Leftward to Victory

In what will be one of thousands of opinion pieces on predictions of the coming "Blue Wave," John Gabriel writes:

A Gallup poll this week discovered that, for the first time, Democrats have a more positive image of socialism than they do of capitalism. Fifty-seven percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners support the state-run economic system, while just 47 percent support free enterprise.

Did these people fall asleep in history class during the lectures about the Soviet Union and the Khmer Rouge? Miss the past few years of Venezuelans unable to find medicine, milk or toilet paper? Forget that just last month, Nicaraguan strongman Daniel Ortega shot up a bunch of university students in a church?

Socialism has never worked and never will, but the majority of Democrats want to give it another shot ...

Delving into Gallup’s data, the strongest supporters of socialism are younger voters. Millennials are far more likely to support the failed system that their parents and grandparents fought against and defeated.

[Congressional candidate, Alexandra] Ocasio-Cortez is a good representative of this trend. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the candidate is leading the move to drag Democrats further to the left.

While she presents the DSA’s aims as more in line with the Nordic model, her organization wants nothing like the nanny-state capitalism of Sweden or Denmark.

Joseph M. Schwartz, the DSA’s national vice-chair, calls for "a militant labor movement and a mass socialist presence strengthened by accumulated victories, looking to not merely tame but overcome capitalism."

For Democratic Socialists, abolishing capitalism is just the opening act.

"Socialism is about democratizing the family to get rid of patriarchal relations; democratizing the political sphere to get genuine participatory democracy; democratizing the schools by challenging the hierarchical relationship between the teachers of the school and the students of the school," said Jared Abbott, a member of the DSA’s national steering committee.

Even Hugo Chavez wasn’t that ambitious.

Then again, Chavez' less "ambitious" policies essentially turned a rich country into a failed state. I'm still waiting for an interviewer to ask Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez (who would have trouble thinking her way out of a paper bag) to comment on exactly why that happened and to explain why the United States should risk socialist policies that have "never worked and never will."

Here is Florida we now have a "socialist" running for governor. The Democrat, Andrew Gillum, is a follower of the Bernie Sanders school of socialist policy. In August, 2011, Bernie Sanders' official website commented on Venezuela when it published the following gem:

These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela [emphasis mine] and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?

In South Florida, we see economic refugees who have fled from a ruined Venezuela the "land of Horatio Alger." Venezuela—the same country that in 2011 Bernie's apostles thought was an exemplification of the "American Dream."

But then again, maybe Venezuela is the "dream" that people like Sanders and Gillum, Ocasio-Cortez and Warren have every night—a dystopian landscape in which everyone suffers equally, where there is no materialism because there is no "material," where no one cares about money because the currency is worthless, where healthcare is available for all, even though doctors have fled, medical equipment is broken, hospitals are in ruin, and medicines are non-existent, where there is a leader who doesn't say mean things about others but instead murders them when they disagree with his policies.

Maybe "dream" isn't quite right. Let's try nightmare.