When President Obama embraced “Medicare for All” earlier this month, it was a remarkable moment. Not because the proposal will be adopted (it won’t) or because the price tag would bankrupt the nation (it would).
Rather, it was a remarkable moment because a former American president played the role of enabler for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Indeed, Obama’s endorsement was a moment of great celebration for an organization that for years has plotted to hijack the Democratic Party and use it as a parasitic host to remake the nation.
Here’s how.
Back in 2012, the Vice Chairman of DSA Joseph M. Schwartz and fellow Political Committee Member Jason Schulman published a strategy document that presented their dream of a socialist America and the political path to get there.
The dream was to abolish privately owned businesses, from small mom-and-pop stores to large corporate enterprises.
“Wealth,” they explained, “is a social creation and should be controlled by society as a whole.”
DSA would thus replace America’s entrepreneurs with Socialist bureaucrats or worker groups. Businesses would be renamed “cooperatives,” though in “advanced socialism” – Communism – they might once again be called “soviets.”
If Democratic leaders and candidates refuse to disavow DSA, it’s time for moderate Democrats to rise up in peaceful revolution.
Schwartz and Schulman admitted that this old-but-new economic system raised a host of uncomfortable questions, including exactly how cooperatives might be run or precisely who would run them.
“There is no final blueprint for socialism.”
Yet for all their uncertainty, DSA’s leaders were abundantly clear that workers would not choose their own destiny.
“However we organize the division of labor – the structure of careers and life opportunities – it should be decided democratically.”
Schwartz and Schulman offered no guidance for how this might happen, naturally. But one can imagine a group of sycophants gathering in a distant city to decide each worker’s fate. (Democratically, of course.)
DSA’s treatise was quick to acknowledge that these proposals were fraught with historical failure and all but certain to be rejected by most Americans.
“Socialism is no longer a pure, innocent ideal,” they explained. “Its appeal has been tarnished by the authoritarian, statist regimes that have ruled in its name.”
Regimes like Soviet Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela.
The DSA’s plan simply needed intellectual dimwits and journalistic chowderheads to help rebrand a failed ideology that has left every nation who’s adopted it in complete tatters.
American socialism would thus need a reboot, something that minimized its troubled past with a more alluring future.
Schwartz and Schulman settled on populist proposals, listing universal health care, housing, education, child care, and federal jobs. They also argued for mandated worker and consumer representation on corporate boards.
DSA’s leaders didn’t explain how these programs might work or be paid for, nor have they in the six years since their 2012 pronouncements. But that’s the point, it seems. The endeavor was not about actually governing but rather rebranding and normalizing a broken ideology.
Indeed that rebranding helps explain why DSA has distanced itself from the established Socialist Party when running political candidates like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As Schwartz and Schulman point out, America’s political system rarely embraces third parties, rendering DSA’s normal political home “pointless” and lacking credibility.
They argued that this left them with but one choice: hijacking the Democratic Party. And they’d do it by collaborating with other activists to push self-described “progressives” hard to the left. In time, these radicalized voters would peel away from the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy, instead forming the backbone of a new, more palatable Socialist Party.
DSA’s future would thus “run through the Democratic Party, not around it.” Candidates like Ocasio-Cortez would be Democrats all right, but in name only.
One would think that the leadership of the Democratic Party would be aware of this political ruse. After all, the DSA plainly lists the Schwartz-Schulman treatise on its website.
Incredibly, however, Democratic leadership seems willing to go along for the ride.
In July, the Chair of the Democratic National Committee declared Ocasio-Cortez “the future of our party.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi added that “our party is a big tent” when welcoming the upstart DSA candidate.
Indeed, not a single Democratic leader has stood up to the DSA or its candidates for their transparent fraud.
Meanwhile, the nation’s journalists have all but abandoned their duty in reporting on DSA’s charade. In fact, MSBNC and CNN have seemingly taken the lead in promoting it.
To wit, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski called Ocasio-Cortez “badass” just after her primary victory this summer, while Rachel Maddow fawned that the New York socialist was “super impressive.”
Others in the media have gone so far as to spread supportive talking points, including daytime talk show host Joy Behar. She claimed that socialists were accomplishing great things in countries like Sweden.
Nevermind that Sweden is not a socialist nation. In fact, Schwartz and Schulman lamented the lack of socialist progress in Nordic countries, most especially Sweden.
This absurd theater might go otherwise unnoticed or dismissed but for DSA’s alarming electoral success in 2018. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is the most notable of the lot but they’ve made in-roads in unlikely places – Pittsburgh, for example – and increased their membership from a couple thousand to 50,000 in two years.
This growing threat leaves sensible Americans with a pressing challenge, most especially for the moderate and conservative Democrats who still hold 50 percent of the party’s membership.
It’s these pragmatic voices that must convince Independents and fellow Democrats that the party should reject the DSA and its Trojan Horse partnership. And if Democratic elders like Obama and Pelosi will not listen, the party faithful would be wise to withhold their vote, money, and volunteer time starting this November.
We should expect “Big Tent” Democrats to recoil at this hardline strategy, with pleas to accommodate DSA’s comrades. That request, however, must be firmly rejected. In the wise words of Schwartz and Schulman, “There is more political freedom and social mobility under Western capitalism than in all previous societies.”
Why on earth would America – or the Democratic Party – ever trade that away?
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