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 was an eccentric Democrat who had served as the secretary of agriculture under Pres. Roosevelt, and  as V.P. during most of WWII.  However, his excessive sympathy for Josef Stalin and the communist rule of the USSR created considerable suspicion among the Democrat Senate 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 did not try to "build bridges" with him, either.  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 stooge for the U.S. Communist Party.  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 naive leftist 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 or Friedrich Engels.  For example, Marx and Engels 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).  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.

E. Jeffrey Ludwig was formerly a teaching fellow in American history and literature at Harvard University, and served on the Editorial Board of the Harvard Educational Review.  He has also taught at Penn State, Boston College, and Juniata College and was listed four times in Who's Who Among America's High School Teachers.  He has been a regular contributor to American Thinker for 13 years.

Image: Praveenp via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).