The American comedian, Will Rogers, once noted: “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” While Rogers made that comment more than 80 years ago, it appears that little has changed in America.
The Democratic Party now appears to be on the verge of an internal civic war. On one hand, we have the traditional Democrats who align themselves with labour unions, students and visible minorities. On the other hand, many recent Democratic primary candidates have expressed a radically different philosophy, a philosophy that is part extreme left-wing socialism partnered with radical environmentalism, hatred for Christianity, and support for open borders. It’s difficult to come up with a name for this left-wing philosophy, since it seems to cover political, economic, scientific, religious and social issues all at the same time. Marxism-Leninism would appear to be the closest pattern, although these new Democrats do have a few profound differences from even this radical following.
Of all the components of this new political thinking, socialism seems to be the strangest feature. Over the last 100 years, numerous nations have experimented with socialism, experiments that ended in failure in every case. Russia, Cuba, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, Vietnam and China are just a few of the failures that come to mind (although China continues to be led by the Communist Party – their economic system is pure capitalism).
The most recent socialist fiasco is likely Venezuela, where a nation that was consistently the richest in South America has descended into abject poverty, violence, corruption and disaster. Just imagine an economic system so miserable that a nation with the largest oil reserves in the world still ends up being bankrupt! This is economic incompetence on a breathtaking scale. The tragedy of Africa, in the 20th century, must certainly be the countless socialist disasters, all of which failed and left the respective nations broken and bankrupt. Thirty-eight national experiments in socialism, all of which resulted in failure, would cause most of us to seriously question the validity of this economic theory, but hope obviously springs eternal – regardless of the results.
Winston Churchill once suggested that “capitalism is the unequal sharing of wealth; socialism is the equal sharing of poverty”. If one was to compile a list of the world’s nations most unlikely to experiment with socialism, I think the U.S. would likely head the list. After all, American capitalism has generated staggering wealth, and one of the highest standards of living in the world, for nearly a century. These new American radicals have the Democratic Party stuck “between the devil and the deep blue sea".
Many Democrats running for re-election have found that ignoring these extremists can lead to defeat in Democratic primaries, however, embracing these attitudes likely means a crushing defeat in the upcoming November mid-term elections. This puts the traditional Democratic candidate into a bizarre balancing act, where the candidate needs to appear radical to a portion of the electorate, while also appearing conventional to the majority of the voters.
No easy task indeed. Hopefully, the upcoming U.S. elections will send this latest version of radical capitalism onto the “ash heap of history”.
Brian McLeod is a St. Albert resident.
