Not going to extremes

Socialism threat not very scary

My job requires listening to trial runs of next year’s election rhetoric. The claim the whole country will go socialist if Democrats win almost makes me laugh.

The Democratic Party was a small pile of ash after the last presidential election. The Republicans’ lead across the nation in state legislative seats, governorships and U.S. House seats reached its highest level in almost a century. The GOP held the White House, both Houses of Congress and a judiciary so riddled with vacancies their party could quickly fill them and assert control of the third branch, too. They did.

This is a GOP-lite country. We are all just living in it. Yet the Republicans got themselves shellacked in the 2018 elections. Now those remaining beg for re-election by saying we will slide into becoming the United States of Socialistic Republics without them.

So when a party loses dominance like they had in 2016 and does it while the business cycle is still above water, whose fault is it? No government since Czar Nicholas II’s has done a better job of clearing the path for socialism if this country really is on the brink.

The socialists today do not enjoy great leadership either. Look at the Democratic primary.

The Democrats’ presidential front-runner, former vice president Joe Biden, runs on nostalgia. He leads the pack not because his party’s “establishment” is strong. He is ahead because his opposition struggles against a 76-year old man whose main claim to fame is his cheerful willingness to ride shotgun to the last Democratic president.

Replace the word “establishment” wherever it pops up with “likely Democratic primary voters.” That gives a clearer picture of where the Democratic race stands so far.

Meanwhile, the change agent who supposedly almost toppled the “establishment” nominee of 2016 is stuck with roughly the same percentage in every poll. Want the liberal wing to win? Convince Sen. Bernie Sanders to drop out and clear the way for Sen. Elizabeth Warren. A divided left loses. If Sanders could win the nomination, his head start as the left-wing standard bearer of 2016 and his seasoned campaign organization would have shut Warren out.

Biden will probably lose the Iowa Caucus in February. This is because the purpose of the Democrats’ Iowa Caucus, so far as I can tell, is to boost whichever prominently liberal candidate is most likely to lose in the general election. The “establishment” is going to Iowa with one candidate with worthwhile support. Meanwhile,

the most liberal wing is going in with two. The liberals will split the best vote they will ever get. Then the race goes to the primaries — New Hampshire and the Southern states.

Suppose the Democrats nominate someone who wins the election. Every conservative justice put on a federal bench since January 2017 will pound the gavel on socialism and anything else liberals want to do. That is the only wall the GOP managed to build in the last two and a half years.

Suppose I am wrong. Suppose — or pretend — the nation does totter on the brink of socialism. Perhaps a guy who personifies every vice capitalism has or is accused of having was not the best choice to save capitalism.

President Donald Trump inherited his money. As a businessman, he is all flash and no substance. Such tax records he has not succeeded in suppressing show he lost great gouts of daddy’s money his whole career. Along the way he stiffed contractors. He even managed to lose money operating a casino.

“The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings,” a couple of Pulitzer prize winners at the New York Times reported. “They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.”

Yet he keeps living the high life. He is rewarded with the highest office in the land.

This administration’s single major accomplishment requiring approval by Congress is a tax cut for guys like him. This contributes greatly to a trillion-dollar deficit. Meanwhile, the president’s tariffs — imposed by executive fiat — costs the average American household an estimated at $800 a year. Any benefit to the treasury of the tariffs is lost paying out subsidies to businesses hurt by trade wars.

With friends like this, capitalism needs no enemies. With enemies like this, socialism needs no friends.

Doug Thompson