This week has brought more news that contains powerful warnings about the trajectory of the country.
First, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Watson v. Republican National Committee. In Watson, the court upheld a Mississippi law that counts ballots received up to five days after Election Day as long as they were postmarked on or before that day.
Second, a Democratic primary in Colorado produced yet another socialist victory. Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old lawyer who was born in Ethiopia, defeated longtime Democrat congresswoman Diana DeGette. Kiros' positions have attracted a lot of attention. She refused to call the firebombing attack on Jews in Boulder, Colorado, last year "antisemitic," and characterized both the Oct. 7, 2023, slaughter of more than 1,000 people in Israel and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States as "inevitable," blaming Israel and the U.S., respectively, for both attacks.
According to the Washington Examiner, 35 candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America have won their primaries so far this year. Nearly a dozen of these are congressional races in safe Democrat districts, meaning that it's highly likely Congress will have a record number of socialists next January.
It's hard to know where to start with this. Collectivist ideologies have produced nothing but economic devastation and political oppression wherever they have been implemented. Contrary to what their propagandists promise, it is not just about higher taxes to fund better services with the objective of helping those less fortunate "get a leg up." These are ideologies steeped in hatred of America, of religion and of freedom. They are peppered with euphemisms like "equity" and "fairness" but grounded in resentment of achievement. They traffic in ignorance, elevate envy, reward sloth, expand government, discourage effort and punish success.
Now, Republicans — and even some Democrats — are wondering how to defeat these uber-left candidates in the upcoming elections.
That's the wrong question.
The correct question to ask is where all these so-called socialists are coming from. And the answer lies in their demographics.
Contrary to what one might think — and certainly contrary to what we're told about who benefits from socialism — there is relatively little support for socialism and other versions of statist collectivism among minorities, the poor, the working class, or most immigrants.
For example, 44 percent of American Blacks own their own homes in the U.S. — and many more would like to. So, the socialists' desire to abolish private property (New York City's socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is starting with rental properties) isn't going to resonate with them. Many working-class Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds own their own businesses — or work for those who do. Demonizing entrepreneurs doesn't sit well with them either. And millions of people who have immigrated to the U.S. did so because they had the dream of starting their own businesses, educating their children, buying a modest home, and moving into the middle class.
But everything changes once you add a college degree.
The support for socialism is strongest among the college-educated, especially (although not exclusively) upper-middle-class and upper-class whites, for whom it is a badge of honor to claim one wishes to improve life for the poor "Black and brown" populations. Of course, this is without regard to whether the policies they espouse so vehemently will help those populations or any others.
And don't forget — because no one will give up their income, their homes, or their businesses willingly, all this "people power" socialism inevitably involves government force.
If "compassion" is emotionally intoxicating for these fanatics, compassion plus compulsion is their ideological version of crack.
Yes, it's important to defeat these candidates at the ballot box. But that's not where the real battle is. It's at the colleges and universities where they are being indoctrinated.
Higher education faculty are overwhelmingly leftist; a recent survey at Yale University revealed that Democrats outnumbered Republicans 78-to-1 across the university's departments in the humanities and social sciences. And Yale is no outlier; surveys of dozens of other colleges and universities — including the other Ivies — show the same political biases, particularly in the departments where most young people learn about history, politics, religion and culture; the ideologies they absorb there will shape their views and their decisions — including election decisions — for years to come, if not for the rest of their lives.
The situation is made worse because so many faculty who espouse these societally corrosive ideologies are often tenured, which means they cannot be removed from their positions. Tenure is heralded as necessary to protect "academic freedom" and diversity of opinion. But as a practical matter, the process of obtaining tenure virtually ensures that the viewpoints of the tenured faculty will dominate the junior faculty they hire.
The disparity between left and right on college campuses is a gross distortion of political viewpoints nationally; outside higher ed, Americans are split almost equally between Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.
What can we do to prevent America from slipping into collectivism?
- Eliminating birthright citizenship would probably require a constitutional amendment, which is about as likely to happen as Spencer Pratt becoming the mayor of Los Angeles in November. (There's always hope. ...) Instead, we should continue to tighten border enforcement, limit visas, and prosecute the companies and individuals who facilitate "birth tourism."
- Protecting election integrity does not require a constitutional amendment. Congress needs to pass the SAVE Act and make voter ID and proof of citizenship a matter of federal law. And while the Supreme Court decision permits mailed-in ballots to be counted, that doesn't mean states must allow it. State governments controlled by conservatives should strictly limit the use of mail-in ballots as well as "ballot harvesting," require paper ballots, ban drop boxes, and bolster observation of vote counting.
- The Electoral College must be protected. This means bringing successful legal challenges to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which disenfranchises the citizens of states that adopt it, by giving the state's Electoral College votes to the winner of the "popular vote," even if that candidate does not win the state. If it reaches the 270 votes it needs to take effect (it's currently at 222), the NPVIC will gut the Electoral College. It will not matter that any states have protected the integrity of their elections; illegal immigration and election policies that facilitate fraud in states like California, New York and Illinois will carry the day.
- Most importantly, we need to attack the problem at its source, and that means cutting off the spigot to colleges and universities whose faculty promote (not merely teach about) Marxism, socialism and communism, antisemitism, bogus theories about "white supremacy," and the viewpoint that there is no such thing as "truth," to name just a few. This need not interfere with "academic freedom." Faculty who want to teach these things still can, but they shouldn't be able to do so with money extracted from taxpayers. They can go find donors.
We can either stop bailing water on the Titanic or go down with the ship.