Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Sanders’ Goal to ‘Transform Society’ Puts Him in Some Terrible Company


Bernie Sanders created a lot of disgust when he praised Fidel Castro, the Communist dictator of Cuba.  Yuri Pérez posted the comment that got the attention of the public in Yes, Bernie Sanders, Castro's literacy program was 'a bad thing:.

. . . a militarized state has guaranteed the Castro dynasty’s power over half a century — not, as Sanders asserted in his 1997 book, because "he educated their kids, gave their kids health care, totally transformed the society." 

In a CNN article posted by NBC, Sanders says 'it's unfair to simply say everything is bad' with Fidel Castro's Cuba, Paul LeBlanc and Dan Merica wrote:

Buzzfeed reported during the 2016 election that Sanders said at the same time that America was "very, very mistaken about" the Cuban people's desire to revolt against Castro because Americans "forgot that he educated their kids, gave their kids health care, totally transformed the society."

Sanders’ comments about education and healthcare got most of the attention, and, rightfully, pushback. 

However, the final part of the statement praising Castro for totally transforming Cuban society didn’t get nearly enough attention, if any. But it should have, because of what it says about Bernie Sanders, and of socialism. 

So let me correct that. A government that has the power to “totally transform the society” from the top down, by government force, is a totalitarian state. This is Sanders. He seeks political power so as to impose on 330 million Americans his brand of socialism. Anyone who believes that an entire society and everyone in it is his to “transform” according to his vision of what the ideal society looks like is a full-blown sociopath. This puts Sanders in the terrible company of such recent utopians as Stalin, Hitler, Mao ZeDong, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Hugo Chavez, and of course Castro. Sanders may be a minor leaguer compared to these major league monsters. But he is cut from the same mold. 

For most of his career as an Independent Democratic Socialist, and now a Democrat for presidential purposes, Sanders is in the process of capturing a large swath of the Democratic Party. Even if he doesn’t get the 2020 presidential nomination, he will have redefined the Democratic Party in a new and dangerous way, aligning it more with undiluted socialism than welfare statism. We need to take Sanders seriously, and at his own word. Ideas matter. Words matter. They have predictable consequences in real life. We’ve seen his political sociopathy before.

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