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Still more than a year out, the 2020 election will pit two very different visions for America’s future against each other.
It is already playing out in the rhetoric from those vying to be the nominees for the Democratic Party. Not unlike the one-upmanship in the Republican Party primary for the 2016 election, the current crop of Democratic candidates tries daily to see who can move the discussion furthest to the left.
Many of the current candidates have embraced, or at least not outright rejected, policy positions that would have seemed untenable until recently: “Medicare for All,” which refers to universal health care; the Green New Deal. Being a socialist is now a badge of honor rather than a disqualifier.
At the core of the new progressive left is the resurgence of an ideology that many considered dead. But regardless of how many times a lesson is learned, human nature remains the same: Each new generation must relearn, or reaffirm, the principles that brought us to where we are today.
I’ve always found the phrase, “This is the most important election of our lives,” at the least polemical, and at the worst, patronizing. But, beyond whoever the candidates might be, the 2020 election represents a potential turning point in America. For most of history, the primary goal—or at least what the Founders thought and hoped would be the goal—has been to facilitate and promote liberty, even though the promise of an America where all individuals were equal politically and legally would take much longer.
But the concept of equality in other respects, like economically and socially, came in fits and starts: It did not take hold until the Progressive Movement of the early 20th century. And even then, it emerged only briefly before reappearing during FDR’s administration in response to the Great Depression. The Great Society and the 1960s, though, cemented this interpretation of equality into the American psyche.
The current evolution of equality, whose advocates include Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke, seeks not to ensure equality before the law. Rather, these adherents’ focus is to use the law in an attempt to manufacture equality across all spheres of life.
At least the Democratic Party of Woodrow Wilson, FDR and LBJ recognized the importance of a burgeoning and strong free enterprise system. The New Deal and the Great Society sought to supplement the places where its proponents thought private society had fallen short.
By contrast, today’s progressives see no room for the free market—it is an oppressive affliction, the root cause of all of society’s ills, and the only cure is a wholesale overhaul that results in a very different balance between free society and government.
Under this new regime, the status quo is not the traditional Western belief of liberty as freedom from government action, but instead a conception that postulates freedom is an outgrowth of a completely equal society. Without complete equality, true freedom is illusory.
But when today’s liberal Democrats espouse that liberty should be sacrificed under the misguided belief that equality in all respects leads to prosperity and happiness, it brings to mind President Reagan’s quote: “Socialists ignore the side of man that is the spirit. They can provide you shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you’re ill, all the things guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave. They don’t understand that we also dream.”•
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Parr is a student at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis and is treasurer of the Indiana Young Republicans. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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