40 years after the ‘Miracle on Ice,’ socialism makes a comeback

Members of the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” U.S. Olympic hockey team have come under fire for joining President Trump at his Las Vegas rally last week wearing “Keep America Great” hats. In fact, their appearance was highly appropriate. Forty years ago, those players’ victory over the Soviets helped restore our nation’s faith in American greatness. A more troubling development in Nevada occurred the day after the rally, when Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. won the state’s Democratic caucuses, making him the undisputed front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination. Only in a country where many have forgotten the lessons of the Miracle on Ice would this be possible.

The Miracle on Ice came at a time when many believed the Soviet Union was ascendant and that the United States was on the decline. President Jimmy Carter bemoaned a “crisis of confidence . . . a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” Then, on Feb. 22, 1980, a bunch of American amateurs -- most of them college kids -- defeated the mighty Soviet team in Lake Placid, New York, and millions of Americans thought: If we can beat the them on the ice, we can beat them in the Cold War.

Four days after the Miracle on Ice, Ronald Reagan won the Republican primary in New Hampshire and soon promised to “make America great again.” As president, he boldly pledged that we would leave Soviet communism on the “ash heap of history” and, within the decade, the Berlin Wall was pulled down. The first blow was delivered not by a pickax, but by a hockey stick.

Four decades later, a new generation of Americans has grown up with no living memory of the Cold War, and apparently no understanding of what socialism wrought for the 100 million people killed by communist regimes and the billions of others who were either imprisoned or consigned to lives of abject poverty and totalitarian oppression.

How else to explain the rise of Sanders, who stood with those regimes and held them up as examples for the United States and the world?

In 1985, Sanders traveled to Nicaragua to celebrate the anniversary of the Soviet-backed Sandinista revolution.

In 1986, Sanders declared “I was very excited and impressed by the Cuban revolution.”

In 1988, Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union and gave a speech there praising Soviet health care and housing policies.

There was a term for people like Sanders back in the Cold War days: fellow traveler. Sanders claims he is not a communist, but a democratic socialist. You know who else might have made that claim? The German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). If you see the modifier “Democratic” in a country’s name, it’s a dead giveaway that it is a socialist dictatorship.

Sanders was wrong during the Cold War, and he is still wrong today. On Sunday, Sanders defended Castro in an interview with CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” saying, “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing?” Regarding Venezuela, a brutal Cuba-backed socialist narco-dictatorship, Sanders has opposed the recognition of opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the country’s legitimate interim president. Asked by the New York Times, “Is it appropriate for the United States to provide nonmilitary support for regime-change efforts, as the Trump administration did in Venezuela?” (emphasis added), Sanders replied “No.” And while Sanders now rails against Russia for its 2016 election interference, during the Obama administration he voted against the Magnitsky Act imposing sanctions against Russia for its human-rights abuses.

The idea that a man who embraced communist tyrants could soon be elected president of the United States is stunning - and would have been unthinkable 40 years ago during the Winter Games in Lake Placid. So, spare us the outrage if some of the heroes of those 1980 Olympics want to “Keep America Great.”