40 years after the ‘Miracle on Ice,’ socialism makes a comeback
WASHINGTON >> While Donald Trump was hosting members of the legendary 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team at a rally miles away, in Nevada last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — a socialist who embraced Sovietbacked regimes — 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. He called the country’s brutal dictator, Daniel Ortega, an “impressive guy,” and defended Ortega’s human-rights crackdown and suspension of civil liberties.
In 1986, Sanders declared “I was very excited and impressed by the Cuban revolution.” Three years later, he visited Castro’s tropical gulag where he praised the Cuban dictator for delivering “free health care, free education, free housing” and said that “under Castro, enormous progress has been made in improving the lives of poor people.” When he returned home he said of his visit “I did not see a hungry child. I did not see any homeless people . . . . The revolution there is far deeper and more profound than I understood it to be. It really is a revolution in terms of values.”
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.
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.”