It is a confusing time within the Democratic Party as the party struggles with identity. Yes the party of identity politics is having an identity crisis. The front runner, Bernie Sanders, is an avowed Democratic Socialist, and has been for years. He’s historically supported Castro, Ortega, Chavez, etc. and Democratic elites know that if he is the nominee, once the American people are educated about how radical he is, they will likely lose not just the presidency, but Bernie will have significant negative coat tails down ballot. But for many people it is still confusing, because policy-wise, there is not a lot of difference between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Yet one calls herself “a capitalist to the bones” while the other is an avowed socialist. Now I question Ms. Warren’s capitalist credentials, but that is not the point of today’s post.

To see the leap from the progressive democrat to the democratic socialist, let’s watch two video clips. First, consider President Obama’s campaign rhetoric in 2012, “You didn’t build that”:

Notice Mr. Obama’s point–because you had a lot of help along the way to build your business (and whoever denied that?!), and especially note that Mr. Obama references specific government-provided help that led to your success (e.g., teachers, government roads). He recognizes you’ve done some things, but because we are a community you have obligations to give back. While not in this clip, the implicit rationale is that the government has a legitimate claim on your business–its effectively not just your business, its all of ours–at least in some limited sense, as we need to “spread the wealth” around. Mr. Obama rightly got a lot of blow back from this claim, most notably from Joe the Plumber.*

But now, watch this video of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, a surrogate of Bernie Sanders. In just eight short years, the view from the leading presidential candidate is not just that you have a significant obligation to “spread the wealth” around to others, but if you made a lot of money, you’ve stolen it from the workers!

No one makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.

“You sat on a couch, while thousands of workers were paid modern-day slave wages and in some cases real slave real modern day slavery…You made that money off the backs of undocumented people. You made that money off the backs of black and brown people being paid under a living wage. You made that money off the backs of single mothers and all these people who are literally dying because they can’t afford to live.”

Now this is beyond absurd; AOC’s view of the world is so distorted and disconnected from reality that you ought to pity the woman who can only see evil in a world of much good. But as just one rebuttal to her many fallacious claims, consider this. If Jeff Bezos (while just sitting on his couch you understand!) was so exploitive to all his employees, and they are literally dying, then why did so many cities fight to get Amazon’s HQ2? Why do most people rejoice when Apple decides to relocate or create a new facility in their area? Why can’t they see how these economic titans are coming to town to starve you to death? How can they be so blind?

Yet that is the worldview of not only AOC, but Bernie Sanders. We went from Bill Clinton, who wanted to grow the economy as big as he could so he could extract more from it, to Mr. Obama, who wanted to spread the wealth around in a more fair way, even if it hurt the overall economy, to a worldview that says the creation of wealth is necessarily exploitive. This is Marxist philosophy to the core (where all value comes from labor), and we know where Marxism goes.

Is the Democratic Party going to walk the plank?

* If you click through and watch the Joe the Plumber debate you will be shocked at the level of civil discourse that Mr. Obama made to Joe, and to Joe’s response. Can you imagine any politician, or any citizen today have that level of dialogue? How far we have fallen. Mr. Trump has been a big part of this, but he is clearly only a part.