Socialism
March 11, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
As it did in 2016, the Democratic party this year flirted with a socialist presidential candidate, but ultimately rejected him for a pragmatist. Bernie Sanders’s quest for the nomination seems doomed. The party almost certainly will select Joe Biden. The case for nominating Biden was three-fold. First, he was Barack Obama’s vice president. This was probably important to black voters, and it was black voters who carried Biden to victory
»
March 10, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Scandinavian history, that is. Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist and has demonstrated a lifelong devotion to Communist regimes in the USSR, Cuba and Venezuela. But now that he is running for president, he deflects accountability by claiming that by “socialist” he means countries like Sweden and Denmark–countries which are not in fact socialist and which have, in many ways, more conservative policies than we do. Bernie finally was called
»
March 8, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Before this New York Post story, I had never heard of Carlos Maza. But a lot of people had; he has 150,000 followers on Twitter and YouTube. Maza is a social justice warrior, and he hates rich people. This is how he describes himself in his Twitter profile: “Marxist pig. Liberal fascist. Queer scum. He/Him. YouTube profits off of hate speech. IG: gaywonk.” He has specialized in exposing the hypocrisy
»
March 1, 2020 — John Hinderaker
At Front Page, Daniel Greenfield analyzes the source, by zip code, of donations to the Bernie Sanders campaign: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Their employees are three of the top 4 Bernie donors. Apple is in fifth place. These dot coms are not exactly organizations known to employ members of the proletariat. *** Geographically, Bernie’s top dollar zip code is 94110 in San Francisco. The average household income in this part
»
February 28, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Whenever Bernie Sanders’s socialism comes up in the Democratic debates, he deflects criticism by saying he favors something along the lines of Denmark’s model. Sanders’s debate rivals almost invariably let this answer pass. (I think Pete Buttigieg tried to take it on in the last debate but couldn’t get the floor.) In reality, the policies Sanders advocates bear little resemblance to those of Denmark and other Scandinavian countries today. They
»
February 28, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Dan Proft is an excellent radio host in Chicago who now also has a syndicated radio show and podcast. I have been on the Chicago show a number of times, and joined Dan’s syndicated show yesterday afternoon for what I thought was an interesting discussion of socialism, capitalism and the Nordic model in the context of the 2020 election. Here is the conversation, which is around 14 minutes long. I
»
February 26, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I think it was Tom Bethell, back when he wrote the must-read Washington column for The American Spectator, who asked the pertinent question when Bernie Sanders was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives under the Socialist Party affiliation in 1990: How will we be able to tell the difference between Bernie’s socialism and the “mainstream” Democratic Party in Washington? That illuminating question has become suddenly urgent now that
»
February 24, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Bernie Sanders’s big victory in Nevada was powered by the Latino vote. The socialist claimed 53 percent of it. Sanders didn’t do nearly as well with African-Americans and whites. If Hispanics had voted like these other two groups, Sanders would not be riding so high. His victory would have resembled the more modest wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. Mark Krikorian sums up what the Nevada results and other evidence
»
February 16, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
We have often written about AFFH, which stands for “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.” AFFH gives the federal government a way to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood. It enables the feds to impose a preferred racial and ethnic composition; densify housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike; and weaken or cast aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities from zoning to transportation to education. Another way
»
February 14, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Paul Krugman rejects the idea that Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Krugman writes: Bernie Sanders isn’t actually a socialist in any normal sense of the term. He doesn’t want to nationalize our major industries and replace markets with central planning; he has expressed admiration, not for Venezuela, but for Denmark. This made me wonder why Sanders has been calling himself a socialist all these years. Was it a way of
»
February 4, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Bernie Sanders has visited the Soviet Union, Nicaragua (celebrating the sixth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution), and Cuba. Twice. Bernie’s line on Cuba is that, while it is a poor country with a less than perfect government, there is much we could learn from Fidel’s regime. Cuba embodies the socialism that Sanders espouses, albeit without his “democratic” gloss. In this Turning Point USA video, four young Americans who are steeped
»
January 25, 2020 — John Hinderaker
From early in our nation’s history, America’s intellectuals have mostly looked down on their own country and yearned for it to be like someplace else–someplace more sophisticated, and more in tune with “modern” intellectual currents, whatever they might be at the moment. That is a long history, which I will skip over. In our own time, American intellectuals have claimed that Soviet Russia, Germany and Japan were harbingers of the
»
January 20, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal carried Mene Ukueberuwa’s excellent column “Boomer Socialism Led to Bernie Sanders.” Subhead: “Government policies limit millennials’ prosperity, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser argues. Will they realize more of the same isn’t the answer?” The column gives a glimpse into the argument advanced by Professor Glaeser in his 2019 Manhattan Institute James Q. Wilson Lecture this past September: “The Entrenched vs. The Newcomers.” The Manhattan
»
December 29, 2019 — Steven Hayward
On Friday the Wall Street Journal ran an extra-long and remarkable editorial about the agenda of Elizabeth Warren (“Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan, Oh My“), which is so far beyond extravagant that “socialism” seems an inadequate adjective. She makes Bernie Sanders look cautious by comparison. As the Journal put it in the lede: “[A]s we discovered after a tour of her 60-some policy papers, Ms. Warren is proposing a transformation
»
November 20, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Let’s take in a few headlines from the last few days, starting with the New York Times: COPENHAGEN — More than 60 years of hassle-free travel from Sweden to Denmark has ended after the Danish authorities, struggling to quell a wave of bombings blamed on Swedish gangs, introduced passport checks for the first time since the 1950s. The measures put in place on Tuesday are temporary and will be applied
»
September 17, 2019 — Scott Johnson
The highlight of the Dem presidential candidates’ debate last week was the 30-second advertisement run by Elizabeth Heng’s New Faces GOP PAC. We posted the video along with an admiring note here over the weekend. The truth quotient of the advertisement stood in stark contrast with that of the Dem presidential candidates. If we could divide by zero, we could put a number on the quotient. Speaking of zero, however,
»
September 15, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Brontosauruses are renowned for their small brains, but let’s be fair: at least they weren’t socialists. They may have become extinct, but unlike Sanders and many of his fellow Democrats they didn’t subscribe (as far as we know) to an extinct ideology. Michael Ramirez imagines what really killed off the dinosaurs. The cartoon also features an ancient fossil. Click to enlarge: I don’t suppose socialism actually killed the dinosaurs, but
»
