RUTHFULLY YOURS

John Bachtell, chairman of the National Committee of the Communist Party USA, addressed the Communist Party USA’s national convention this past weekend, celebrating its 100th anniversary. He talked about using this “pivotal moment” in history to help bring about a “democratic and transformative upsurge” for the purpose of radically shifting politics in the United States. He talked about forging a “socialist path,” working as needed “within and alongside the Democratic Party” to defeat “the extreme right and the GOP,” including ousting the “fossil fuel, military-industrial complex, and the industrial elite that constitutes its core.” He added that “many of the forces operating within the Democratic Party today”—along with Communist Party members themselves — “will form the working-class party of tomorrow.”

Mr. Bachtell had written back in 2015  how the Communists could use the constituencies of “labor, African Americans, Latinos, other communities of color, women, most union members, young people, and a wide range of social and democratic movements” already within the Democrat Party as “the vehicle” to advance the Communist Party’s own agenda. The Democrat Party today, which has become a grievance machine against the imaginary ills of toxic maleness and white privilege, is helping Mr. Bachtell’s vision become a reality. Indeed, the Communist-progressive Democrat agendas have melded, as the Communists shrewdly exploit the identity politics that have taken over the leftward-leaning Democrat Party to serve their own more radical ends.

Take immigration, for example. Communist Party USA Chairman Bachtell adocated last weekend  “legalizing all immigrants.” President Trump can “go to hell!” Bachtell declared, if he “thinks he’s going to deport one million undocumented immigrants.”

Socialist-Democrat Bernie Sanders, a leading contender for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2020, said on Sunday that he was opposed to deporting any illegal immigrants, even if they have clearly broken U.S. laws. “I don’t like this deportation thing, at all,” he said. “I think Trump uses this as a beginning to do worse things to come.” Another Democrat presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, thinks that deporting illegal immigrants, even those who have been issued removal orders after the opportunity for a court hearing, “is deeply reprehensible and an affront to our values.” Evidently, upholding the rule of law is not one of the “values” this country should be concerned about, according to Senator Harris.

One of the  resolutions considered at last weekend’s Communist Party USA national convention demanded “the cancellation of the plan for a racist ‘wall’ on the U.S.-Mexico border.” Democrats have likewise characterized the border wall as racist. The anti-Semite Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), for example, called President Trump’s border wall a “monument to racism.” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) declared that the president’s focus on building a wall is “rooted in xenophobia and racism.”

Another Communist Party USA resolution that was discussed last weekend proposed “an end to the multibillion-dollar, profit-based immigrant incarceration industry and the building of immigrant detention centers.” Last Friday, Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed essentially the same thing. “Washington hands billions over to corporations profiting off of inhumane detention and incarceration policies while ignoring the families that are destroyed in the process,” Warren wrote. “Incarcerating and detaining millions for profit doesn’t keep us safe. It’s time to do better.”

Socialist-Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is one of the most prominent voices of progressivism today, leading the Democrat Party sharply to the left. She is the force behind the economy-wrecking New Green Deal proposal, which most of the current crop of Democrat candidates for president have supported. She introduced a resolution in the House making climate change a racial and class issue. Her resolution states that “climate change, pollution, and environmental destruction have exacerbated systemic racial, regional, social, environmental, and economic injustices…by disproportionately affecting indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.” The New Green Deal resolution seeks to “promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression” of these “vulnerable communities.”

The Communist Party USA is all in. It said that it would commit “to working within these communities to advance the goals of the Green New Deal” and develop “a plan within our districts and clubs to connect the Green New Deal organizing with ongoing struggles in their neighborhoods and workplaces.”

The Communist Party USA has boasted of its support for single-payer healthcare (Medicare for All). The Democratic Socialists of America has also promoted the idea for decades. Now, Medicare for All is mainstream Democrat policy. Many Americans are happy with their private health insurance. But private health insurance means profits to the risk-takers and that cannot be tolerated by Communists or today’s progressive Democrat elite. So, Medicare for All would abolish private health insurance and have the government take over instead.

Fundamentally, what many of the Democrat candidates for president and their progressive supporters have in common with the Communist Party USA is their antipathy to the capitalist notion of fully reaping the rewards of one’s own success. “The profit drive is inherent in capitalism, and underlies or exacerbates all major social ills of our times,” the Communist Party USA has declared in its Party Program. Progressives like Elizabeth Warren and avowed Democrat-Socialists like Bernie Sanders have not gone quite that far in their rhetoric to date, but do agree that curbing profits is necessary in the interest of advancing their notions of social justice. And they have advocated massive wealth redistributionist policies to that effect. The Communists are succeeding in using the Democrat Party of today and its constituencies as the vehicle to achieve what the Communists envision as the more radical “working-class party of tomorrow.”