Tonight brings the year 2019 to a close. Please stay safe, everyone. And for you truly crazy masochists who will be packed like sardines tonight in New York City’s Times Square — well, as they say in the South, “bless your heart.”
This past year was an eventful one, from a political perspective. From the Covington Catholic High School media imbroglio back in January through the unveiling of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s much-anticipated eponymous report in April through a slew of horrific mass shootings over the dog days of the summer through House Democrats’ (kind of/sort of) formal impeachment of President Donald Trump, 2019 pretty much saw it all.
As we enter 2020, I have two main substantive political wishes to complement my electoral wish that the president be re-elected. We need less socialism and we need more law and order.
It is possible that, perhaps above all else in the broader political universe, the year 2019 will be remembered by historians as the year in which unvarnished socialism became truly ascendant on the American Left. Embodied by the harrowing all-freshman congresswoman “Squad” of economically illiterate would-be despots, socialism has likely not been this popular since the fall of the Berlin Wall itself. According to Gallup, an eye-opening four in ten Americans now support some form of socialism. Perhaps even more terrifyingly, MarketWatch reports that more than a third of Millennials approve of communism itself.
It is impossible to overstate how grossly irresponsible this flirtatiousness is with the economic fool’s errand of socialism and the outright evil political totalitarianism to which socialism inevitably leads: Communism. No ideology in human history has ever killed more human beings than has communism. None. Alas, as it is said, those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. And as we enter 2020, a leading presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Loonbag-VT), is a former Soviet Union-honeymooning, hammer and sickle flag-waving communist who sided with America’s existential geopolitical foes at the very height of the Cold War. This is utter moral idiocy. Hopefully 2020 sees a resurgence of traditional American skepticism of socialism.
A similarly immensely dispiriting trend, and one that unfortunately has more bipartisan support, is the rise of an all-encompassing culture of lawlessness. From weak-on-sentencing judges to the decline of bail to “First Step Act”-style early prison release of violent felons to leftist/libertarian assaults on the integrity of prosecutors to the continued war on cops to the misplaced calls for mass drug liberalization to the neo-Confederate illegality of sanctuary jurisdictions, 2019 was also marked by a general decline in pervasiveness of traditional American support for law and order.
The rule of law is an indispensable piece of the broader puzzle that is the American experiment. Without robust and diligent enforcement of the law, we are nothing. The bipartisan infatuation with mass jailbreak initiatives, the likes of which bamboozled Trump into signing the First Step Act federal legislative catastrophe and which are locally responsible for recent high-profile criminals from New York to Texas being free to roam to streets and wreak havoc upon a vulnerable citizenry, simply must stop. The mentality of mollycoddling criminals and failing to stand for the victims of crime — most emphatically illegal alien crime, but certainly also crime committed from those American citizens who ought to be incarcerated — has long since moved from the realm of the merely pernicious to the realm of the full-on societally ruinous. Along with the inherent lawlessness of Supremacy Clause-defying sanctuary cities, the totality of all these attacks on law enforcement and the rule of law is to inculcate a culture of sheer anarchy. Anarchy, much like socialism and communism, is complete moral idiocy. Hopefully 2020 sees a resurgence of traditional American support for law and order.
Surely that isn’t asking too much for our political environs in the year 2020. Is it?