Opinion

KIRK: Rise Of Radicals Signals Democrat Downfall In November

Charlie Kirk Contributor
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President Donald Trump is right — despite infesting the Democrat Party, socialism still has no place in American society.

According to a recent Gallup poll, 53 percent of Americans would not vote for a socialist candidate for president even if they are “a generally well-qualified person.” In fact, a socialist is the only kind of candidate on the list who would have to overcome opposition from an outright majority of Americans.

The results remained consistent among independent voters, only 45 percent of whom would be willing to vote for a socialist candidate in the upcoming election — the same proportion as the overall population.

A predictably miniscule 17 percent of Republican voters say they would even be hypothetically open to voting for a socialist, but a shocking 76 percent of Democrats don’t have any problem with the notion. Notably, more Democrat voters expressed willingness to vote for a socialist than for an atheist, a septuagenarian, or a candidate who is under 40 years old.

These findings confirm that the Democrat Party’s rapid descent into radicalism has not been an illusion, and that the rising support for self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries is not a fluke. Despite promising to implement a Soviet-style government-run health care system, increase taxes, and implement draconian environmental regulations that would cripple the U.S. economy, Sanders managed to secure a win in the New Hampshire primary shortly after posting a respectable second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, propelling him to a double-digit lead over the other Democrat candidates in national polling.

Sanders is hardly an anomaly in today’s Democrat Party, though. Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, another “surging” candidate who ran neck-and-neck with Sanders in the first two primary contests, has already demonstrated his willingness to go even further to the left than the country’s only openly socialist senator. Buttigieg recently announced that he supports decriminalizing ALL illegal drugs — a position that even Sanders isn’t willing to embrace ahead of the election.

The rest of the Democratic field is just as radical as Sanders and Buttigieg. Almost every Democrat running for President, for example, has already endorsed the “Green New Deal,” a far-left wish list of climate policies that would cripple the private sector with job-killing regulations and cost American taxpayers a whopping $93 trillion. The Democrats have also adopted an extremist open-borders agenda that calls for ending enforcement of federal immigration law and actively encourages illegal immigration. In one particularly poignant moment during the second Democratic primary debate, every single candidate on the stage eagerly raised their hand to pledge that they would provide “free” taxpayer-funded health care to illegal aliens.

Luckily for the freedom-loving majority of Americans, Trump has been watching with concern as socialism has steadily infected the Democrat Party, and he’s vowed that he will never allow that poisonous ideology to take root in the U.S.

“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” the president said during his State of the Union Address last year. “America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free.”

The rise of radical socialists such as Bernie Sanders spells doom for the Democrats — the left is completely out of touch with the rest of the country, which has never stopped abhorring socialism. The American people will never accept the economic devastation and loss of individual liberty that socialism entails, which effectively rules out every single one of the candidates the Democrats are putting forward in 2020.

Charlie Kirk is the founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, an advocacy group for young conservatives.