Rally Around the Flag: The Specter of Socialism is On the Horizon

WASHINGTON, DC, Aug 6 — Question for all those wannabe socialists in Congress and in the mobs of city streets: how’s it going? From the looks of things, you’ve got a fight on your hands.

Even in the city of Seattle, long a refuge for liberal Democrats, “tensions are mounting,” says The Hill in an article headlined, Angst grips America’s most liberal city. It’s gotten “so heated here between a rising generation of ultra-progressive leaders and activists and the more traditionally liberal Democrats who have dominated the city’s politics for so long that the old Seattle way of compromise politics has been eschewed for one of protest and purity.”

And, according to the National Review, die-hard socialists are going to nasty extremes in order to keep Seattle on its voyage to communist bliss. They are using their tried and true schemes in their quest, namely payoffs and intimidation. For example, they are said to be handing out $100 so-called “democracy vouchers” to voters that can be resent to candidates to help fund their campaigns. And they’re imposing strict limits on corporate campaign contributions that might be available to opposition candidates from so-called “foreign-influenced” corporations, otherwise known as international corporations.

“At the same time, black-bloc activists and Antifa militants intimidate any potential opposition by disrupting events, vandalizing homes, and even orchestrating death threats against political adversaries.”

So, who are these disrupters to which the National Review refers? Whoever they are, they include members of both the fanatical, left-wing Antifa movement and black bloc anarchists, radicals who dress in black and who mask their faces. Both of these groups were players in the May Day riots in Seattle this year. Bear in mind that while the holiday was once a traditional spring festival, it was usurped by socialists and communists in 1889. They relabeled it International Workers’ Day, and it became a worldwide movement for anarchists, labor activists, and leftists in general.

To be sure, the police were handicapped by Seattle’s Defund the Police [DTP] efforts. The notion of defunding the police has become a national pastime; Seattle cut police funding by $69 million. They lost 158 police officers and supervisors.

Meanwhile, the nationwide DTP movement cynically suggests on its Website that they did us a favor by cutting police budgets and resources by a staggering amount approaching a billion dollars. “Over the past six months, organizers across the country have won significant victories in campaigns to reallocate funds from bloated police department budgets to meet community needs. They extracted over $840 million dollars from police departments and secured investments of at least $160 million dollars in communities. They removed cops from schools in over 25 cities, saving an additional $34 million for investment in meeting student and community needs. They have engaged more people than ever in conversation around defunding police departments as a pathway to achieving genuine and lasting public safety by meeting material needs and resourcing and building community-based safety strategies, and to eventually abolishing policing altogether.”

Some might say what is happening in Seattle, and other cities is a local issue. But the National Review sees it as already spreading nationwide. “If the business sector wants to protect its own interests, it must rapidly adapt to this new reality. It’s no longer enough for local Chambers of Commerce to drop leaflets before local elections; they must build a permanent counterbalance to the progressive-socialists. They must begin by commissioning original policy research, funding local neighborhood groups, and building a political alliance of conservatives, moderates, and old-line liberals. In other words, they must re-establish a balance of power in America’s cities.”

Efforts to replace democracy in America with socialism go back to the early 1800s when religious communities sought to experiment with a philosophy they called utopian communal living. Although most of these communes were religious rather than political in nature, they were based on collectivism, a rudimentary form of communism. They obviously didn’t flourish, mainly because of the principles upon which our nation was founded.

One scholarly examination of why socialism is doomed to fail in America is a book called It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States. In it, authors Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks explain, “The Revolutionary Americans, having defeated a tyrannical king, feared the power of a unified, central state. They sought to avoid tyranny by checks and balances, dividing power among different political bodies, all subject to a Bill of Rights limiting government authority. The anti-statist, anti-authoritarian component of American ideology, derived from Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, remains an underlying source of the weakness of socialism in the United States.”

John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.