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President Donald Trump has been caricatured in many ways. Now we must add Captain Obvious to the list.
During the State of the Union address, Trump announced that America would never be a socialist country.
It was a jaw-dropping moment—one of those “duh” statements that everyone should already know and which doesn’t need voicing.
Or, does it?
Socialist ideas are, shockingly, gaining approval. The Gallup Poll has been measuring socialist attitudes for the last decade. The most recent poll showed that 57 percent of Democrats have a positive image of socialism. Fewer than half have a positive image of capitalism.
Democratic socialist, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, made a convincing run for the presidency in 2016, narrowly losing the party’s nomination to Hillary Clinton. Now he’s back and easily raising money and gaining support for a 2020 presidential run.
Sanders and many other Democratic presidential contenders back the socialist-leaning ideas of the Green New Deal, a plan that would dramatically increase government intervention into the lives of the average citizen and diminish autonomy. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, California Sen. Kamala Harris and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand have all voiced support for it. Others who are considering a run for the presidency—and haven’t yet aligned themselves with socialist thinking—will likely face pressure from the Democratic Party to do so.
Politicians, or the ruling class, have the luxury of coming up with freedom-taking schemes to impose upon the working class. Legislators protect themselves—not us. They passed Obamacare without reading it, because it didn’t apply to them. The fallout from socialism won’t affect them, either.
Venezuela is an example of how socialism is good for the ruling class and bad for everyone else. Socialist President Nicolas Maduro doesn’t appear to have missed a meal. Venezuelans, though, must scavenge through garbage trucks to find food. Finding electricity is tough, too.
When we’re forced to make obvious statements, as Trump did in the State of the Union address, it’s an indicator that a crisis may already be on our doorstep. Our country has been through it several times.
In the 1700s, stating the obvious meant that there should be no taxation without representation. Or as the colonists more eloquently stated at the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, “…only representatives of the people of these colonies, are persons chosen therein by themselves, and that no taxes ever have been, or can be constitutionally imposed on them, but by their respective legislatures.” It preceded the Revolutionary War.
In the 1800s, the obvious wrong was slavery. President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that stated, “…all persons held as slaves…are and henceforward shall be free.” The year was 1863—three years into the bloody Civil War.
In the 1900s, it took a world war to acknowledge the obvious—that the Jewish people, like any people, have the right to existence. But not before Nazi Germany killed six million of them.
We’re in a new century, with all new foreign threats. It’s no time to generate the home-grown threat of growing acceptance of socialism.
The threat of socialist ideas, though, needn’t accelerate into a full-blown crisis. We can hang on to our freedoms by voting for and placing the right people on the ballot—people who denounce socialism.
The citizens of the land of the free and the home of the brave deserve the bare minimum of choosing between a Democratic capitalist and a Republican capitalist in the 2020 presidential election.
And here we go again. Shockingly, having to state the obvious.
Moving the Conversation Along 