There is an insidious meme afoot that in the Obama era Democrats have been heroically restraining themselves by clinging to moderate policies while ideologically extreme Republicans have gone hog-wild in the pursuit of conservative purity.
Today’s Democratic Party makes common cause with the criminals who burn down poor people’s neighborhoods in American cities. And yet the Right is somehow alleged to be more susceptible to “extremism.”
Sharpening her class-warfare guillotine, Hillary Clinton calls for the “toppling” of the one percent. She copycats her potential rival, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), claiming that “the deck is stacked” in favor of the wealthy and powerful.
“My job is to reshuffle the cards,” Clinton says.
Yet Republicans, who haven’t singled out identifiable social groups for destruction, somehow get tagged as the radicals.
This alleged so-called asymmetric polarization by the GOP is just the latest iteration of the hoary media myth that Republicans are dangerous extremists and Democrats are reasonable moderates. It is popping up now because the two parties’ primary contests are heating up. The benighted masses need to be reminded by their betters what to think and how to vote.
In a May 31 Financial Times column titled “American socialism’s day in the sun,” garden-variety left-winger Edward Luce hails the recent entry of self-described socialist Bernie Sanders into the Democratic presidential race because, he claims, it is “dragging” frontrunner Hillary Clinton “leftward.”
“At 15 per cent in the Democratic polls, Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, is riding higher than any US socialist since Eugene Debs ran for the White House a century ago,” writes Luce, who is the son of a British peer and was speechwriter to Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers from 1999 to 2001.
“The fact that Mr. Sanders has very little chance of unseating Hillary Clinton is beside the point. His popularity is dragging her leftward. If he flames out, other left-wingers, such as Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland who entered the race at the weekend, are ready to pick up the baton. Elizabeth Warren, the populist Massachusetts senator, will continue to prod Mrs. Clinton from outside the field. The more Mrs. Clinton adopts their language, the harder it will be for her to reclaim the centre ground next year. Yet she is only following the crowd. A surprisingly large chunk of Democrats are happy to break the US taboo against socialism.”Via: Canada Free Press
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