PART I: A DEFINING EVENT IN OUR RECENT HISTORY
A truly evil cabal has taken control of the Democrats. It took effect when the pact between the Sen. Joe Biden camp and the Sen. Bernie Sanders camp was signed in July 2020. The pact was a 110-page position paper on many national issues of concern to both men. Although Bernie had caucused with Democrats in the Senate for years, he was elected to office in Vermont under the rubric of ”Democratic Socialist.” He usually justified that rubric as not being ”communist” because he said he was a ”non-authoritarian socialist” (sic). This clever manipulation of language could not, however, hide the reality that his lifelong views were derived from Marxist critiques of capitalism. His bombastic rhetoric was largely taken from the Marxist playbook of criticisms of capitalistic Western culture. And, in fact, when Sen. Sanders married in the 1980s, he and his wife honeymooned in the USSR.
Compare Biden’s willingly uniting with Sanders with Harry Truman’s wing of the Dems that refused to ally itself with the Henry Wallace wing of the Democrats in 1948. Henry Wallace, although having some notable eccentricities, was a tremendous mover and shaker within the Democrat party and not only had served as the secretary of agriculture under Pres. Roosevelt, but was the vice president handpicked by Roosevelt, who served as V.P. during most of WWII. However, his obsessive insistence on having greater sympathy for and alliance with Josef Stalin and the communist rule of the USSR created considerable disgust and suspicion among the Democrat party leadership, and FDR replaced Henry Wallace with Harry S. Truman as his V.P. in the election of 1944. FDR won that election and died the next year, and Truman became president of the USA.
Truman did not try to conform with Wallace in 1948 and also did not try to ”build bridges” with him. Wallace instead ran against Truman as the Progressive Party candidate for president, resurrecting the name of the party from the earlier movements by that name in both the Democrat and Republican Parties in the early 20th century.
Wallace’s use of the term ”progressive” was intended to deflect against legitimate concerns that he was a communist ideologue. The platform of the Progressive Party had statements that certainly stoked this concern. The platform said, ”If peace is to be achieved, capitalist United States and communist Russia must establish good relations and work together.” Another statement that appeared in the Progressive platform stated, ”The move to outlaw the Communist Party is a decisive step in their assault on the democratic rights of labor, of nations, racial, and political minorities.” And lastly, the Democrat decision to rebuild West Germany as a bulwark against communism was distorted to state, ”The use of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Nazi Germany [sic] has a war basis … [and is intended] to subjugate the economies of other European countries to American big business.” Thus, our legitimate concerns about the ideological and military expansion of the USSR was distorted by Wallace’s pro-communist vision.
Truman, in a surprise victory, defeated Thomas Dewey, the Republican candidate for president, and Wallace received less than 3% of the votes cast.
Thus, the left-leaning but non-communist mainstream of the Democrats retained their claim to being ”liberal” or ”left of center” and managed to draw the line when it came to uniting with the extreme leftist wing of their party. However, that boundary line collapsed 72 years later with the emergence of the Biden- Sanders pact. The Dems are now the Demo-communist party with a few other elements of cultural Marxism included that were not anticipated by or included in the writings of Karl Marx. For example, Marx understood the family to be a bourgeois institution that they believed promoted selfishness, so they stood basically in opposition to the nuclear family as the building block of society. However, knowledge of puberty-blockers and genital- mutilating surgeries was not available in the 1840s, so they did not explicitly promote ”transitioning” as a legitimate albeit anti-family practice. Today’s left is, of course, totally on board with all this transgender-affirming ideology because it conforms totally with traditional anti-bourgeois, anti-family values.
The Biden-Sanders pact is overwhelmingly negative in its positions. Page after page states all the horrible things that must be fixed in the United States. No successes are included in their 110-page document – no successes that one could build upon. This is the hallmark of communist criticism – reasonable, constructive language is not used. The system as we live in it and know it is failing.
Vastly enlarged government control is the key feature of the communist program. Wallace’s platform stated that it ”wants to put into the hands of the people’s representative the levers of control essential to the operation of an economy of abundance” (my italics). “levers of control” means “ownership of the means of production” in every major sector of our economy. That is according to the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and according to the Socialist Party Platform of 1912. It was their position then, and it is their position now. The Manifesto states unequivocally, “In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” That is the principle of communistic governance – more government control of all sectors of the economy is the basis of progress. It is a false premise, but it is repeated by the Sanderses and Bidens of this world as though it were a deep truth.
The Biden-Sanders pact makes the accusation that ”the U.S. economy is rigged against the American people.” They also state, ”But our economy was fundamentally flawed even before the novel coronavirus sickened millions and killed more than 130,000 Americans.” Because we are
”fundamentally flawed,” they call for a federal expansion and takeover of health care and education in America. So their answer is to re-rig the rigging! Government control and funding of entire sectors of the economy is the formula that communists want to impress us with, but it is not the solution.
