Socialist Sanders Plays Moral Judge

Bernie Sanders is calling on President Trump to “think about resigning,” citing past allegations of sexual misconduct against him, along with his infamous Access Hollywood vulgarity.

Anyone familiar with my writing knows I am not a Trump defender, but for the media to trumpet Sanders, of all people, as a moral judge — of Donald Trump or anyone else — indicates the measure of America’s political decay.

Senator Sanders is perhaps the most prominent and unapologetic socialist in American electoral politics. Socialism, as a principle of total societal organization, has been tried repeatedly for a century, to varying degrees of thoroughness, on all the inhabited continents of the Earth. It has been instituted in dozens of variations, against widely diverse cultural and historical backgrounds, by leaders of various temperaments and professional backgrounds. It has been promoted by both militant revolutionaries and self-described pacifists. Its intellectual vanguard has been peopled by educators, doctors, and poets.

In other words, there can no longer be any excuse, qualification, or exemption broad enough to dismiss all the declared attempts at socialism as “inauthentic” socialism, “misapplied” socialism, or “corrupted” socialism. Socialism has proved to be just what you see. Its most famous instantiations — all of them lauded and promoted by the socialist thinkers and activists of the free world at the time — have led to massive failure and destruction, to put it mildly.

Hence, all retroactive attempts to expunge its failures and destruction from the annals of “true socialism” must be regarded as just so much special pleading by those who insist on defending an idea against all tangible evidence of the disparity between its self-descriptions and its existential realities.

The hundred-year experiment is more than complete. It is redundant. And the results of the past century of socialist implementation, experimentation, and modification speak for themselves:

The summary executions of untold thousands of people for the “crime” of being property owners, blood relatives of property owners, or descendants of property owners.

Forced famines that killed uncountable millions in the Soviet Union, in the name of “collectivization.”

Mass killings in the name of “cultural revolution,” running anywhere from fifty to a hundred million victims in communist China, along with the symbolically important Tiananmen Square massacre of university students (Bernie’s core supporters) rallying for more freedom.

Nazi (national socialist) Germany killing millions of “impure” humans in concentration camps, and starting a world war that cost the lives of tens of millions more. (Neo-Marxists like Sanders always use Nazi Germany as moral leverage to balance the scales against the crimes of their Marxist-style socialism, but why let them? The underlying premises of both sides — collectivist tribalism, political progressivism, the deification of the State, the denial of individual dignity, and the denigration of traditional morality — are essentially identical.)

The destruction of Cuba by Fidel Castro, along with his gun-crazed henchman and lifelong defender of Stalin, Dr. Che Guevara. 

The “killing fields” of Cambodia, in which more than a million people were murdered by a communist regime.

North Korea, the world’s last surviving gulag state, in which parents sell their daughters to Chinese villages in exchange for rice, and from which soldiers full of ten-inch parasites risk almost certain death to escape.

The normalization of mass abortion policies led by progressive icons such as Margaret Sanger, with the original express purpose of reducing inferior racial groups.

The calculated and deliberate destruction of the private family — nature’s buffer protecting the individual from absorption into the collectivizing State — through compulsory schooling laws, feminist attacks on traditional manhood and motherhood, the propagandistic promotion of promiscuity, and the denigration of heterosexual monogamy. 

The active assault on all unifying moral structures, e.g., religions, which are based on the premise that there are powers higher than humans, and therefore laws higher than those of the State.

The weakening or disintegration of national economies (i.e., general prosperity and material security) throughout the modern world, proportionate to the degree of socialism’s implementation within any given nation.

This list could easily be extended to include a hundred more examples, all equally damning of the underlying idea. But why bother? As I noted above, the experiment has become redundant. What is shown by this experiment is that mass death, displacement, violence, and moral disintegration, along with the general diminution of human worth and respect for life, are not mere accidents or byproducts of socialist thinking. They are of its essence.

No one, at the end of this long, horrifying field study, can advocate socialism innocently, unaware of its real results in practice. The neo-Marxism of men like Bernie Sanders cannot be ascribed to ignorance of the true nature of what he is advocating, unless we presume that he is literally of moron-level intelligence.

Nor can we excuse Sanders as we might someone who has never seen any other way of life. Sanders is an old man who has lived his entire life in the country that was once history’s most direct and inescapably obvious counterargument to everything Karl Marx wrote. His ignorance, if that’s what it must be called, falls into the category of willful blindness.

Sanders is America’s most prominent and unapologetic elected socialist, which means he is her most prominent public apologist for all the evils enumerated above, along with all the associated ugliness I chose not to mention. For him to set himself up as a moral inquisition against any other man is hypocrisy of absurd proportions. For the mainstream media to get away with reciting his spewings as though they were a respectable contribution to the public dialogue is evidence of the extent of the neo-Marxist subversion of the American popular mind.

Bernie Sanders is an advocate of, and apologist for, the most comprehensively destructive political philosophy of the modern age. Donald Trump, for all his faults, is not that.

Sit down and shut up, Bernie.

(This article originally appeared at American Thinker.)

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