An ambitious acquaintance of mine once said he’d roll his tanks on to his boss’s lawn within six months. It’s an effective though uncomfortable metaphor conjuring a moment of total victory over the existing order, and a brutal contempt for it, too. Those steel tank tracks churning up the manicured grass are not just destructive, but also barbarous and quintessentially insulting.
Kindred thoughts arose this week as we laid out David Harsanyi’s cover story under the headline “What’s Left,” accompanied by Tim Bower’s illustration of an anguished Statue of Liberty contemplating the Democrats’ demolition of America’s founding values. Their awful policies are so numerous, and would be so far-reaching if implemented, that we’ve also compiled a spreadsheet pulling them together so readers can readily grasp the breathtaking ruin they’d visit upon our nation. But destruction is not the only thing. There is about the policies an arrogance that knows little and cares nothing for the principles that undergird the status quo they’re intent on destroying. We live in a norm-destroying epoch, with both President Trump and his antagonists happily going to greater extremes of rhetoric (in his case) and policy (in theirs) than ever before. “What’s Left?” has two thrusts: what it means to be on the Left these days, and what would be left of America if all their policies were put in place.
The extreme policies were moved into the Democratic mainstream by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. He’s a socialist, and when he went out and said it loud and clear in 2016, he wasn’t met with groans and instant irrelevance, as he would have been in previous election cycles. On the contrary, people swooned for him. He created a movement, an army of socialists sprang up across the country, and the Democratic Party metastasized into what we see today. Its members are on the verge of declaring, “We’re all socialists now.” But, as our second big feature, “Bernie’s Promised Land” explains, Sanders in 2020 may be the victim of his own success in 2016. Most of the candidates running against him for the nomination are just as radical as he is, all of them are younger, and most of them can also check the boxes on race and sex that Democrats, consumed by intersectional angst, prefer.
Elsewhere this week, we feature David Friedman, the strikingly unorthodox and successful U.S. ambassador to Jerusalem, and lament that golf rule changes haven’t prodded slow players to speed up. Eric Felten learns the hard way about dealing with panhandlers in the cashless age, Peter Tonguette ventures into the spooky world of paranormal “reality” TV, and Jamie Dettmer, our globetrotter, returns to the Maidan and reports on rampant corruption in the Ukrainian election.
