. . . of the Democratic Party. Who tilled the soil in which his ideology took root?
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL explains. This essay was written before the Democratic establishment closed ranks around former Vice President Biden, but the thesis still holds (emphasis added).
[Senator] Sanders wouldn't be this close to the White House if not for the complicity of Democrats and the liberals [read progressives] who dominate the academy ad media. Rather than fighting the ideas that animate him and millennial voters, they have . . .
. . . indulged and promoted them. They created the political environment in which he could prosper. Consider the intellectual currents he is riding:
The attack on capitalism and markets. Like Tony Blair in Britain, Bill Clinton's New Democrats accommodated the economic lessons of Ronald Reagan. By the Obama Presidency, all that had changed. The left blamed markets for the 2008 panic and crash -- not failed government regulations, subsidies for bad housing risks, or too loose monetary policy.
Then came the socialist intellectual comeback let by French economists Thomas Piketty ("Capital"), Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, inequality replaced growth as the top economic policy concern. The economists resurrected the anti-market ideas and tax policies of the 1930s, and they were celebrated by the Democratic press. Occupy Wall Street became the street version of this movement and was praised by less less than Barack Obama.
And praised -- though praise is too mild a word for the newspaper's very moist embrace of Occupy -- by our very own Houston Chronicle. Continuing . . .
It's a short ideological hop from there to 60% marginal tax rates, wealth taxes, the demonization of billionaires, and equating business success with "corruption," and Mr. Sanders and [Ms.] Elizabeth Warren do. Millennials heard Democrats assail "the rich" for years, but Bernie has the courage of their pretensions.
The rise of left-wing intolerance on campus. From the late 1960s on, the political left flooded into the academy and rewrote the curriculum to fit its ideological fashions. American history was dogmatized [demonized?], often according to the work of Howard Zinn. The Western canon was purged. Conservatives resisted but lost as liberals accommodated the revolution.
First the humanities, then the social sciences, and now even the sciences have been forced to bend to identity politics. Race, gender, class and sexual orientation became preoccupations in scholarship and tenure. This is the academic culture that nurtured millennials and the "cancel culture" that now torments Democrats who disagree.
The critique of America as irredeemably racist. Identity politics took an especially sharp turn on race with the police shootings of 2014 and 2015. Black Lives Matter erupted and demanded that politicians bow to its concerns. No Democrat has dared to challenge it, or to defend 50 years of racial progress or the reduction in crime that has saved black lives.
Author Ta-Nehisi Coates became the darling of white liberals with his castigation of America as systemically racist. The New York Times has tried to replace 1776 with the 1619 arrival of the first slaves to North America as a racist America's founding event.
Climate change as religion, not science. A generation of apocalyptic climate education has made what was a matter of temperatures and scientific modeling into a cultural identity. No dissent is tolerated, and the solutions must be radical and immediate. Mr. Sanders was quick to sense the political possibility and grab onto the Green New Deal.
(Review & Outlook, Editorial, "The Agony of the Democrats," The Wall Street Journal, February 15-16, 2020). Here's how the essay ends:
These are among the beliefs feeding the radicalism and resentment of the Sanders campaign. Bernie started his political career as a Marxist focusing on the economic class struggle. But he has adapted to these other intellectual streams, and this year he has adopted identity politics with a fervor that out-woked Julian Castro and Kamala Harris.
Yet rather than challenge Mr. Sanders, the other candidates have given him a pass on everything besides Medicare for All. They have adopted his tax and redistribution arguments, if not all this policies. They mimic his denunciations of America as racist.
With the exception of Joe Biden, they have also accepted his anti-interventionist foreign policy. The press corps has almost seemed to cheer Mr. Biden's collapse in Iowa and New Hampshire. Yet now the Democratic media find themselves fearing that Mr. Sanders might win the nomination and lose to Mr. Trump. Their refusal to challenge the political left makes them Bernie's accomplices.
The tragedy is that this year, even more than most years, the county needs a sensible and centrist opposition party and nominee. Millions of Americans like the results of Mr. Trump's policies but not his divisive brand of politics and personal behavior. They are looking for an alternative that doesn't scare them. They agony of the Democrats is that years of bowing to the left means they may nominate someone who makes Mr. Trump look like the safer choose.
Now former Vice President Biden has emphatically replaced Mr. Sanders at the leading candidate. The establishment rightly feared that Mr. Sanders could not defeat Mr. Trump. But after months of buffeting by the left, Mr. Biden has now adopted virtually all of Senator Sanders's policies, with minor tweaks here and there to dial down the radicalism.
The choice on the left is simple: how to reach an agreed destination. Faster or slower? Revolution or evolution?
Either way a victory by Democrats will turn America into something else, and worse.
To be sure, the only real choice -- Trump or Biden, it appears -- is also not much of a choice. President Trump has his moments, to be sure, but he offers little more than a brief reduction in the speed of America's decline.
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