OPINION:
The oath is familiar. Members of Congress, military officers and many other high government officials take it. It requires the oath-taker to defend the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
We can identify many of America’s foreign enemies, but what about domestic ones?
Now that Democratic Socialists of America has published its platform, it appears the organization would qualify as a domestic enemy of the Constitution. If its members achieved power, they would do what Barack Obama promised just before the 2008 presidential election: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
When someone tells you their intentions in advance to restructure what the Founders gave us in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we had better take them seriously and respond accordingly.
This is not conjecture. Among other things, DSA’s goals include eliminating the U.S. Senate and expanding the House of Representatives while creating a multiparty system; guaranteeing free housing and healthcare for all; endorsing a free Palestine (translation: eliminating Israel); abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; emptying prisons (which would release murderers and other hardened criminals to prey on the innocent); abolishing the Electoral College; replacing the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress; establishing public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic principles and accountability to the people (meaning government control); enacting aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations to spend on public goods and infrastructure.
The problem with the last one is that after a very short time, there would be no wealth or corporations to tax.
Are you paying attention to Cuba, where the lights went out again last week — for the third time this month? A man interviewed in Havana by a Miami TV reporter said he could not afford meat, even if he could get it, because it cost 3,000 pesos.
The ignorant and sometimes deliberate voters who support the DSA agenda should be careful what they wish for. They should look around the world and study history to learn where socialism has been tried and miserably failed, leading, along with its twin sister, communism, to massive deaths, imprisonment, censorship and denial of rights that are protected by our Constitution.
Cuba is just one example among many.
Anyone familiar with the past that extends beyond yesterday might recall the popular paraphrase “Workers of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” It is closely associated with the rallying cry from the 1848 pamphlet “The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
The DSA agenda might be considered a modern version of the manifesto, because its goals are remarkably similar.
More from DSA’s published platform: “You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses, they are common goods and utilities.”
As studies have shown — apparently to no avail for those who embrace the DSA agenda — even if the government confiscated all the money owned by corporations, billionaires and millionaires, it would not pay for all this. Socialism is the equal sharing of poverty, robbing people of the incentives to work and prosper according to their talents and persistence.
If ever there were an identifiable domestic enemy, this is it. It must be fought not only at election time but also by members of both parties and publicly, or we will lose the Constitution to our regret and the regret of generations to come.
Those future generations will also blame us for refusing to fight this scourge that is expanding its influence before our eyes.
• Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book, “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (Humanix Books).
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