Their pact flatly states,”Democrats have been fighting to achieve universal health care for a century.” They also want the federal government to take control of the energy sector of the economy, presumably to protect us from climate change. Private companies do not have the extensive reach or authority that government could bring to make the needed changes. Further, the Biden-Sanders communist, hyper-negative critique of our so-called needs also calls for a federal takeover of the housing market. They state, ”We have a nationwide shortage of affordable housing units, and tens of millions of Americans live in homes that pose risks to their health and safety.” This implies that they want nationwide standards for what home health and safety should be – that means national control over building construction – and with the claimed shortage of homes, this would mean home-building would become federalized.
This writer is not exaggerating the turn to the left that that pact intends for our economy. The communist policies that were resisted by mainstream Democrats in 1948 are no longer being resisted. The Wallace vision has been accepted by the leadership of the Democrats, and we are on a path to losing our capitalist and free market applications, which have already eroded to a great degree. The New Deal left-of-center mindset has succumbed to communist ideology.
PART II: SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ABOVE DEFINING EVENT FOR BORN AGAIN CHRISTIANS
The implications of this shift of the Democrats from being “left of center” or “liberal” to being communist is significant because it is like an article of divorce from Judeo-Christian morality and from acknowledgment that government is accountable to Almighty God, not only to the “political class” or to the citizens. Power even with good intentions often is not an end-in-itself. Government exists to carry out the will of God, to be consistent with Biblical examples and principles, and to protect the God-given rights which come from our Creator. (Romans 13: 1-7)
Communism has from its inception portrayed religion as “the opiate of the people.” According to communists, belief in God is a ploy by a selfish leadership that allows them to exploit the inherent selfishness of people for their own benefit. According to communists, the hope of heaven leads people to accept exploitation on this Earth by those who know how to garner and use their exploitative powers. Communism claims that religion or faith distracts us from loyalty to the universal “village” of humankind and instead directs us to place our hopes and aspirations on a non-existent heavenly city. This is atheistic garbage which has never been explicitly accepted by politicians in our country, even those with dissolute personal lives and many ethical shortcomings.
In fact, since the 19th century, even the politicians who believed in government ownership of the means of production – which was advocated by Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels – did not call themselves communists, but instead referred to them as socialists (like Eugene V. Debs) despite the fact that they vociferously advocated for government ownership of the means of production (i.e., ALL production), a central tenet of communism. The Socialist Party Platform of 1912 bears witness to what I am saying. They knew that the word “communism” had so many negative connotations in the USA that they would have no chance of moving their program(s) forward if they used that term to characterize themselves. Yet, in that earlier platform, although calling themselves Socialists they call for the government ownership of all major sectors of the economy. And the reader – especially the evangelical Christian reader – may be shocked to see how many positions listed in their 1912 platform have already been implemented by our federal government. Like Bernie Sanders, they have called themselves Socialists or Progressives, or International Workers of the World, but their program is totally consistent with the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published in 1848.
Communists specialize in and spend a lot of time thinking about subterfuges whereby they can take over non-communist organizations. My father was involved with the founding of the Transport Workers Union in Philadelphia, PA and at a certain point in time in the early 1940’s, the New York Chapter and the Philadelphia Chapter militantly kicked out the communists who were emerging in their midst and in their leadership. One of the key features of this was the fact that most of the founders of that union were Catholics (my father was not), and the unionists knew that their communist co-founders and associates did not believe in God, and were in fact aggressively disdainful of faith in Almighty God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit sent by the Father and the Son.
Unionism for the communists was a step towards the building of working men’s associations that would commit to the creation of a new society not merely a union, and the new society would reject what they considered to be the “mumbo jumbo” of faith in God. Sadly, even my earthly father believed that God – if there was a God – is merely a “force.” Yet, by His grace, this writer, this sinner, has been saved unto eternal life with God by His precious Son who died on that horrible cross that I might know Him and live with Him forever.
The evangelical goal of living a life in and through Christ and His Word, and the hope that that lifestyle gives, is diametrically opposed to the atheistic first principles of communism. John 1:12-13 tells us “To as many as received Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” Thus, the convergence of the Democrats with the communists in our country is at bottom an advance of the dark powers of Satan that pretends that politics and everyday life can be conducted, and conducted most effectively, by a leadership that denies Almighty God’s existence and the salvation offered by His Son.
When the Biden Democrats in 2020 took the major step to accept the communist ideology of the Sanders organization, that action implied taking a stand against Almighty God. Once one crosses that line into communism, one has irrevocably entered into enmity with Jesus Christ and His people. Whether explicitly stated or not, communism means officially embracing atheism. Sadly, that line of doom has been crossed by one of our two major parties.
Jeffrey Ludwig
Photo: MarketWatch
To read more articles by Jeffrey Ludwig click here.
