History records that in the 1920s, after the death of Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov - Lenin - the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fell into a brief civil war between factions loyal to Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky. Stalin emerged victorious because he saw and accused Lenin - and therefore, Trotsky - of being too moderate, unwilling to do what was necessary to ensure the triumph of socialism. We saw what Stalin considered to be necessary - the starvation of some fifteen million Ukrainians in the forced collectivization of their agriculture, the collaboration with Nazi Germany in order to seize the eastern half of Poland, and....collaboration with the foolish Western democracies, who refused to recognize an even greater enemy than Hitler and were unwilling to do their own fighting to defeat both of them.
I was reminded of that history when I read this article:
A more liberal and populist movement is emerging within the Democratic Party that views President Barack Obama and the party's presumptive presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton as excessively centrist, according to the Washington Post.
This group is looking to Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, as its 2016 presidential standard-bearer.
Denial. Pure, unfettered, unadulterated denial. In Barack Obama, the Left realized all its dreams, those dreams have produced a national nightmare, and the - for lack of a better term - "Warrenoids" have decided that they simply are not going to accept reality, that the nightmare isn't real, that they still know best, that doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on socialism WILL TOO bring us heaven on Earth, that the failures and disasters are all the fault of Tea Party sabotage, and that the only ("Final"?) solution is to crush the Tea Party in one, swift, ruthlessly brutal blow - and I don't mean at the ballot box.
Senator Warren didn't say that last part - at least not in the article - but if she and her followers actually believe that Barack Hussein Obama is "excessively centrist," then I honestly don't know what else to conclude.
The Newsmax piece does include a cautionary note for the Dems:
Democrats need to be cautious not to pull too far to the left, the Post said, lest they be charged with being irresponsible over the national debt and not caring about economic growth. Moreover, policies that would further redistribute income would make many Americans uneasy. Also, running a candidate who is too far to the left could also hamper the party's electoral prospects.
Well, all I can do is cite more recent history, in which the Dems didn't take that advice and swept to victory in 2008 and 2012. So clearly there's no candidate too far left for that party to run and no candidate too far left to win a national election anymore. And remember that Fauxcahontas would be another "historic" candidate as the first woman to head a major party ticket. Voting against The First Woman President may not have quite the same level of liberal-inculcated guilt as voting against The First Black President, but it'd be close. And, unlike Hillary!, Senator Warren only just arrived on the national stage, and her "expiration" date is well into the next decade.
Sure, we think the Donks are committing political suicide if they follow their natural base instincts even further Left. But that's complacency, not wisdom; if we've learned anything since 2008, it should be that the old assumptions about America "really still being a center-right country" and "conservatism always winning national elections" no longer apply. There's every reason to believe that, assuming Barack Obama's coup doesn't happen, Elizabeth Warren will become the 45th POTUS - particularly if the Tea Party follows its usual self-destructive path of fragmentation and purity fetishism.
Or, it and the rest of the GOP could unite behind a Tea Party man of executive action like Scott Walker and have a, well, "fighting" chance.
History teaches that there are only so many "last chances". I believe ours passed a year ago. If that's not the case, it is, well, "incumbent" upon us not to squander any more them.
Wouldn't you all agree?
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