Democrats Double Down on a High Risk Hand

Member Group : Jerry Shenk

The Democratic Party’s pretenses of moderation are over. The radical left now controls it.

The Democrats’ radical elements are organized, energized – violently, in some communities – so, in their desperation to regain power, party leadership foolishly courts them, even though radicals are relatively few compared to the party’s narrow moderate and moderate-conservative majority.

Even though the Democrats’ rank-and-file are primarily moderate, the modern party not only tolerates, but encourages the political ambitions of radical-leftists, and allows them to formulate policy by default.

The party indulges the radical fringe, because Democrats need their votes.

Of course, that means traditional Democrats must be deceived into thinking moderates still formulate party policy, a deception that enabled the nomination of Joe Biden, an ancient, amiable, but malleable Trojan horse whose decades-long political career enriched him and his family.

Here’s how it happened: In 2016, avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, who isn’t even a registered Democrat, nearly won the party’s presidential nomination. Hillary Clinton secured her nomination only through back room machinations and establishment-controlled convention super-delegates. Nonetheless, Sanders forced Hillary leftward, undoubtedly contributing to her general election failure.

Mindful of Sanders’ 2016 near-success, 2020 contenders, including Joe Biden, ran hard-left alongside Sanders. The field’s unanimous radical campaign posturing further institutionalized the party’s political, social, cultural and economic immoderation.

Once again, party elders intervened to prevent Sanders’ nomination, but, to console Sanders’ energized hard-left minority, they awarded Sanders a central role in crafting the policies on which Joe Biden must run.

Everyone should read their platform.

In a February video, Biden clearly said, “… if you elect me, your taxes are going to be raised, not cut…” Now, in a campaign ad, Biden calls repeating that “a lie.”

In addition to increasing certain personal income tax rates, Biden’s $4 trillion tax grab includes the largest real increase in capital gains rates in history, an increase that would stimulate a huge stock selloff as investors lock in lower existing tax rates. Almost everyone in or nearing retirement would be affected by the impact on pension funds and personal 401k accounts. Cities and states – including Pennsylvania – with massive unfunded public employee pension liabilities would be devastated.

Biden’s proposed increase in corporate tax rates would send jobs offshore (again), raise costs to consumers and damage American companies’ ability to compete in world markets.

Biden supports a bill to consider financial reparations to black Americans for their years in slavery, even though, according to the NY Times, the last former slave died in 1971.

Biden promises a route to single-payer government health care through a government-administered “high-quality public option plan…without deductibles” that would effectively encourage employers to dump their popular employee health plans covering 180 million Americans onto the government program. Care would necessarily be rationed.

On immigration policy, Biden would declare a 100-day moratorium on deportations of illegal immigrants, including felons, and offer an “immigration reform package” providing a “roadmap to citizenship” for anyone in the country illegally. Socialists have sought open borders for years.

Biden’s education policy would ban charter schools and private school vouchers. He would also reinstate Obama-era Title IX “protections” for transgender students, so women and girls will share public facilities with biological men who are afflicted with gender dysphoria – or claim to be.

Biden pledges to stop states from enforcing common sense laws that impose clinical sanitation standards on abortion mills, pre-abortion “parental notification requirements, mandatory waiting periods, and ultrasound requirements.” Biden has been denied communion in some Catholic churches because of his pro-abortion views.

Joe first ran for president thirty-two years ago. At age 77, this is his last shot, so Biden has embraced his party’s socialist wing.

History teaches that nations have been ruined when minority factions that recognize no limits on government power successfully impose their will on everyone. If Americans wish to avoid the fate of, for example, Weimar Germany, voters must join to defeat militant radicals.

In a two-party system, there are only two practical options for disaffected rank-and-file Democrats who reject the excesses of liberal governance – not voting or voting for Republicans. In 2016, many did.

Metaphorically, the party dealt itself Joe Biden “up,” with a hard-left platform “in the hole,” following which elected Democrats’ clear sympathy for lawless urban anarchists, and indifference to public safety upped the ante.

Now, with the election imminent, desperate Democrats are forced to double-down on an already high-risk hand.

https://www.pottsmerc.com/opinion/jerry-shenk-democrats-double-down-on-a-high-risk-hand/article_02a3baee-01ae-11eb-9517-ef1c89e4fba1.html