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| Schumer |
An electrician is talking to his comrade at an East Hartford Diner, while munching on eggs-over-easy, rye toast, home fries and bacon. The subject of minority leader in the U.S. Senate Chuck Schumer arises and the electrician whispers somewhat dejectedly into his coffee cup, “I feel sorry for him, very weepy these days.”
We know that, at some point during his presidency, perhaps
earlier, Joe Biden had entered a sort of political second childhood dominated by
the itch to make the world over anew. Is Schumer now following the same path? Schumer, still sharp as a pin, has not taken
leave of his senses. But the senator, once a reliable mainstay of the Democrat
Party, a modest John F. Kennedy liberal Democrat, is permitting the socialist
tail in New York to wag the Democrat dog. Some say he has done so to curry
favor with the far left wing of his party, anchored in the Northeast corridor
by U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and socialist Senator Bernie
Sanders of Vermont. The two have been stirring the leftist broth that has
always been a yeasty part of their party.
“The self-proclaimed ‘Bronx girl,’” the New York Post notes,
“isn’t hard up for money — she wrapped up the quarter with $11.8 million in cash
on hand, new Federal Election Commission filings show. That’s money that could
be funneled into a Senate or even White House campaign, as per FEC rules.”
Socialism sells, and the so called rules, one might note in
passing, are cleverly designed by incumbent politicians to give incumbents a
monetary hand-up against primary challengers and opposition challengers in
general elections. Some political speculators imagine Ocasio-Cortez could make
inroads on Schumer in a Democrat primary. Even the proverbial “man from Mars”
will have noticed that the Big Apple these days has become somewhat eccentric,
in a tail wagging the dog way. The likely next mayor of New York City will be
Zohran Mamdani, a committed socialist who has flirted with communism. The
distinguishing characteristic of the committed communist, from Marx through
Lenin through Stalin, has been an unwavering, almost sacramental insistence that
“the means of production” should be seized by the proletariat.
“Mamdani’s views in the mayoral race,” Politifact tells us,
“do not reflect communism, and experts found his 2021 remark too brief to reach
detailed conclusions.”
"And what I want to say,” Mamdani said a couple of
years ago, is that it is critical that
the way that we organize, the way that we set up our you know, set up our work
and our priorities, that we do not leave any one issue for the other, that we
do not meet a moment and only look at what people are ready for, but that we
are doing both of these things in tandem, because it is critical for us to both
meet people where they're at and to also organize and organize for what is
correct and for what is right and to ensure over time we can bring people to that
issue.
"But then there are also other issues that we firmly
believe in, whether it's BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel),
right, or whether it's the end goal of seizing the means of production
(emphasis mine), where we do not have the same level of support at this very
moment.”
Politifact asks, “Was that a clear
call for communism?”
Well now, some – not Politifact apparently – would say it is rather more an embrace than
a wink at communism, since “seizing the means of production,” Mamdami’s “end
goal” lies at the very center of communist doctrine. And notice that Mamdani,
here preaching to the choir, a conference of the Young Democratic Socialists of
America in February 2021, has chosen not to wrap his ideological package in the
soft-socialism of Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez.
On June 26th, the Blake Center for Faith and
Freedom in Somers, Connecticut hosted Professor of Economics Dr. Ivan Pongracic, William E. Hibbs/Ludwig
Von Mises Chair of Economics at Hillsdale College. Don’t be fooled by the many
false claims of socialism, Pongracic warned his audience, “The so called
variants of socialism all have one thing in common: the seizure of the means of
production and the enfeeblement of a market economy.”
The distinguishing characteristic of Schumer’s post-modern Democrat
Party is socialist, but it is also infantile, an intellectual
affinity towards a failed mode of thought and action from which logical
consequences have been rescinded and preempted. It remains a mystery how a John
F. Kennedy Democrat politician like Schumer, pickled in the juices liberalism that derives from Locke, Jefferson and other
small “r” republicans like Cicero, could have
wandered so far from the historical roots of the American Republic.
Politico
has reported that Schumer met with anti-Semite Mamdani recently. “We had a good
meeting,” Schumer told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday. “We know each other
well, and we’re going to keep talking.” But, no endorsement was forthcoming,
and Schumer was not asked by reporters whether he agreed with Mamdani’s pledge
to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he set foot in the city. The
senator‘s telling silence on Mamdani’s boisterous anti-Semitism may baffle some
New York Jews, but then the city has long been used to Democrat politicians
facing both ways.
William Butler Yeats wrote in his poem The
Second Coming:
Things fall apart; the
centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed
upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide
is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of
innocence is drowned;
The best lack all
conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate
intensity
An intense attentiveness, we may hope, will wretch the
Democrat Party in particular from a decades long anarchic infantilism.
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