DSA’s foreign-policy agenda has one goal: weaken America so that world’s worst regimes can reign instead
If politics required truth in advertising, the Democratic Socialists of America would be forced to rebrand to the Democratic Socialists against America. The far-left insurgents oppose everything that has propelled the United States to a position of global wealth and leadership.
Consider its foreign policy. The DSA has a simple goal: Weaken the country so that it cannot defend itself or its allies. The world’s worst regimes will then dominate in America’s place.
How? The America envisaged by the DSA will defund its military, shutter its military bases, stop “economic warfare” against malign actors like Cuba and Iran, cut off all assistance to Israel, “end immunity for U.S. war criminals,” and prosecute Americans and Israelis implicated in the Gaza “genocide.”
The DSA’s central aim, embodied in its new platform, dubbed “Workers Deserve More,” is supposedly to elevate the proletariat. If the DSA gets its way, “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries” will replace capitalism. We know how this movie ends: less growth, innovation and international influence for the United States. How does that benefit the American worker?
In this new iteration of the Democratic Party, the patriotism of Democrats of yore, who wanted America to be strong and do good deeds overseas, is gone. The Democratic Party that supported NATO and Ukraine, opposed tyrannies like Iran and China and voted almost unanimously to avenge the attacks of 9/11, will be no more.
During a Fox News interview last month, Shannon Bream asked national co-chair Megan Romer whether the DSA would defund the Pentagon. “Absolutely,” Romer said with alacrity.
Romer agrees with her fellow DSA stalwart, Melat Kiros, the Democratic nominee for Colorado’s 1st Congressional District, that America is to blame for everything. Kiros insists that US policy made 9/11 “inevitable.” Even illegal immigration is somehow America’s fault. Romer says illegal immigration to the United States is due to America “destabilizing countries in order to mine them for resources.”
Give Romer and her confreres credit for consistency. It’s not just that they abhor pillars of American greatness like personal responsibility, freedom of speech, and free markets. They also love the avatars of anti-Americanism in Cuba and Iran and jihadists everywhere. Whenever a regime, no matter how craven, stands against the United States, it can count on their encouragement.
According to the DSA, Israel is the sole country rivaling the United States in its depravity. DSA darling Darializa Avila Chevalier, poised be elected to Congress in November, believes that “Israel doesn’t exist.” She has never apologized for participating in a pro-Hamas rally in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023. When pressed by David Remnick of The New Yorker, Romer defended Avila Chevalier and said that she “probably would have” attended the rally herself. Romer also called Hamas’ Oct. 7 rampage “largely inevitable.”
Some of the DSA’s support can be explained by the folly of youth. The DSA, whose average age is about 30, is remarkably young and naïve. Its ranks are full of Millennials and Zoomers who have no recollections of the Soviet Union. They think that socialism will yield abundance rather than destitution.
But 84-year-old Sen. Bernie Sanders, the godfather of these ignoramuses, can claim no such ignorance. He lived through the horrors of Maoist China, the collapse of Soviet Communism, the immiseration of socialist utopias like Cuba and Venezuela, and the bloodthirstiness of Islamists in Iran.
Sanders’ anti-Americanism is rooted in willful ignorance. Like over 80% of DSA members aged 25 or older, he has a bachelor’s degree. Yet credentials do not necessarily confer knowledge or wisdom. When these forever college juniors enjoy their semesters abroad in Barcelona or Paris, they fail to appreciate that the world welcoming them was built by American power. Who polices the global commons? The US Navy. Which country underwrites the financial system whose ATMs dispense Euros? The United States.
Polling tells us that DSA voters are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly college educated. They are overwhelmingly not the proletariat. Theirs is the ignorant idealism of Lenin and Trotsky. In case you missed that day in class, this earlier generation of “socialists” did not simply fail to make the Soviet Union great. They destroyed their country, their people, and their world.
That’s exactly the DSA’s agenda for America.
Daniel J. Samet is a Jeane Kirkpatrick Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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