The Democratic Party succeeded in stopping Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) from getting the nomination. But when it's his socialist platform Joe Biden is running on, does it matter?
To a lot of people in the Democratic Party, liberal Mark Bennett admitted, Sanders "inspires fear, anxiety, and outright terror." But put Joe Biden's face on Bernie Sanders's policies and suddenly, the Democrats think they've struck gold. Biden won, Vox admits, "by convincingly slapping a moderate label on a policy agenda [far more liberal] than the one pursued by Barack Obama or proposed by Hillary Clinton." And they're hoping, in the handful of months before the election, that the majority of Americans won't notice.
Biden's "genius," a lot of Democratic insiders point out, is that he's not the centrist people think he is. The Biden-Sanders Unity Platform, a mishmash of wildly extreme policies that socialists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) gleefully support, helps keep his cover intact. Radical Democrats get what they want with Bernie guiding the vision, and moderate Democrats keep Biden out front selling it as palatable to voters who wouldn't otherwise buy it.
They just have to hope that between now and November Americans don't decide to pick up a copy and read it. The document, so "surprisingly progressive" that even the liberal media was taken aback, is full of ideas the general population would never support: defunding police, expanding the welfare state, opening the borders, exploring reparations, exporting abortion, killing conscience protections, redefining the genders, sexualizing the military, and more. Add to that Biden's latest push -- teaching Islam in schools -- and the pendulum has officially swung.
"This is not a unity group," House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) insisted. "This is surrendering to socialists." Which is something, Bernie Sanders insists, that Biden has already done. "[Joe] promised to be the most progressive president since [FDR]."
And based on this document, he's already well on his way. "Biden has either exponentially increased the scope of what Clinton proposed or advocated for new ideas that most Democrats would have up until recently considered fringe," McClatchy has argued. "For a candidate who has generally kept within his party's mainstream during his five-decade career, it also underlines just how much -- and how rapidly -- the Democratic Party has changed..." Alex Roarty writes.
