The Soft-Soaping of Socialism in the U.S.

At IBD:

Bernie Sanders is coming on as a presidential contender, while polls show surprisingly large parts of the public look favorably on the socialism he espouses. The public apparently has forgotten socialism's record.

For years, Sanders, an avowed, unapologetic socialist, was viewed as an anomaly of U.S. political life, an eccentric whose atypical ideology reflected the supposed quirkiness of his home state of Vermont.

Now that's changed, and with Democrats worried about the scandals surrounding their top candidate, Hillary Clinton, Sanders is attracting ever-bigger audiences on the campaign trail. Polls show him at 15% of the Democratic tally.

Maybe that's because Sanders is portrayed in the media as "a normal guy" — as a Washington Post headline put it — while liberal media doyen Bill Moyer headlined a [news item "Despite What Corporate Media Tells You, Bernie Sanders' Positions Are Mainstream."
In the Huffington Post, Distinguished Professor Peter Dreier of Occidental College, one of Barack Obama's alma maters, declared, "Bernie Sanders' Socialism Is as American as Apple Pie."

Such is the new narrative about Sanders, 73, whose ideology grew out of the same 1930s roots as all past socialist movements, even as America since the Reagan era has moved toward free markets and taken much of the world with it.

Sure, Sanders calls himself a "democratic socialist" and says that his model is the all-encompassing welfare state of Sweden, not the Soviet Union. No comment from him, however, about the reforms that Sweden has made over the last decade to rid itself of the state embrace that's choked economic life or the demographic losses endured as the young move out or lose interest in forming families.

Also under the democratic socialist banner is Venezuela, where citizens have lost not only all their prosperity and access to goods but their civil freedoms as well.

Every last government agency there has been politicized since the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, ending civil society, while the separation of powers has been rubbed away in the name of "the revolution."

As a result, political dissidents have been thrown in prisons without trial. Others have lost the right to leave the country. Still more have had their businesses expropriated. More still have been victims of political thuggery from government-sponsored private goons.

Like Sweden, Venezuela is no country for young men. A study of professors at Gervasio Rubio Rural Pedagogic Institute reported last week in El Universal showed that large numbers of Venezuela's young would rather deal drugs than go to school.

More.

We're surrounded by leftist idiots. But I repeat myself.