Blue State Blues: Once Socialism Gets In, You Can Never Vote It Out

Joe Biden says he’s not a socialist. “I beat the socialist,” he protests.

He won the nomination for president, but as Bernie Sanders declared in April: “We have won the ideological battle.”

Biden is the liberal figurehead of what has become a socialist party. Biden’s platform — the “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force” — is a manifesto for state domination of the economy.

Even Biden’s rhetoric — calling for “revolution” to “fundamentally transform” America — is socialist now.

Ah, but this socialism isn’t going to be like Soviet communism, we are told. This is democratic socialism. That is, we will still have the vote, and our civil liberties.

But as F.A. Hayek argued last century in The Road to Serfdom, you cannot preserve individual freedom if the state controls your most basic economic choices.

We have seen that ourselves: once Obamacare “guaranteed” health insurance, Catholic nuns had to go to court to preserve their basic religious liberties.

Moreover, what the Democratic Party has planned is fundamentally undemocratic. They rejected the last democratic election; if they win in 2020, they intend to rig the system so they can never lose again.

They want to admit D.C. and Puerto Rico as states, creating a permanent Senate majority. They will kill the filibuster, then pass amnesty and create millions of new Democratic voters. Finally, they will pack the courts with liberals to override any checks on their power.

Former President Barack Obama cast these changes as necessary to overcome the legacy of “systemic racism.” At John Lewis’s funeral in July, Obama cast the filibuster — which he himself used — as a relic of the Jim Crow era.

The Biden campaign has cast President Donald Trump as a white supremacist champion — though Biden’s hoax claims about neo-Nazis in Charlottesville imploded when Vice President Mike Pence fact-checked Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) onstage.

I was born in a white supremacist country — South Africa. My parents emigrated to the U.S. shortly after I was born: they did not want to raise their kids in a racist society, and thought it would only change through violent revolution.

As it turned out, South Africa’s transition was peaceful. Even before black South Africans had the vote, whites voted two-to-one to approve the apartheid government’s negotiations with Nelson Mandela toward a non-racial democratic future.

I went back to South Africa as a graduate student — and a confirmed leftist, enthusiastic about the socialist nature of South Africa’s new constitution, which provided “socioeconomic rights” for basic necessities like health care.

What I learned was jarring: not only did socialism make people worse off, but it was impossible to get rid of after it failed.

South Africa’s ruling party has been in power for 26 years. It casts every alternative to statism as a yearning for the  racist past.

What my experience has taught me, as a former South African, is that you can vote to get rid of white supremacy, but you cannot vote to get rid of socialism. It takes over every institution and demands loyalty to its redistributionist ethic.

You can see it already in “Critical Race Theory,” seeping into our schools; you can see it in professional sports; you will be forced to acknowledge it by mobs of activists who demand you kneel and raise your fist in solidarity to the cause.

Look at California, where I live today. Democrats control supermajorities in the legislature and every state office. In theory, Republicans could win back control one day. In reality, Democrats have raised taxes and regulations so much that middle class homeowners and small business owners — two core Republican constituencies — are simply leaving in droves.

The state is run by the very rich as a cultural vanity project, with the poor treated as voting fodder, bought off by new social welfare programs. In the midst of recent fires and electricity shortages, Democrats found time to reduce penalties for pedophilia and create a new reparations commission.

In 2016, California legalized “ballot harvesting,” allowing party operatives to collect unlimited mail-in ballots from voters. It is a practice regarded as fraud everywhere else in the world. Nancy Pelosi wants to take it nationwide; it was one of the provisions of her so-called coronavirus “relief” bill.

It will be among the first priorities of a Democratic Congress.

If President Trump is your problem, the Constitution solves that problem for you. If he wins in November, he will leave office in 2025 — because if he doesn’t, his own Republicans will force him out.

But if Joe Biden wins, and the Sanders-Obama cohort takes power behind him, you will never get rid of them. Never.

Democrats need to be taught — now — that riots and radicalism do not pay. They need to learn to reject socialism before you can trust them with your vote again.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.