COMMENTARY Democratic Socialists will complain if right-wing President Trump tries to block their election in America — but they rarely if ever denounce left-wing election theft in Latin America.
There’s something I’d like to ask Democratic Socialists. (Those are the leftists who establishment Democrats fear are hijacking the party while the fecklessness of establishment Democrats continues to hamstrings the party.)
If Democratic Socialist candidates, on the Democratic ticket, win congressional seats in November’s midterm elections, how hypocritical are you prepared to sound if the Republicans move to nullify your victories — and you scream foul?
What if President Donald Trump goes through with a scheme, which constitutional experts warn he’s pondering, to prevent a Democratic takeover of Congress by triggering an obscure code that lets its leadership refuse to seat any newly elected members they don’t like — such as the “communists” he's telling voters you embody.
What if that happens and you condemn it? How much naked double standard are you willing to expose to the world in the process?
Because, believe me, you’ll look pretty naked. And Trump and the GOP know that.
READ MORE: Dear lefty-loosey, righty-tighty zealots: Spare us your Venezuela 'bulla'
They know how unwilling the Democratic Socialists of America are to censure leftist regimes in Latin America — dictatorships like Cuba’s, Venezuela’s and Nicaragua’s that are infamous for the kind of election thefts Trump might try.
Those regimes pull off those heists so often, in fact, that he’s probably requested their how-to manuals.
Trump knows the DSA declares gushing ideological “solidarity” with Havana, Caracas and Managua, while all but ignoring their human rights repression, which includes not only rigging votes but jailing anybody who bellyaches.
And so he also knows that the DSA’s complaints will carry squat credibility with Americans should he imitate, say, Venezuela’s 2024 election piracy after U.S. ballots are counted in the fall.
Why does standing with working people require stroking dictators just because they share the utopian dogma we so often pick up in our college dorms?
So I would suggest to the DSA that it pre-empt that humiliating isolation, re-write its manifesto and full-throatedly urge Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua to hold — and respect the results of — democratic elections.
That way, the DSA can retain the moral high ground if Trump tries to keep it off Capitol Hill when the new Congress is sworn in next January.
It will also improve the DSA’s chances, and the Democrats’, of getting voted in to begin with, by reassuring Americans it’s not a communist-sympathizing Che Guevara fan club out to seize their private property and make their kids wear red Young Pioneers scarves to school.
Political prisoners
DSA politicos have won an impressive number of Democratic primary elections this year as the party's base turns left.
But it stands to face tougher scrutiny in November's general vote — in no small part because, while it understandably condemns Israel's treatment of Palestinians, it has inexcusably given a pass to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
And, just as the DSA can’t seem to bring itself to acknowledge that Hamas massacred hundreds of Israeli civilians in 2023, it also can’t kick the habit of apologizing for the hundreds of political prisoners still languishing behind bars in Cuba and Venezuela, or the scores killed in Venezuela or Nicaragua when they protested epic regime election fraud like 2024.
Yes, the DSA is right to slam the right-wing Israeli government over Gaza; yes, it’s justified in questioning the Trump administration’s interventions in Latin America, like this year's de facto oil blockade on Cuba.
Still, why does standing with ordinary Palestinians and Cubans also require stroking brutal tyrants just because they share the utopian social dogma we so often pick up in our freshman dorms at college?
This week’s DSA statement on a new State Department report about Cuban espionage is a showcase.
The DSA asserts what most Cuba watchers have admittedly said about the document, that it rather hysterically overstates Cuba as a subversive national security threat to the U.S.
It shamefully omits, though, any mention of the deep suffering Cuban communism has wrought. It blames all the island’s ills on the U.S. economic embargo — as if that were also the sole reason Cubans are denied free speech, free elections or genuinely free enterprise.
Instead, the DSA communiqué lionizes the Cuban revolution as a defender of “working people around the world suffering under the boot of U.S. imperialism.”
I just wonder if the DSA will remember its support for the boot that people live under in Latin America if it finds itself under Trump’s boot this fall in America.
