Add The California Post on Google What was once unthinkable is now reality.
A recent UC Berkeley poll found that 58% of California Democrats have a positive view of the label “socialist.”
In a nation founded on freedom, that finding is striking.
Socialism, after all, is an ideology of oppression that’s brought mass death, forced labor, famine and executions to a long list of nations, including China, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, and the former USSR.
The bad news is, some Dems here have a crush on socialism. The good news is, it reads like a fling, not something the state will settle down with.
California voters may be, in predominance, devoted Dems who despise the demonized Donald Trump.
They still want freedom. They still bristle at being bossed around. And at times they’ve been known to correct the overreach of their own party.
State voters have passed and upheld bans on race-based preferential treatment, for example. They’ve passed corrections to overly permissive criminal justice “reforms.” They’ve rejected rent control and a plot to scuttle bail costs for accused criminals.
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Their record’s not perfect, but it’s also not radical.
Perhaps, as per the Berkeley poll, state sentiment’s shifting.
Socialism (with a smile!) sells in blue enclaves in part because it’s faddish, on trend, of the moment.
It’s a shiny object glorified on social media to an audience too young to remember the Cold War –– or the ghoulish history of socialist and communist regimes.
It taps into disgruntlement, class envy, entitlement.
And it sells utopian fantasies about, when it comes down to it, taking other people’s stuff.
The latter might win a few elections; if so, the backlash will come –– as it has against loony policies like “defund the police” and adding boys to girls’ sports.
Far-left radical approaches don’t work in the real world … and they clash with our national DNA besides.
The United States was founded on freedom, on individual rights, on constitutional protections for each American.
It’s the land of the Abe Lincoln, JFK and the ideal of the self-made man.
Even California, with its sharp left turn in recent decades, retains a yearning for opportunity, for innovation, for entrepreneurship –– and for freedom on the edge of an ocean.
Granted, US culture has shifted dramatically in the years since Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential bid was tanked in part by the label “liberal.”
Even so, the laws of politics and economics hold firm.
Down the road of socialism lies repression, privation and ruin. And to paraphrase the great Margaret Thatcher: Eventually you run out of other people’s stuff to take.
