Several thoughtful analyses have emerged since the election last week pointing out that most of the Democratic candidates promoted by the party’s socialist wing lost their elections. (See here and here.) Some of the analysts concluded the country may not be ready to embrace socialism-lite.
While that’s true, it’s also irrelevant.
The Democratic Party’s socialists, aided and abetted by an adoring mainstream media, are driving the agenda as the 2020 presidential election gets underway.
If a Democratic presidential hopeful wants to be featured, even feted, by the media and the party’s energized younger members, he or she MUST tout far-left policies. That includes:
- A government-run, single-payer health care system;
- Free college tuition (at least at public universities and community colleges);
- Universal basic income;
- Higher taxes on businesses and the wealthy;
- Lots more onerous regulations on businesses;
- Minimum wage increases;
- Gun control;
- Massive green-energy spending and fossil fuel restrictions; and
- Price controls on anything the public perceives as too expensive, especially prescription drugs.
And that’s just the list we know of so far.
Any Democrat—presidential hopeful or not—who objects to that agenda or offers more moderate proposals will receive ZERO attention from the Democratic Party or the media—and not a little scorn from the die-hard lefties. No one cares what moderate or thoughtful Democrats think.
These days the media only care about what Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, Kamala Harris, and Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—along with the Democratic leadership—have to say. And the further left and more anti-Trump Democrats are, the more attention the media will give them.
Hillary Clinton knows this, which is why Democrats Mark Penn and Andrew Stein recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Clinton is reinventing herself as a “liberal firebrand” in an effort to nab the Democratic presidential nomination… again.
She and other Democratic hopefuls know thoughtfulness and moderation are yesterday’s standards. Anger, aggression and socialism are in.
Even though the far-left did not fare well in the election, they have no intention of learning a lesson from that. They think socialism is the new capitalism, and voters just have to be convinced.