OPINION:
“We have won the ideological battle.”
So declared Bernie Sanders on April 8 as he announced an end — sort of — to his campaign.
He’s correct. The Democratic Party is now slurping down uncut Marxist Kool-Aid, with class warfare as the lingua franca between its many factions.
The Soviet-loving politician from Vermont by way of Brooklyn has visibly moved the party far, far to the left. They’re openly purging Dems who don’t march to the socialist drumbeat.
Just ask eight-term Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinksi, one of the last pro-life Democrats. He was beaten in a special primary election in Chicago on March 18 by Marie Newman, a leftist challenger. Aided by $1 million in TV ads bought by the abortion industry and its allies, she’s likely to be right at home as a member of “The Squad” led by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
AOC has become a star on Twitter, doing brief videos. In one, she shows how to mix a margarita. While pouring in the booze, she rants that government is not doing enough for her. In another, she says America is “only a rich society for a very small amount of people, and it’s a brutal, barbaric society for the vast majority of working-class Americans.” Seriously.
That would be news to tens of millions of patriotic, working Americans or the millions trying desperately to migrate here, legally or illegally.
As for Bernie, he’s keeping his delegates and seeking more — a “weird” way to drop out, as President Trump has noted.
Refusing to throw his full support to Joe Biden, Bernie continues to blast America as rife with “racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia” and “religious bigotry.” Well, that latter charge is rich, coming from the guy who grilled Russell Vought, Mr. Trump’s nominee for deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. The angry senator yelled that Mr. Vought was unfit for public office for being a Christian.
We shouldn’t be surprised. Marxism’s main enemy is the God of the Bible and those who believe in Him.
Bernie also described the United States as a place with “massive income and wealth inequality, prejudice and hatred, mass incarceration, terrified immigrants and hundreds of thousands of Americans sleeping out on the streets of the richest country on earth.”
Are you ashamed of our country yet?
Undeterred by Bernie’s simmering contempt for the United States, Mr. Biden knows the senator’s followers are crucial and will have to walk a tightrope to keep them without scaring everyone else. On Thursday, he edged closer to Bernie’s socialist vision with new giveaway proposals on student debt and Medicare.
Some longtime lefties refuse to play the game of labeling Mr. Biden a “moderate.” Of Bernie and Joe and the whole Democratic presidential field, Bill Press wrote, “Whatever they choose, revolution or evolution, they’re both paths to the same progressive goals …. first set by Sanders in 2016.”
Hard-left Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank agrees: “[Sanders] has succeeded in pushing the Democratic Party to the left, and his differences with Biden are less about ends than means.”
Mr. Biden himself said of Mr. Sanders that “we share a common vision.” And what’s the vision? Socialism, with these outcomes:
Abortion on demand up to the moment of birth, and taxpayer-funded abortions; passage of The Equality Act, which would upend morality and turn Bible believers into outlaws to be punished by the state; free, four-year university tuition for families earning under $125,000 annually; government “forgiveness” of student loans; free child care; a variation of AOC’s Green New Deal; massive tax increases; massive illegal immigration; an end to election integrity safeguards such as state voter ID laws; seating judges who view the Constitution as a blank check, and far more government control over health care.
There’s much more, but before the media nudge Bernie off stage so Mr. Biden can pose as a mere liberal, it’s worth looking at more of his bedfellow’s liabilities.
During the 1970s, before he was famous, Bernie called for “public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries,” including “the entire energy industry.” He has called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a reactionary racist.”
He still tosses accolades at Communist Cuba’s Castro regime and shrugs at how Marxists turned prosperous Venezuela into a hellhole. In fact, one of Bernie’s advisers, David Sirota, praised Hugo Chavez in 2013, saying the late Venezuelan dictator “racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.”
Only if that dream were a nightmare.
As we navigate the coronavirus crisis and head toward November, Mr. Biden and his party are going to have to pretend they aren’t captive to the Bernie/AOC wing without alienating young True Believers.
The first part might be hard, but perhaps not the second. As Bernie says, “we have transformed American consciousness as to what kind of country we can become.”
Indeed. He’s proved he can fool millions of miseducated people. Could they now buy Joe Biden as a “revolutionary moderate?”
Slipping into classic Marxist-Leninist cant, Bernie concluded, “Let us go forward together. The struggle continues.”
Thanks be to God that it would still be a mighty “struggle” to force most Americans to worship at the altar of the god that failed.
• Robert Knight is a contributor to The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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