Reaching Peak Progressivism

Reaching Peak Progressivism by Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/16/reaching-peak-progressivism/

Excerpt: First-term socialists—House representatives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and her fellow “squad” members, inspired by Sanders—now set the new Democratic agenda. And it is one that is more radical than anything seen in modern American history and largely unsustainable: calls to level a wealth tax and new top income-tax rates of 70-90 percent, to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service, all student debt, an enforceable southern border, the internal combustion engine, and most Second Amendment rights, and to enact multi-trillion dollar new entitlements as outlined in the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college, free healthcare for illegal aliens, and reparations. Identity politics so rules the rhetoric of the new progressive party that all of its—exclusively white—primary finalists vie to be most vocal in the ritual damning of their own country (that has ironically ensured their own influence, power, success and wealth) as inherently “racist.” [Hanson, ever the historian, points out that about the only thing currently missing from the “peak progressivisms” of the past is open violence as seen in the French, Russian, Chinese, or Cuban revolutions. The coming election may not be an “end,” but only a “way station” on the road to that end, whatever that end may be. Ron P.]