For years I have enjoyed listening to a lovely song by Gil-Scott Heron titled “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”.

Two nights back, it was.

On Thursday, Miami played host to the second night of the 1st Democratic Presidential Debate, in the run up to the coming 2020 elections. I tuned in expecting to watch ten Presidential-Hopefuls battle it out over who is best suited to oust Donald Trump from The White House in the 2020 Presidential Elections. Instead what I witnessed was a democratic party competing within itself to commit political hara-kiri on national television by advocating among other radical things-

a. decriminalization (and no deportation) of illegal immigrants,

b. free-healthcare for the same undocumented immigrants,

c.abolition of private health insurance,

d. and of all things- ‘busing’.

At this point, it’s important to remind readers about President Obama’s position on a few of these issues, if only to trace how far the radical/ socialist termites have come within the Democratic Party:

1.On Immigration: Note how Obama in the video below talks about the ‘need’ to secure our borders as part of a comprehensive immigration reform bill through better infrastructure for border security and penalization of those employers who hire undocumented immigrants. This wasn’t generic tough talk to appease his moderate base, President Obama actually oversaw more deportations than President Donald Trump has overseen till date. In 2012, the Obama administration kicked 419,384 people out of the United States, a single-year record that still stands, despite two years (and counting) of Trump framing himself as America’s border-guard-in-chief. In fact when viewed in its entirety from 2009–2016, Obama’s administration deported 1,242,286 people from the interior of the U.S and that does not include the 1,507,220 border removals during that time. If one goes further back in time to President Clinton’s era it would perhaps do the Democrats well to remember that he passed the Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which created new criminal penalties for illegal immigration which required ‘expedited removal’. From new criminal penalties for immigration (a hugely popular move at the time) to literally decriminalizing undocumented immigrants and advocating for no deportation policies, the ‘progressives’ have now destroyed the electability of democratic presidential candidates.

2. On Healthcare: A key pillar of ‘Obamacare’ was President Obama’s assurance to the American people that private health insurance would not be abolished or in his words “If you like your plan, you can keep it”. Today 2/3 front-runners- Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren support the abolition of private health insurance in United States of America. In a statement following the debate, the Trump campaign claimed the Democratic candidates “want to throw 200 million people off their current private healthcare plans, put them into a government-run system that would eliminate choice, and crush Americans with an enormous tax burden to pay for it.” Come the general election in 2020 be ready for a million attack ads on ‘socialism’ in healthcare, thatwould be shown by the Republicans in every single swing state across United States. After that, good-luck trying to win over the 200 million odd people on private insurance plans, including those that were negotiated by their trade and labor unions.

3. Obama vs ‘forced busing’: In 2016, at the fag end of his second term in office, Obama launched a voluntary, incentive- based federal initiative named ‘Stronger Together’ to integrate schools by economic indicators (instead of race). The grant program was created to support local efforts to integrate schools by income. The proposed program would set up a competition to reward school districts or groups of districts that voluntarily take efforts to break up school-poverty concentrations. Note how radically different this is from the ‘busing’ that Senator Kamala Harris accused former VP Joe Biden of opposing.

For those of you watched that thought “How wonderful to see an empowered black woman holding an old white male accountable for his record on racial justice”, think again. Busing was a federally mandated program under which the full weight of the government was used to impose sweeping mandates of racial balance on metropolitan school districts. They fired up the buses and sent X percent of black kids over here and Y percent of white kids over there, compulsorily.

Black schools were unilaterally closed down, their students divvied up and distributed to whatever white school needed to adjust its numbers in order to avoid being sued, often over the very loud protests of black parents; at angry town hall meetings, integration was denounced as a white supremacist plot to destroy the black community.

Not surprisingly the program was almost universally unpopular among both black and white parents who didn’t want to send their 8 year olds on hour long journeys to far-away schools and actually resulted in an increase of de-facto segregation as the phenomena of ‘white flight’ took hold across America. When forced to bus their kids without any choice, White parents fled for gated communities and private academies; and they opted out of the social contract and they haven’t been back since, at least not as far as public education is concerned. By 1980, public schools in Memphis, Chicago, St. Louis, and Newark were more than 70 percent black. Schools in Washington, D.C., were more than 95 percent black. Busing had just started, and white people were already gone, ducking out to private schools and suburban enclaves. More importantly, even black families with the leverage to get out often did the same- ‘busing’ was a massive (and expensive) policy failure which has now been universally rejected by all social scientists worth their salt.

Despite all of this, armed with the advantage that hindsight brings into issues such as busing, the liberal media still almost instinctively tripped over each other to declare Senator Kamala Harris to be the new darling of progressives within the democratic party and Former Vice-President Joe Biden to be an anachronistic, ‘out of touch’ old white male who cannot empathize with the sensibilities of the ‘new’ democratic party. Perhaps that’s true-after all Biden is a formidable statesman from an era when Democratic Politicians actually cared about winning elections.

It’s time to look at the numbers:

To understand how profoundly out-of-step the democratic party is with the rest of the country lets breakdown poll numbers among one of the many possible indices- immigration. According to the latest Gallup Poll of June 2019, 23% name immigration as the most important problem facing the country. This is by one percentage point the highest Gallup has ever measured for the issue since it first began recording mentions of immigration in 1993.

Asked their preferences for U.S. immigration levels, 37% of Americans say it should be kept at its present level, while 35% say it should be decreased. So essentially 72% of all Americans want immigration levels to either hold steady or be decreased over the coming years.

Isn’t it just wonderful that in an election cycle where American voters have clearly expressed that they overwhelmingly do not prefer an increase in immigration- the Democrats have decided to run on a platform of directly incentivising illegal immigration by not only decriminalizing the offence down to a mere civil violation (like a speeding ticket) but also providing free healthcare plans for the undocumented immigrants who break the law. One can only imagine the field day the Republican Campaign is going to have in 2020 while they tell Southern and Mid-Western Blue Collar Workers- “I told you so.”

Conclusion

In conclusion, it’s time to bury the old democratic party into the ground, for as the new socialist vultures emerge victorious, feasting on the decaying remains of what was once a moderate, center-left coalition of union workers, white collar liberals and ethnic minorities, there is no longer place for anyone other than ideological puritans within the party.

One suggestion to the new vanguard of socialists in United States: do your proletariat one last favor- rename your party as the ‘Socialist Party of America’, don’t sully the name of a great tradition whose last (and final) legacy was President Barrack Obama.