OPINION:
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro said in an interview with The Hill that Joe Biden, in conjunction with the current hot protest climate, represents the best chance Democrats have seen in a generation to enact significant reform, and in particular, racial justice reforms.
So say and see all the socialists.
Biden may wear a “D” button. Biden may be the donkey to President Donald Trump’s elephant.
But the left sees him as a hammer and sickle.
“The Communist Party of America (sorta) endorses Joe Biden,” one Reddit thread ran a few months ago. It’s not a cheering endorsement; that’s for sure. But as one poster then explained: “CPUSA [Communist Party of America] has always sort of gotten along with the Democratic Party more than one would think.”
No, not more than one would think. It’s not really surprising at all.
After all, the far left works best when you can’t see them coming — by chip and by drip, in other words. Why’s that? Because leftists have no policy ideas that work outside the realm of thuggishness and violence, so if they want to expand their brand and presence, their best chance is to go slow. Their best chance is to move the bar little by little, bit by bit, using soft phrases like “social justice” and “racial equality” and “gender equality,” so as to not alert the people of their total government control designs.
It’s the frog in the boiling pot method of politicking.
There are plenty of socialists and democratic socialists and progressives and communists out there who vociferously denounce Biden and vow not to endorse, never to support. Publicly, that’s their defiant line. But in the end, they’ll vote for him. Privately, in the personal space of their own voting booth, they’ll check Biden in a heartbeat.
As a couple of lefties opined in The Star-Ledger in May: “[D]efeating Trump and, more importantly, Trumpism are strategic DSA priorities. … Instead of vote-shaming the left, which might feel good demonstrably does not work, those concerned about a Biden win might show that they are pushing Biden in more progressive directions.”
Chip. Drip. Little by little and bit by bit — that’s the strategy. Biden the Democrat will become Biden the progressive will become Biden the democratic socialist will become Biden the socialist will become Biden the — whatever. Truthfully, he’s already there.
“Joe Biden Signals He’s All in for Socialism,” the headline of a Bill O’Reilly segment read in May.
He just a needs the proper pushing to get him across the finish line. And that’s what Castro was saying. It’s all about timing, he said. America is on a cusp, he said. The country’s prepared for far left pressings, he said.
And Biden’s the guy who can get the left there, he said.
Castro — a far-left progressive himself, who in May launched a political action committee to support like-minded progressives — said: “If you’re a policymaker, you understand like [President Lyndon Johnson] did in the ’60s, that you have these certain moments. You had a moment where you could pass the Fair Housing Act after the passing of Martin Luther King. You had a moment where you could pass the Voting Rights Act after the march in Selma and Bloody Sunday. We have a moment. … You need to strike while the iron is hot, while people do have that moment of clarity and politically you have the room, the latitude, to go further than you usually would.”
To go further than the Constitution would allow.
To go further than government in America should rightly go.
Castro is right about that: The chaos in the country generated by the anti-Trumpers, the fears over the coronavirus and the nonstop attacks from the left have created a system where lawlessness seemingly rules the streets. To the right is America the free; to the left, the “new normal.”
Biden leans left.
And don’t all the progressives and socialists and communists and collectivists know it. Biden, to radical leftists, is ripe for the picking, ready to mold.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE.
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