As Halloween approaches, I ponder frightening things: encounters with people garbed as witches and warlocks on the one hand, and the prospect of a Democratic Party takeover of the House and/or Senate on the other.
Frighteningly dressed people can remove their scary outfits at evening’s end. The fear they instill is temporary.
Democratic politicians, by contrast, are scary because of what they believe and what they want to do, not because of the way they dress. They cannot remove their beliefs and throw away their agenda at the end of the evening. Beliefs and agendas have a permanence to them that costumes do not.
What Democratic politicians believe and want to do is scary.
For instance, Democratic politicians believe the economy “doesn’t work” for most Americans. They want to rip it up and start over. The most active and energetic of their candidates come from the progressive side of the party, where they openly tout their socialist beliefs in the “necessity” of the seizure of the means of production and the use of government power to engineer the redistribution of wealth.
To that end, Democratic politicians support higher levels of taxation not as a means of collecting the revenue necessary to fund government, but as a means to use the coercive structures of the government to redistribute wealth to help “level the playing field” in what they insist is a “more equitable” manner. They cling to this belief despite the experience of history demonstrating conclusively that this socialist idea only succeeds in “moving toward equality” not by raising the poor up to the level of the rest of society, but by lowering the rest of society to the level of the poor.
Under socialism, it is said, all share equally — in their misery.
To be clear, it’s scary to think there’s a major political party in the early 21st century in the United States of America led by people who believe we would be better off were we to abandon the economic system that generates our world-leading standard of living and move instead to an economic system that has failed to produce prosperity anywhere it has been tried.
The evidence is clear, and has been for decades: Socialism does not work.
To continue to hold pro-socialism beliefs, then, one must either be ignorant of the historical record or deliberately be overlooking that historical record in service of a different goal than “equity.”
It’s not just on the wealth redistribution front that the Democratic politicians’ agenda is frightening.
Democratic politicians believe that the millions of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. should be granted amnesty. They believe that the vast majority of these illegal immigrants should be made citizens, be allowed to vote, and receive all the taxpayer-funded social welfare benefits for which citizens in their circumstances qualify.
Democratic politicians believe the Medicaid work requirements made in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act should be reversed.
Democratic politicians believe the federal government should interfere further in the housing market by spending to create 3 million homes and expand rental and down payment assistance.
Democratic politicians believe that the Second Amendment applies only to state militias and that individuals have no right to possess a firearm.
Democratic politicians believe that “climate change” should require us to stop using the natural resources we have in abundance for our energy needs.
Democratic politicians believe criminality is not the consequence of individual moral failure or personal choice — they believe it is the inevitable consequence of what they see as the unjust class structure our nation has created and maintains. They believe that unjust class structure leads to poverty, inequality, inadequate education, family instability, and lack of economic opportunity. Consequently, their approach to criminal justice emphasizes addressing these underlying causes, “rehabilitating” offenders, reducing incarceration, and “reforming” the criminal justice system, rather than focusing on protecting the lives, liberty, and property of law-abiding citizens by emphasizing individual responsibility, deterrence, incapacitation, and just punishment as the central purposes of the criminal justice system.
That’s quite a scary list.
A sharp-eyed reader will have noted that I have not referred to those who hold these scary beliefs as “Democrats.” I have made a point of referring to holders of these frightening beliefs as “Democratic politicians” to note an important distinction: I do not believe all rank-and-file Democrats hold these beliefs.
CANCEL CULTURE COMES FOR HALLOWEEN
Yet whether rank-and-file Democrats hold these radical beliefs as intensely as do Democratic politicians is beside the point — as long as rank-and-file Democrats keep casting their ballots for Democratic politicians, they are enabling the chaos that follows.
Ultimately, the idea that millions of citizens maintain an allegiance to a political party with such deeply flawed and demonstrably failed beliefs is the scariest thing of all.
Jenny Beth Martin is the chairwoman of Tea Party Patriots Action.