As President Donald Trump continues to solidify his support, the left is panicking.
Their radical liberal agenda has them on the outs with most mainstream middle-of-the-road Americans. But instead of regrouping and moving back toward the center, they’re doing just the opposite.
They’re going more extreme.
A new Gallup poll finds less than half of all Democrats view capitalism favorably.
But mention the “S” word, and they light up: 57 percent have a favorable view.
That helps explain the 800 percent rise in memberships in the Democratic Socialists of America in just three years.
“In normal times, the declarations of a fringe party and ideology in America would not merit much attention,” Newt Gingrich wrote in a column for Fox News. “However, these are not normal times.”
Indeed, they are not as a growing number of Democratic candidates openly embrace both the socialist label and the movement’s radical far-left agenda.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) nearly won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 despite not being a Democrat and openly calling himself a “democratic socialist.”
One of his proteges, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is running for Congress in New York, while also embracing the label.
She’s expected to win after defeating Rep. Joe Crowley (D-New York) in a primary considered one of the biggest upsets since… well… probably since Trump won the election in 2016.
Zak Ringelstein, the Democrats’ candidate for Senate in Maine, is now literally a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
“I stand with the Democratic Socialists, and I have decided to become a dues-paying member,” Ringelstein told the Associated Press earlier this summer. “It’s time to do what’s right, even if it’s not easy.”
This one-time “fringe” group, is quickly becoming a player not just among the extreme left but in mainstream Democratic politics.
RealClearPolitics notes that the Democratic Socialists have now formally endorsed at least 42 candidates across 20 states, including hopefuls in crucial “swing” states such as Florida and Michigan.
Some, like Sanders, Ringelstein and Ocasio-Cortez are proud of the label.
Others are doing their best to downplay it.
“I don’t like the term socialist, because people do associate that with bad things in history,” James Thompson, a Democrat running for Congress in Kansas, told AP. Still, “there’s definitely a lot of their policies that closely align with mine.”
They’re so closely aligned that he’s one of the DSA’s endorsed candidates… and while he is in a solid red district, there’s at least some chance he could win after he took 46 percent of the vote in a special election there last year.
But make no mistake about it: The DSA’s goals aren’t merely a more liberal America or more extensive and expensive social welfare programs. It’s not about expanding healthcare programs such as the so-called Medicare for all.
It’s much bigger.
“In the long run, Democratic Socialists want to end capitalism,” Meagan Day, a member of the East Bay Chapter of DSA confessed – proudly – on the Vox website.
Day declared that even a welfare state in a capitalist system as many Democrats seem to advocate for is “at best a temporary truce between bosses and workers.”
As far as they’re concerned, it has to go… and not just in the United States.
“The eventual goal is to transform the world to promote everyone’s needs rather than to produce massive profits for a small handful of citizens.”
Not just the country. The world – a transformation which, for the record, was one of the stated goals of the Soviet Union.
The Cold War is back, but this time it might be taking place entirely inside the United States!
— The Horn editorial team