Socialism, Corruption, and the Decline of Democrat Party Integrity

Modern Democrat leaders – rising “socialists” – are not Truman, JFK, Carter, or Clinton Democrats. They are humorless, shameless, arrogant, and entitled, sure that they can run our lives better – yet feckless, spendthrift, flawed, and deceitful.

Nationally, the once proud Democratic Party – which boasted Senators like Maine’s Edmund Muskie, Georgia’s Sam Nunn, Washington’s “Scoop” Jackson – is now the prowling ground for shameless, ill-informed “Socialists” or “Progressives.”

Their agenda is shocking, or should be, even to Democrats from Maine to California. It aims to upend the Constitution, gut our Supreme Court, military, Electoral College (which protects smaller states), and private sector. It would take rights from individuals, wildly overregulate, mandate, and nationalize companies.

Many national and local Democrats are willing to accept their money, labor, and this radical, extreme agenda to win – but such extremism comes at a cost: trust lost.

Many modern Democrats –little in common with the older patriotic, working, self-reliant Democrats – seem ready to embrace extremes, part of administrations that pushed costly mandates, intolerably high property taxes and income taxes, chasing their tax base away, saddled taxpayers with unsustainable solar and wind subsidies, embraced defunding the police, drug trafficking, overdoses, illegal immigration.

The biggest change, judging by events nationwide – big fraud investigations, Medicaid abuses, theft of taxpayer money for votes, failure to pay hospitals, collapsing schools to sole-source contracts – is lost integrity, shameless corruption.

What appears to be a hallmark of the modern – versus the older – Democratic Party, if not a wider cultural disintegration and acceptance of lawlessness, is the rise of deceit, open speaking of untruths as if true, and shameless defense of these untruths.

Our Founding Fathers were clear: If massive spending, over-taxation, policy failures, and lost moral, legal, and political accountability become a norm, the republic will be in serious straits – as will any state in the Union.

On the topic of deceit – demise of trust in leaders – historically, clear-eyed observers are united. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Abraham Lincoln, and leaders from Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan knew it: Without public trust, we have nothing.

Put differently, leading Americans have often made the point in different ways. Wrote famed playwright Noel Coward, “It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit,” and George Orwell wrote: “In a time of universal deceit — telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Punchline: It is one thing to suffer poor leaders, those who pretend our Constitution, history, fiscal and moral policy do not matter – another to see deceit.

From Maine to Minnesota, New York to California, we see the dangerous alloy – bad policymaking, shameless socialism, with deceit. That has to be reversed.

Today’s “modern Democrats” or “Progressives” are not Democrats. Their deceit is poison. As the British sage, Edmund Burke, wrote: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Whatever your party, whether traditional Democrat, Republican, or Independent, we cannot be those people.