The Democratic Party has come a long way since Bill Clinton was president — and not in a good way. In 1993, the first year of his presidency, Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) introduced legislation to end automatic birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens; today, Democrats routinely call for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and advocating illegal alien suffrage.
Clinton famously described abortion as “safe and legal but rare”; now, many Democrats promote the idea of “shouting your abortion” as a perverse badge of honor.
On marriage, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act to define federal law as one man and one woman; today, Democrats struggle to even tell us what a woman is, with polyamory emerging as the next frontier in social experimentation.
But of all the issues where the Democratic Party has moved sharply to the left since the Clinton era, economic policy stands out most dramatically. During his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over.” He signed the most transformative welfare reform law in a generation, deregulated Wall Street, slashed taxes on capital gains, and ended his presidency with consecutive balanced federal budgets.
Clinton was greatly assisted by the dot-com boom and a fiscally conservative Congress, but facts remain unchanged. Today’s Democratic Party looks absolutely nothing like its more moderate 1990s-era forebear.
What began as an incipient Barack Obama-era trend toward big government has now, during the post-Joe Biden era, emerged as a strong majority sentiment. A Gallup poll from last September found that 42% of Democrats have a positive view of capitalism, while 66% hold a positive view of socialism.
Leading kingmakers in today’s Democratic Party are (literal) Soviet Union-honeymooning communists, such as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
The singular party top dog right now is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who quotes Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto,” speaks of the “warmth of collectivism,” and is implementing city-owned grocery stores across the Big Apple.
This represents some serious intellectual whiplash.
It must be noted that communism has been the single deadliest ideology in human history, responsible for an estimated 100 million deaths. Additionally, socialism and communism have resulted in horrific resource scarcity and immeasurable immiseration everywhere they have been attempted.
At its most basic level, socialism is contrary to human nature. Men have a natural right to the fruits of their labor, provided those fruits do not undermine the common good. It is also natural to value the flourishing of one’s family and tribe over that of the polity — let alone the whole world.
As Dennis Prager has often noted, socialism violates two of the 10 Commandments: “do not steal” and “do not covet.”
Republicans are presently confused about what exactly they should run on as they prepare for this fall’s midterm elections. Inflation remains stubbornly higher than it ought to be despite being reduced from its catastrophic Biden-era peak. The Trump administration has been unwilling to finish the campaign launched against Iran. Republicans have a great story to tell on crime but seem uninterested in telling it effectively.
The administration has had tremendous success stanching illegal immigration, but the GOP’s consultant class frets that focusing on immigration would hemorrhage gains with Latino voters.
The solution for Republicans to defy historical trends and retain both houses of Congress next January may come through a concerted socialism-centric campaign. In previous cycles, Republicans might have been accused of fearmongering by running against a “socialist” bogeyman; that is simply not the case anymore — in a world where third-worldist DSA radicals like Darializa Avila Chevalier and Melat Kiros are knocking off longstanding incumbents in Democratic congressional primaries, and where a vocal foe of capitalism is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The threat is here, and it is real.
Perhaps even more to the point: Latino voters who fled failed socialist regimes in places like Havana and Caracas do not want this outcome. Middle-class suburban mothers concerned about dim job prospects for their children also reject such policies. Gallup data further indicates that independents share this sentiment.
In an April speech in Austin, Texas, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued that progressivism and American constitutionalism are fundamentally incompatible. It is also true that genuine socialism is incompatible with the American way of life as it has been experienced for two and a half centuries.
Josh Hammer is host of “The Josh Hammer Show” podcast. He authors the weekly newsletter, “The Josh Hammer Report,” and is a syndicated columnist through Creators Syndicate and a research fellow at the Edmund Burke Foundation.
