OPINION:
Two weeks ago, President Obama took time out of his busy schedule of “fundamentally transforming the nation” to do the wave with the Reds at a baseball game in Cuba. This week, socialist Bernie Sanders won the Democratic primary resoundingly in Wisconsin, the birthplace of progressivism. Not a coincidence.
This is Barack Obama’s Democratic Party, a party of radical leftism now fully outed as socialism.
“So often in the past there’s been a sharp division between left and right, between capitalist and communist or socialist,” Mr. Obama told a group of young Argentinians after his tete-a-tete with the Castros of Havana. “And especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate, right? Oh, you know, you’re a capitalist Yankee dog, and oh, you know, you’re some crazy communist that’s going to take away everybody’s property.
“And I mean, those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don’t have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory — you should just choose from what works,” he continued. “And I said this to President Castro in Cuba. I said, ’Look, you’ve made great progress in educating young people. Every child in Cuba gets a basic education — that’s a huge improvement from where it was. Medical care — the life expectancy of Cubans is equivalent to the United States, despite it being a very poor country, because they have access to health care. That’s a huge achievement.’ They should be congratulated.”
He admitted that the Cuban economy was still faltering and issued some perfunctory praise of the free market, but added “a market does not work by itself.”
None of this socialism-worship should come as a surprise. After all, he “chose what worked” for him long ago. Indeed, he once described his brief time in the private sector as being “behind enemy lines.”
His comments serve as a good reminder of what he truly believes — and how it has directed his policies and reshaped the Democratic Party.
In his memoir, “Dreams from my Father,” Mr. Obama wrote boldly about his early radical associations, though he was careful to tone down their true beliefs and influence on him.
His father, Barack Obama Senior, was a committed communist who, while serving as a finance minister for the Kenyan government, urged a total confiscatory tax rate of “100 percent.” He also routinely demonized corporations. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, sympathized with the cause.
His grandfather introduced him to poet and prominent communist Frank Marshall Davis, to whom he refers in “Dreams from My Father” as “Frank.” Davis became a mentor and father figure to the young Barack, schooling him early in the ways of radical redistributionism. Mr. Davis was a labor movement activist who worked — along with Vernon Jarrett, the father of William Jarrett, ex-husband of one of Mr. Obama’s closest confidantes, Valerie Jarrett — in the Communist Party-dominated group Citizen’s Committee to Aid Packing House Workers. As Mr. Obama himself recalled in his memoir, “It made me smile, thinking back on Frank and his old Black Power, dashiki self. In some ways he was as incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith, living in the same sixties time warp that Hawaii had created.”
Thanks in large part to the influence of his parents and Davis, Mr. Obama admitted that as a student, he sought out Marxist professors. In April 1983, while a senior at Columbia University, he attended a “Socialist Scholars Conference” at Cooper Union, a confab touted as a tribute to Karl Marx. He was so taken by the socialist ideology that he attended the 1984 conference as well. The archived files of the Democratic Socialists of America show Mr. Obama’s name on a conference registration list.
As his radicalism fully flowered, he grew close to an even fuller array of influential leftists, the radical preacher Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, the co-founder of the Weather Underground, which described itself as a communist revolutionary organization. Throughout his life, Mr. Obama’s mentors and pals made sure he consumed Marxist literature, anti-colonial propaganda and revolutionary poetry.
As he gained political currency, Mr. Obama increasingly promoted radical wealth redistribution, class warfare and retrenchment of U.S. power globally until he reached the presidency and could put it all into full effect.
When Mr. Obama told those Argentinians to “just choose from what works,” he reminded us yet again of what he has chosen. Socialism has a long historical record of economic and human devastation, but that has never stopped the social engineers, including Mr. Obama, who always believe that they will be the ones to finally do Karl Marx proud.
Hence the rise of Bernie Sanders, socialist.
But for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Hence also the rise of Donald Trump, unapologetic capitalist.
• Monica Crowley is editor of online opinion at The Washington Times.
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