Ed Rogers Special to the Washington Post
Speaking
at an event in New York City this month, Hillary Clinton said something
interesting about Democrats and their lurch to the left. Clinton said
being a capitalist "probably" hurt her when campaigning in the 2016
primaries against democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, an
independent from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats.
Think
about that. Part of the reason so many Republicans are frozen like a
deer in headlights when it comes to President Donald Trump is the horror
of thinking about Clinton as president. It is stunning to realize how
in today’s Democratic Party that being a capitalist is something one
must either apologize for or at least give qualified acceptance.
Talk about nostalgia for the 1950s. It seems that socialism is making a comeback.
I
think if Bill Clinton had been asked the same question Hillary was, he
would have thought it was a softball and proceeded to give a valuable
history lesson on the negative impact of socialism versus the global
benefits of capitalism. Of course, Hillary Clinton’s instinct is to
pander and hedge, but it is nevertheless revealing that she thought she
had to do so to keep from alienating the socialists.
Democrats
want to talk about Republicans living in the past, but the new
progressives, as they like to call themselves, are in fact a lot like
the old socialists. They want free college, free cash, free health care,
new mandates for this and that. The latest progressive policy du jour
to be gaining traction among Democratic presidential hopefuls is the
so-called "job guarantee." Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., announced one, Sen.
Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has one in the works, and Sen. Kirsten
Gillibrand, D-N.Y., says she supports the idea, too.
Yet
there are some signs of intellectual honesty on the left. Kevin Drum, a
liberal blogger for the progressive gospel Mother Jones, thinks the
jobs guarantee is a ludicrous idea: "Even our lefty comrades in social
democratic Europe don’t guarantee jobs for everyone. It would cost a
fortune; it would massively disrupt the private labor market; it would
almost certainly tank productivity; and it’s unlikely in the extreme
that the millions of workers in this program could ever be made fully
competent at their jobs." Well said.
If Democrats go down this road, their only way
forward will be to one-up each other in every primary election.
Clueless liberals such as Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes want to
guarantee $500 per month for every American earning less than $50,000 a
year. But why not $550? Or should we go ahead and call it an even $600? A
guaranteed monthly stipend would become the floor. And every subsequent
election would be a referendum on whether voters want to support the
candidate promising the larger pay raise from Washington. Is that where
we want our elections to go?
Anyway,
Clinton’s admission of the Democrats’ matter-of-fact acceptance of
socialism couldn’t have been any timelier. Saturday marked the
bicentennial of Karl Marx’s birth, and as Paul Kengor reminded us in his
smart Wall Street Journal commentary last week, Marx’s communist
philosophy "set the stage … for the greatest ideological massacres in
history." Marx’s rebuke of capitalism and individual property rights
inspired the likes of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Mao Zedong, the Kim
family, the Castros and countless others to wage mass murder against
millions of innocents.
But
never mind that, at least according to many of today’s millennial
voters. According to the 2017 You Gov-Victims of Communism Memorial
Foundation Report on U.S. Attitudes Toward Socialism, more millennials
would prefer to live in socialist countries than they would in
capitalist countries.
That
fact reveals a powerful force shifting today’s Democratic Party. Barack
"you didn’t build that" Obama and his contempt for private business is
starting to seem quaint. It certainly means every Democrat running for
president in 2020 will be asked if they favor socialism or capitalism.
It will be interesting to see if they blush, stammer and wince, or if
any of them will have the confidence to give a robust endorsement of
free enterprise and a historically accurate critique of socialism vs.
capitalism. I’m not holding my breath.
Socialism is just a kinder, gentler version of communism. Democrats should think twice before they abandon capitalism.
Rogers, a UA alumnus, worked for the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
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