A "Democratic Socialist" Mayor for New York

  by

     M. Richard Maxson

      New Yorkers have elected a new mayor who dedicated himself to the Sandinistas in the 1980s, honeymooned in Cuba in the 1990s (in violation of a U.S. travel ban), and participated in a New York City Council event honoring Zimbabwe's tyrannous Robert Mugabe in 2002?

     In 1988, Bill de Blasio went to Nicaragua to aid the Marxist, Soviet-supported Sandinistas. He came home, as The New York Times put it, with "a vision of the possibilities of unfettered leftist government." Today, 25 years later, New York City Public Advocate de Blasio, has been elected mayor and  remains "very proud" of his radical activities. Mr. de Blasio's class warfare strategy in New York City is directly out of the Marxist playbook. Initially, he denied having once claimed for himself the "democratic socialist". "I am a progressive who believes in an activist approach to government.  The people of this city have chosen a progressive path, and tonight we set forth on it together as one city."

     As Americans brace for the federal takeover of one-sixth of the economy with Obamacare, do we know what's hitting us yet? It's called socialism, and it has increasingly transformed the American political landscape.  We are now at a place where there are legitimately fewer Americans who desire a free republic with a free people than there are those who think the government should give them stuff. There are fewer of us who believe in the value of free exchange and free enterprise. There are fewer of us who do not wish to demonize successful people in order to justify taking from them. Quite unexpectedly, socialism -- or its variant, "democratic socialism" -- has quickly emerged in New York City.  

     Americans are so grievously under-educated about the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. The left's vision of the world is the implicit assumption that high-minded third parties like themselves can make better decisions for other people than those people can make for themselves. The fact that the "new Democratic Socialism" is never "democratic," and that "socialism" destroys free markets. Such ideas, which have entered the Democratic Party mainstream flow from anti-liberty, collectivist roots. The new mayor's policies have less to do with the principles of free people under the U.S. Constitution than with government controls in the old Eastern bloc -- from de Blasio's plans to expand government's role in the economy by controlling prices in the housing market and imposing a higher minimum wage, to degrading the concept of national citizenship by introducing a "Universal City ID card" and allowing driver's licenses for illegal aliens. The promised "fundamentally changing  of America" continues.