Watermelon Politics: Green On The Outside, Red On The Inside

The law of conservation of energy says that matter cannot be created or destroyed. It must go somewhere. 

The same can be said about the people who hate capitalism. In his pithy judgment, Churchill declared that capitalism was the worst form of government— except for all those other forms that have been tried. Even its best friends admit its shortcomings. Unchecked, it tends to accrue power to the powerful and influential. Its horror stories are many.

From the moment Marx penned his famous screed against capitalism in the mid 19th century to the present day, neither rain nor snow nor dark of night has prevented the opponents of market forces from their quest to rid the world of capitalism. For that reason, a number of nations have tried— and failed— to dislodge capitalism from its perch with Marxism and socialism. 

Its horror stories in the USSR, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and many others made capitalism seem like a walk in the park. Ultimate government control produced horrific results. In the 20th century alone, the application of Marx’s ideas killed over 100 million people.

And yet it still has many toney friends in high places. Despite its history of suffering and suffocating conformity, socialists still think you can get to heaven without dying. President Barack Obama articulated the nostalgia for that old-time political religion during his 2008 election campaign.

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for.”

Obama’s “us” purports that these services were provided by some beneficent neutral state that cares equally for all. What he didn’t disclose was that the money “us” provided came from… taxes on the very businesses people he was lecturing. The product of capitalism. The state produces no wealth of its own. It redistributes.

No matter. This soft socialism was lapped up by liberals in Obama’s eight years in the White House. Obama’s siren song allowed for the rise of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and The Squad who advocate for universal health care, permissive immigration and the Climate Crisis narrative. Donald Trump’s current strategy is to portray this crew as hot for Karl Marx. They’re making it easy for him.

A number of people, intellectually homeless after the fall of the USSR, found new perches in the Obama years between 2008-16. As Ross McKittrick of the University of Guelph has pointed out, when the Iron Curtain fell the adherents of communism and state control didn’t smack themselves on the forehead at their youthful indiscretions. No, more convinced than ever about capitalism’s evils, they crawled into other crevices of society. 

In particular, McKittrick observes, they took their crusade into the environmental movement. Suddenly the Marxist/ Leninist cheer squad adopted a green pallor, using the platform of imminent climate destruction to remount their arguments against capitalism. Overnight, red menaces like Naomi Klein and Elizabeth May become Friends of Gaia. 

Together with guilt-soaked trust-fund liberals they launched a holy quest to control the weather or some facsimile of the same. With their friends in academic institutions they put a leg hold on a new media that seems too invested in crusade journalism to dabble in facts. Through the ridiculously cheap medium of social media they were able to create online Potemkin villages of people living in harmony with the land. 

Leading to the moniker Watermelon warriors— green on the outside/ red on the inside.

When early dire warnings about 96 months to doom (from the Prince of Wales or Al Gore) fell apart they recalibrated their timelines into a distant future where no one alive today could possibly assess the proof of their claim that CO2— the gas of life on earth— was poison. In the spirit of the Communist Internationale they convened global climate conclaves under the aegis of the United Nations kleptocrats.

The Democrats’ bloated roster of far-left-leaning presidential candidates is testament to how well this takeover worked. In just ten short years, you now must be a crypto-Marxist to win the party’s nomination. A devotee. A soldier of the earth.

Many think this Sandersization of the Dems is a positive, a forerunner of the new political reality in the U.S. (and Canada). Beating Trump in 2020 is considered a cinch.

So it must have come as a shock this week when uber-liberal NYT columnist Thomas Friedman assessed the Dems field and penned a column entitled “Trump’s Going To Get Re-Elected, Isn’t He?” Friedman’s point is that, whatever the Dem Party thinks it’s doing in its embrace of socialist nostrums, the result will be a re-election of their Beelzebub, Donald Trump.

“I was shocked that so many candidates in the party whose nominee I was planning to support want to get rid of the private health insurance covering some 250 million Americans and have ‘Medicare for all’ instead… I was shocked that so many were ready to decriminalize illegal entry into our country… I was shocked at all those hands raised in support of providing comprehensive health coverage to undocumented immigrants.”

Shocked, says Friedman, who’s dying to give these people his vote. His old Democrat party has taken a powder. Yup, it looks like Marxism is well on its way to another triumph of the circular firing squad.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the publisher of his website Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also a best-selling author whose new book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports And Why The Free Market Could Save Them is now available on brucedowbigginbooks.ca