Too many 'progressives' would rather take out Trump than stop socialists from burning down the republic. Now that's stupid.
The republic Benjamin Franklin wondered if we could keep is in trouble. Big trouble.
It's been trending that way for a while, but this Election Day could put a bullet in the old girl's stomach.
The polls don't necessarily worry me. They have been little more than psyops aimed at depressing conservative turnout in the Trump era. Who could forget this gem from the Des Moines Register in early November 2024: "Kamala Harris leapfrogs Donald Trump to take lead near Election Day". The president won Iowa by 13 percentage points, swept all seven swing states and grabbed the popular vote on the way to GOP control of the White House and Congress.
What worries me are voters. Sadly, many of them are stupid. And angry. Dean Vernon Wormer of National Lampoon's Animal House advised, "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life." The same applies for the furious and the dumb. For a constitutional republic, it's a lethal cocktail.
'The American Experiment is Over'
We have millions of Americans heading to the polls who believe socialism will make their lives more affordable. That price controls and government takeover of private industry will ease inflation and cure what ails capitalism, so abhorrent to their central planning sensibilities.
That's idiocy on a dangerous scale. A Venezuelan scale.
Oil-rich Venezuela went from one of Latin America's wealthiest countries to its poorest within the span of about 30 years. From one of the highest standards of living in the world to starving Venezuelans eating zoo animals. The common denominator: socialism. The reigns of Hugo Chavez and successor Nicolas Maduro turned a once prosperous, oil rich democracy into a tropical hellscape within two decades.
The collapse happened right before our eyes, within our lifetimes.
Cuba is much closer. Just 90 miles separates the squalor of communist Cuba and the free state of Florida — and the overall prosperity of America.
So it's heartbreaking to those who have survived and escaped such regimes to know that a whopping 43 percent of Americans now hold a positive view of socialism, according to a Gallup poll released earlier this fall. The troubling number marks the first time socialism garnered more than 39 percent support in the poll since 2010, during Democrat Barack Obama's first presidential term.
Socialism's rise in popularity is cause for deep concern.
"If a majority of Americans think that socialism is the right path, well the American experiment is over in a sense. It would be very, very difficult to recover from that. That's a multi-generational recovery kind of thing," Charles Steele, director of the Center for Commerce and Freedom at Hillsdale College, told me on a recent episode of The Federalist Radio Hour.
'Pro-Socialist Propoganda'
How did we get here? Ignorance. Willful ignorance.
From pre-K through grad school, America's education system has failed America and the American Dream in many ways. None more so than in sweetening socialism and poisoning capitalism in the minds of the last few generations of voters. Marxist critical theory — oppressors vs. the oppressed — dogma has indoctrinated millions to believe that socialism can work if only done right, failure after failure notwithstanding. That's like Tina Turner believing Ike could change.
"For decades, the U.S. public education system has failed to accurately teach generations of American students about the true history of socialism," Samantha Fillmore and Christopher Taigo wrote in September in a column for The Heartland Institute. "Even worse, a movement is afoot in middle schools in which vulnerable children are being indoctrinated with pro-socialist propaganda and neo-Marxist rhetoric."
The kids that have gone through the system are now voting, some have been for several election cycles. And they are electing socialists, lots of them, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. And they're poised to put many more Marxists in power, including antisemitic, America-hating leftists like New York congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier and Michigan Senate contestant Abdul El-Sayed.
Too many "progressive" voters would rather take out Trump than stop socialists from burning down the republic. Now that's stupid.
'Wake Up to What Socialism Is'
There's a similar disconnect on the right. Conservatives disenchanted with Trump and perhaps more so with feckless Senate Republicans who did very little with their majority could end up sitting these midterms out. They have some understandable grievances. Whether you're in the "Iran can never have nukes" crowd or the "end the endless wars" contingent, Trump's war in Iran has been hard on the price of gas, diesel, and the cost of a lot of things that rely on gas and diesel.
While Sen. Majority Leader John Thune and his circle of trust RINOs have proved to be masters at inaction on critical legislation, Republicans sitting out this existential election may be the ultimate example of cutting off the nose to spite the face.
Steele believes that the majority of Americans still aren't on board with the Venezuela model, and that the democratic socialist movement in America will ultimately fail.
"But it's going to take determination, it's going to take serious thinking and helping people to wake up to what socialism is and how dangerous it is," the economics professor said.
Are enough voters awake to save this election, to save this republic? Or will the stupidity of socialism rule the day?
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