A French revolutionary is said to have once said, "There go my people; I must follow them, for I am their leader."
The quip nicely describes what is currently happening to the Democratic Party, wherein an enraged base provoked by Donald Trump's grotesque presidency is racing toward the hard left and pulling their "leaders" along with them.
Evidence for this includes the Gallup poll from last week showing that 57 percent of self-identified Democrats now view socialism positively; only 47 percent view capitalism positively.
This preference is consistent with the emergence of the "democratic socialist" movement within the party that began in earnest with the (then) insurgent candidacy of Bernie Sanders and is now being energetically propelled by younger Democrats, who are even more enamored of socialism (and soured on capitalism) than other Democrats.
People become more conservative as they age (and acquire wisdom and experience ... and tax bills and mortgages), but that process occurs only gradually, such that the future program of any political party can be best divined from the preferences of its 18-30 age cohort. And the future of the Democratic Party is going to be "democratic socialism," however ambiguously defined.
The bellwether in this regard isn't Sanders (there's no chance that the Democrats, given their embrace of intersectionality logic, nominate an old white male for president) but the more calculating and thus politically viable Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has made a career out of figuring out, like a good Jacobin, what the radical left wants and giving it to them a step or two ahead of other Democrats.
Her latest effort in that regard, coming on the heels of her speech in which she called the American criminal justice system "racist ... front to back," is called the "Accountable Capitalism Act" and would amount to nothing less than a takeover of corporate America by the federal government.
According to Kevin Williamson, "Under Senator Warren's proposal, no business with more than $1 billion in revenue would be permitted to legally operate without permission from the federal government. The federal government would then dictate to these businesses the composition of their boards, the details of internal corporate governance, compensation practices, personnel policies, and much more. Naturally, their political activities would be restricted, too." In his succinct conclusion, "It is unconstitutional, unethical, immoral, irresponsible, and--not to put too fine a point on it--utterly bonkers."
But the important point is that Warren's "bonkers" proposal really isn't intended to be enacted; rather, it is merely for symbolic purposes, a signal to Occupy Wall Street Democrats that she dislikes capitalism as much as they do, as well as a shot across the bow of the other prospective Democratic contenders. It will never be voted on, even if Democrats manage to take Congress in November, but still manages to tell us where her party is going and how the contenders for its presidential nomination will have to compete in a bidding process that will ratchet ever more leftward.
After all, any Democrat wanting the nomination already has to embrace a fairly radical program, including a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for all, "free" college, abolition of ICE, and a guaranteed federal job with good benefits for everyone who wants one.
They will now likely, after Warren's gambit, have to also favor the increasing nationalization of the American economy by the state, a concept which takes the Democratic Party in a doctrinaire sense much closer to the defining features of socialism as an ideology.
In other words, it won't stop there, because Warren's proposal is just the opening salvo in a competition to get the furthest left the fastest.
The thought occurs in all this that Warren tries so hard to get out in front of the stampede because, as a white woman, she occupies a less ideologically advantageous position on the intersectionality/victimhood hierarchy compared to black males like New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and black females like California Sen. Kamala Harris.
Warren's persistent extremism might therefore be best understood as an effort to compensate for her relative weakness in the identity politics sweepstakes that defines the contemporary left--yes, she is oppressed because she is a woman, but also an oppressor because she is white.
As such, it will be interesting to see how far all this silliness goes in the next two years and whether there will emerge any "stopping point" to the leftward bidding; more precisely, whether more moderate party leaders, nervous over the potential electoral consequences, become more willing to openly challenge and therefore risk the wrath of the pitchfork brigades.
After all, if everyone is on board for a $15 minimum wage, what prevents some of the more long-shot Democratic candidates from proposing $20 or even $25? And if the "1 percent" are truly the bane of our existence and should be assigned the role of milk cow funding expensive leftist projects, why not borrow a page from the British and their confiscatory 97 percent top marginal tax rate in the 1970s?
Once you embark on the road of crazy, it's hard to avoid traveling the whole way.
The Republican problem is a nut in the Oval Office; the Democratic problem is a party chock full of nuts.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 08/27/2018