The Perilous Mainstreaming of 'Democratic Socialism'

By Rose Tennent



It has been both shocking and terrifying to observe just how far to the left the Democratic Party has moved. While watching the debates last week, it was abundantly clear how radical both the candidates and their policies truly are.

The once-shunned label of “socialist” is now boldly embraced by many on the left. They believe it to be a fairer system than capitalism. But no one stops to think about what it means to have “free” education for all or “free” health care for all. There was scant mention of how we will pay for all the “free” stuff during the debates. 

Last week, Joy Behar targeted conservatives and mocked them by saying that the right is blind to the supposed virtues of “democratic-socialism.” She said that Republicans just don’t understand what the word “socialist” means.

We absolutely understand the big-government, redistributionist agenda they are pushing. That is why we are terrified and alarmed to see how the left has embraced it. Liberals love to talk about “free” stuff, but we Republicans take those impossible promises to their logical conclusion: there is no such thing as a free lunch — someone eventually has to pay for it.

We know that socialism eliminates free markets and does away with free enterprise. We know it doesn’t work — just look at Venezuela, a once-prosperous country that now faces mass starvation due to destructive socialist policies.

But there is something more alarming in what Joy Behar said, and it’s not the first time it’s been mentioned by the left. Bernie Sanders was one of the first to popularize the term in mainstream American politics, and since then it has become a leftist mantra: democratic-socialism.

This is a clever way to ignore socialism’s continued failures. The left can no longer explain away socialism’s epic fails. The word “socialism” is a turn-off to many people. So, Bernie and the others are redefining it. They aren’t talking about “that socialism,” they insist; they’re talking about “democratic-socialism.” 

“Democratic-socialism,” however, is just an innocuous-sounding term for the “tyranny of the majority” that the Founders were so anxious to avoid when they wrote the U.S. Constitution.
  
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The Perilous Mainstreaming of 'Democratic Socialism'