: "The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother."
This is horrifying.
No wonder wise old Democratic hands such as former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell are saying their party’s crazy-left turn could get President Trump re-elected in response.They certainly ought to for the sake of their own humanity. And perhaps another take on this could break through to those younger demographics. On just the first and last topics that Hillyer covers, Jonah Goldberg takes a fascinating deep dive into the inherent correlations of socialism and infanticide, quite accurately dubbed The Return of Barbarism:
There are still enough Americans with enough common sense to be angered by ideas so radical as to dangerously undermine American civil society. That’s the direction Democrats are going in. They ought to reverse course, and soon.
Related links: Child Sacrifice Through The Ages | Ep. 304Old evils continue to reinvent themselves.
...At its core, [socialism] is not an idea or even a program: It’s a feeling. ...
Whether it’s the Socialist Party of Great Britain or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or the millions of young people who think they’re socialists, they think socialism is a good thing that can do no wrong, and if it does wrong it must be because it’s not really socialism. I understand why conservatives think socialism is evil — because there are so many examples of socialism being evil. But most socialists don’t think they’re evil — nor is it their greatest dream to steal our hamburgers: Socialism is just their word for fixing what’s wrong with the world. The problem is that when you give yourself over to a single idea of how things should be, you check yourself into what Chesterton called “the clean and well-lit prison of one idea” and you become “sharpened to one painful point.” You are bereft of the “healthy hesitation and healthy complexity” that lets you grasp the world as it is and understand the crooked timber of human nature.
In the fantasy world of [socialism], we’d all share equally society’s wealth. But what this vision leaves out is the socialist with the clipboard that keeps track of who gets their “fair share” and the men with guns who protect the man with the clipboard from those who disagree with his decisions. The man who says “get in line for your share” is the new ruler of every would-be utopia. The clipboard becomes a totem of power no less ominous than the ball and scepter, the whip, the fasces, or the phone the person in power uses to make you disappear. Humans make hierarchies of status and privilege for themselves whenever the opportunity avails itself. This is why all socialist systems that do not work within the constraints of a liberal democratic framework of the rule of law inevitably descend into tyrannies. Give the state unbridled power, and the denizens of the state will use that power toward their own ends.
But socialism is just one form of [destruction] that can be unleashed to trample the complex ecosystem of liberty in pursuit of a single idea. Nationalism, fascism, and almost every other ism can, in service to the same cult of unity, do the same damage.
One-thingism is the enemy of all freedoms, even the one thing of freedom itself. As Peregrine Worsthorne once noted, a doctrine of total freedom pursued to its logical conclusion is a world where bullies are free to do their will. Ordered liberty is a different concept altogether because it balances the tension between the need for both order and liberty. We are free to do the things that do not harm others unjustifiably. Which brings me to...The Freedom to Kill Babies. ...
...putting aside the philosophical, scientific, and theological arguments... People can understandably debate whether a young embryo should be considered a human being. But there is simply no credible moral argument that a viable baby should not be considered a human being. A late-term fetus strikes most reasonable people as a baby, not some abstracted and euphemized thing called “uterine contents” or whatnot. And a delivered baby outside the womb or in the process of delivery is, simply, a baby. The Barbara Boxer view that a baby miraculously becomes a baby only after you bring it home from the hospital is a moral monstrosity.
And this is why conservative pro-lifers are not hypocrites when they say the state should intervene on the behalf of babies. The real hypocrisy cuts the other way. Liberal abortion rights supporters — speaking broadly — have no principled objection to the state regulating the size of our sodas, banning plastic straws or regulating free speech. But going by the statements and votes of the last month — by Ralph Northam, Andrew Cuomo, Kamala Harris, and so many others — they draw the line at regulating infanticide. ...
Harris supports the Women’s Health Protection Act (as do Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Kristen Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, and Bernie Sanders). It would eliminate nearly all limits on abortion from late-term bans to abortions based on sex-selection (one wonders how they would feel if transgender fetuses could be identified in utero).
This isn’t ordered liberty; it’s the freedom of the jungle which says you can do whatever you can get away with. It’s fine to argue that “abortions” of viable, healthy, babies are rare (putting aside all the begged questions implicit in the word “healthy.” Do otherwise healthy kids with Down Syndrome count as unhealthy?). But what we’re talking about is the principle. ...
Just as socialism represents an atavistic impulse to return to pre-modern understandings of politics, the new push for killing inconvenient babies — in principle — is a barbaric step backward to pre-civilized past. Infanticide in our natural environment was incredibly common. ...
In pre-historic times, which were no Eden, our ancestors often killed their offspring because they were a real burden and adoption agencies were few and far between. And when I say a real burden, I mean a real burden. Mothers often didn’t have enough milk to feed two infants, which is why the killing of twins was so common. Crying babies when enemy tribes or predators are about are as inconvenient as hungry toddlers when food is scarce.
One aspect of the amazing miracle of the environment we live in now – i.e. civilization — is that killing babies is no longer a necessity, but a luxury. This move to disguise this hideous luxury as a new form of necessity is not a sign that we are advancing as a civilization, but that we are regressing, back to when killing babies was natural and normal.
CPAC Highlights the Stakes in 2020: The Socialist Agenda, Extreme Abortion Laws, and Infanticide
RADICALS ARE RUNNING AMOK IN DEMOCRATIC PARTY
