Here We Go Again: Forward to the Disastrous Past!

We’ve seen it all before. In fact, I’ve seen it up close.

Back in the early 1970s, at the wizened age of 22, I dropped out of college for a while to join a Marxist-Leninist political action group called the Young Socialist Alliance. Based in New York, I became what that era’s media scornfully referred to as an “outside agitator,” someone who gravitated to universities at which he wasn’t enrolled to help organize student protests.

But my most vivid memory of that period originated in a Burlington, Vermont apartment. It was the home of Bernie Sanders, the now-aging US senator, former presidential contender, and much-ballyhooed ideological father of the “democratic socialist” movement currently invading America. Back then, however, he was just an unknown young radical running for governor.

We were watching the pre-taped broadcast of Bernie’s first-ever television appearance when suddenly he jumped up, angrily shaking a fist at himself on the screen. “That guy looks like the village idiot!” he roared in his now-famous lower-middle-class Brooklyn accent. “I would never vote for a bum like that!”

At the time I thought it was hilarious. In retrospect, I believe it was a rare moment of candor in an otherwise rhetorical career. The problem: Bernie’s socialist rhetoric has now gone mainstream.

“Socialism is not a passing thing but an arriving thing,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently wrote. “It must be taken seriously…”

The extent to which that’s true is not yet clear. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—a leftist organization closely aligned with the Democratic Party whose national co-chair supports open borders and recently praised the Oct. 7 murder, rape, and kidnap of 1,450 Israeli men, women, and children—has indeed made major strides. First came the election of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist who promises free food for everyone and talks as if owning property is a criminal offense. He’s also a devout Muslim who vowed—illegally it turned out—to arrest Israel’s prime minister when he arrives for next month’s UN General Assembly.

Then another socialist—also a radical anti-Israel Muslim—won a Democratic nomination for US Senate. And CNN reported that an unprecedented one-third of America’s Democrats identify as socialists, plus another 64% say they’re “OK” with socialist candidates.

All of which deeply disturbs me, and here’s why: so-called “socialism” is simply communism in better clothes. But calling everything “communist” is an old and ineffective tactic, so let’s not even go there. Instead, here’s a clear-eyed look at what the DSA is actually proposing.

Naturally, they see a “future without capitalism,” but we already knew that. In addition, they want to rewrite the US Constitution to “replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”

Oh yes and abolish the Senate.

In short, they would dismantle the three-branch system of checks and balances that was America’s historic contribution to the world’s democracies, replicated by dozens worldwide. And as for any future support of Israel, well, you can forget about it.

“The common denominator of all these DSA proposals,” the Wall Street Journal editorializes, “is eliminating barriers to rapid, radical change. The socialists want a single-branch legislature that can sweep into power in a single election, dominate the President, and neuter the judiciary as a check on that power. With those checks gone, they can impose their agenda that will be nearly impossible to undo.”

Say hello to unbridled authoritarianism!

It was actually that far-left tendency to exert power and manipulation that drove me out of the socialist camp to begin with. Fearing for my sanity and America’s, I even left the country for a while.

But the US survived, and so I returned.

That was a different time. Socialists like Bernie and I were radicals flaying on the fringes of society; bit players in a counterculture that had larger concerns. Now Bernie is a senator whose minions may soon control one of America’s two major parties.

I pray that the American electorate will have the wisdom to stop them

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(An earlier version of this column appeared in The Manila Times.)