The Democrat Party has come a long way since Bill Clinton was president — and not in a good way.
In 1993, the first year of the Clinton presidency, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) introduced legislation to end automatic birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens; today, Democrats routinely call to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and advocate for illegal alien suffrage. Clinton famously called for abortion to be "safe and legal but rare"; today, Democrats prefer to "shout your abortion" as a perverse badge of honor. On marriage, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act to define the union under federal law as one man and one woman; today, Democrats struggle to even tell us what a woman is, and polyamory now lurks as the next frontier in social experimentation.
But of all the issues where the Democrat Party has moved sharply to the left since the Clinton era, perhaps none is more notable than economic policy. During his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton famously declared that "the era of big government is over." And he acted on that impulse too: Clinton signed the most transformative welfare reform law in a generation, deregulated Wall Street, slashed taxes on capital gains, and ended his presidency by presiding over consecutive balanced federal budgets. Clinton was greatly assisted by the dot-com boom and a fiscally conservative Congress, but facts are still facts.
When it comes to economic policy, today's Democrat Party looks absolutely nothing like its more moderate 1990s-era forebear.
What began as an incipient Barack Obama-era trend toward big government has now, during the post-Joe Biden era, emerged as a strong majority sentiment. A Gallup poll last September found that 42 percent of Democrats have a positive view of capitalism, while a whopping 66 percent hold a positive view of socialism. Leading kingmakers in today's Democratic Party are (literal) Soviet Union-honeymooning communists, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), or leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). And the singular party top dog right now is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is fond of quoting Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto," speaks of the "warmth of collectivism," and is now implementing city-owned grocery stores across the Big Apple.
That is some serious intellectual whiplash.
Hold aside that communism is the single deadliest ideology in the history of mankind — responsible, historians estimate, for nearly 100 million deaths. Hold aside, as well, that socialism and communism have resulted in horrific resource scarcity and immeasurable immiseration everywhere they have been attempted. At the most basic level, socialism is simply contrary to human nature. Men have a natural right to the fruits of their labor, provided those fruits do not undermine the common good. And it is natural, contrary to the basic tenets of socialism, to value the flourishing of one's family and tribe over that of the polity — let alone the whole world. As Dennis Prager has often noted, socialism violates two of the 10 Commandments: do not steal, and do not covet.
Republicans are presently confused about what exactly they should run on, as they begin to make their case to the American people before this fall's midterm elections. Inflation, while dramatically reduced from its catastrophic Biden-era peak, is still stubbornly higher than it ought to be. The Trump administration is, at least for now, unwilling to finish the campaign it launched against Iran. Republicans have a great story to tell on the issue of crime, but they seem uninterested in telling it. The administration has had tremendous success in stanching illegal immigration, but the GOP's consultant class frets that a focus on immigration would hemorrhage the gains the party has made with Latino voters.
The solution, and the best path the GOP has to defy historical trends and retain both houses of Congress next January, comes in the form of a concerted socialism-centric campaign.
In previous cycles, Republicans might have credibly been accused of fearmongering in running against a "socialist" bogeyman. That is simply not the case anymore — not in a world where third-worldist DSA radicals like Darializa Avila Chevalier and Melat Kiros are knocking off longstanding incumbents in Democratic congressional primaries, and where a vociferous foe of capitalism is the mayor of the nation's commercial center. The threat is here, and the threat is real. Perhaps even more to the point: Latino voters who fled failed socialist hellholes in places like Havana and Caracas don't want that. Middle-class suburban moms concerned about dim job prospects for their children don't want that. And according to Gallup, independents don't want that either.
In an April speech in Austin, Texas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued that progressivism and American constitutionalism are fundamentally incompatible. He's right. It's also true that socialism — real, genuine socialism — is incompatible with the American way of life as it's been experienced for two and a half centuries. That's a fact — and it's a powerful argument to make in this milestone 250th American birthday year, in particular. Republicans should make that argument passionately and with alacrity.
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