There can no longer be any doubt that Bolshevik Bernie Sanders is a runaway freight train with the Democrat establishment tied to the tracks in front of him near a stop called Super Tuesday.
Sanders absolutely steamrolled the field in Nevada, creating the sadly funny optic of Joe Biden celebrating like it was 1999, apparently thrilled that Sanders won only around 2.5 times as many votes as he did.
If Sanders can keep his Havana daydreaming under control, he will sail to the convention with the lion’s share of the delegates provided by actual voters. Considering the voting coalition he pulled together in Nevada and the laws of political momentum, it is a good bet he may secure a majority of delegates and not just a plurality.
Democrats are almost out of time to change the trajectory of the race, although it remains to be seen if Sanders fantasizing about Cuban literacy rates slows him down. Some Democrats are begging the New York Nondisclosure Agreement to carpet bomb the airwaves and social media with attacks on Sanders knowing that if Sanders sails into the convention with a significant lead, they will be left holding a menu with a couple of equally horrible choices, the political equivalent of Brussels sprouts or liver and onion.
Their hope to pull off a convention bait and switch works only if somebody can keep the delegate count close. But who can pull it off? Mike Bloomberg? Not without a charisma transplant and the removal of layers of baggage. So far, he and Shrill Indian have combined to net one more delegate than is currently in the hands of the candidate from Minnesota who nobody has noticed is in the race. Joe Biden? He was last seen fantasizing about running for the Senate, even as his South Carolina firewall is fraying. Pious Pete, the Bible “scholar”? Sanders could not have hand-selected a better field of awful candidates to propel him.
At this point, suggestions to stop Sanders range from the fanciful to the absurd, with Joe Scarborough winning first prize for stupidest suggestion when he indicated it was time for Shrill Indian to drop out to help stop the Bolshevik, apparently surmising that her core of socialist voters can’t wait to help Mike get it done.
An increasing number of Democrat talking heads are resigning themselves to the Sanders storm rolling in and trying to prepare the ground to receive its rain. Liberal revisionists have tried out two lines while the race is still somewhat in play: the Paul Krugman he’s not really a crazy Marxist…he just plays one on TV special and the one about vote for Bernie because he won’t be able to do the crazy stuff he has promised. These are political losers, but they are just the warm-up act for the socialism revisionism to come. Today’s Democrat Sanders critics will soon pivot to singing homilies to socialism.
What we are going to be hearing ad nauseam is that Sanders is for a kinder and gentler form of Democrat socialism like what we see under Scandinavian skies in places like Denmark. Bernie loves to talk about how he wants to turn America into Denmark while spitting out proposals that would make old-school Soviets blush.
His Denmark delusion is hampered by the simple fact that Denmark is not a socialist country. Denmark ranked higher on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic freedom (12th) than the U.S. (18th).
The Prager Institute nailed it when it said Denmark is a “small capitalist country (and the size and population of Maryland) whose citizens pay oodles in taxes in exchange for oodles in benefits.” The only redeeming feature that allows the sky-high taxes and benefits is the Danes’ capitalism. Cut that leg off their stool, and they would be the Cuba that so enamors Sanders.
With his Denmark fetish, one can picture Sanders playing the role of Hamlet, holding one of any number of skulls of those people killed by Marxist regimes, muttering, “To be a Marxist country. That is the answer.”
America’s Hamlet is preaching societal collapse, and even some of the Democrats know it, which is why they pulled the “go ahead and vote for him because he can’t do his crazy stuff anyway” argument off the shelf.
So how did we get to the point where the nation founded by champions of liberty is on the cusp of nominating a man who is a fellow ideological traveler with history’s greatest foes of liberty? The Democrats have been on a steady march toward this Marxist moment for generations.
Ronald Reagan, in one of the greatest American orations, delivered back in 1964, saw that we were heading toward the moment, noting that “back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his Party was taking the Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.”
We are now 84 years past that 1936 Al Smith epiphany, and we are nearing the finish line, which is not surprising, since socialism is the natural destination for big-government Democrats as each successive generation ups the ante on the generation that came before.
My first direct run-in with Marxism came in college in the late 1990s when I was working on a master’s degree. My first professor proudly declared himself a Marxist, which struck me as bizarre. But I soon realized that all my professors and most of my fellow students were also Marxists and that I was the real outlier. Since I had gone to a service academy for my undergraduate degree, I missed the memo that Marxism was cool, although it is now also seeping into military schools since many rely on the same pool of propaganda-pounding professors.
Most Americans don’t yet appreciate just how much Marxism and its grievance-mongering offshoots have become the university mainstream in America, but this is of profound importance. America’s colleges, with a few notable exceptions, have been churning out Marxists for decades, which is why an old Marxist who looks like a madman is this year’s surprise hot political commodity.
The short-term problem for Democrats is that there are still too many older voters they need with an understanding of history who are horrified at the prospect of socialism.