DON SURBER: Taking on foreign cash to Democrats.
Foreigners not only are paying to promote liberal causes and by extension liberal candidates but foreigners are running their own candidates. The Squad has a couple of them and Minneapolis is about to get a Somali mayor.
Foreigners are funding the Indian who was born in Uganda and sent to New York City at some point. Now he’ll a jihadist-friendly communist—but if justice prevails, he may end up in prison instead of being in City Hall.
The New York Post reported last week, “Zohran Mamdani was hit with two criminal referrals Tuesday filed by a campaign finance watchdog accusing the lefty socialist of accepting illegal contributions from foreign donors.
“The Coolidge Reagan Foundation filed the referrals—alleging Mamdani may have violated the Federal Election Campaign Act and New York Election Code—with the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office on Tuesday.
“The referrals were filed after The Post reported earlier this month Mamdani’s campaign raked in nearly $13,000 in contributions from at least 170 donors with addresses outside the U.S.—including one from his mother-in-law in Dubai.”
Don’t expect Alvin the Chipmunk to go after Mamdani because the DA is a racist who only goes after white conservatives like President Trump and Daniel Penny, the man who saved a subway carload of people from a crazy man. Bragg charged the hero with murder. A jury exonerated Mister Penny.
At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey asks, “Has Foreign Money Turned Democrats Into a Foreign Party?”
The Democrat Party has turned into the Globalist Party. Their constituency isn’t American voters; it’s the international cognoscenti, who want an America that submits to the “global community.” That is why Democrat leaders do not adapt their policies and positions to the clear consensus in the American electorate, because they have already adapted to constituencies outside the United States.
That isn’t the only institution orienting itself away from American constituencies, and for the same reason. Over the last several decades, Academia has seen billions of dollars flow into its coffers from places like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. There too, the money has pushed institutions to indoctrinate students into radical-Left globalist values and agendas. Universities have largely stopped providing foundational Western-civilization values and education in favor of revisionist propaganda about Western imperialism and colonialism. This in turn colors all of the institutions into which radicalized graduates enter and rise within those structures.
And among those, clearly, is the Democrat Party.
Democrats have acted like a de-facto foreign party for well over a century. Woodrow Wilson wanted to transform Congress into something akin to Britain’s parliament:
Wilson’s affinity for an historically contingent perspective on American government—one in which government was not grounded on certain unchanging truths about human nature but would instead evolve to fit ever-changing historical circumstances—can be seen from his earliest days of thinking about politics. During his legal education and then as a professor of jurisprudence, Wilson applied his evolutionary view to the question of how the law should be taught, adopting the approach of what is now called legal realism. Law, under this approach, is not so much a study of forms as it is a study of how the law evolves in response to changing historical realities.
This approach also helps to explain Wilson’s love for the British constitutional system, in which the role of government is not laid out in a single written document but instead comes from an ever-evolving set of laws and judicial precedents that are contingent on historical progress. It is not an exaggeration to say that Wilson was infatuated with the British system of government, and it is clear that he was deeply influenced by the celebration of Britain’s flexible constitutionalism offered in The English Constitution by Walter Bagehot, a leading liberal realist of the second half of the 19th century.
As a teenager and then in college, Wilson loved to read and remark upon the biographies and essays of great parliamentary statesmen, and he particularly enjoyed the speeches of Edmund Burke and John Bright. This experience is what seems to have led him, as a college senior, to write an article, “Cabinet Government in the United States,” proposing that the American separation-of-powers system be replaced by a parliamentary model. It was published in a prominent journal, and its ideas later found a place in Congressional Government, which excoriated the American Congress for its shortcomings when compared with the British parliament.
When Wilson himself entered government, he brought his cynicism about the separation of powers with him, seeing the chief executive (whether governor or President) as a kind of prime minister—not just an executive, but a legislative leader too. This is a perspective, of course, that is the standard view among American political scientists today. During his campaign for governor of New Jersey, Wilson even raised eyebrows by pledging to become an “unconstitutional governor,” by which he meant that he had no intention of keeping to the role outlined for the chief executive under the separation of powers. This was a pledge that he kept as Governor Wilson behaved very much like a prime minister in moving key pieces of Progressive legislation through the New Jersey legislature.
For Wilson, the separation of powers was the source of much of what was wrong with American government. As opposed to a democratic system that would efficiently translate the current public mind into government action, the separation of powers system, as Wilson understood it, was designed to protect the people from themselves by throwing up as many obstacles as possible to the implementation of their will. Such a system served only to impede genuine democracy, which Wilson wanted to restore by breaking down the walls between the branches, allowing them to work in close coordination for the purpose of constantly adjusting public policy to the current public mind.
In 1919, “Progressive” muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens returned from the newly-formed Soviet Union and famously declared, “I have seen the future, and it works.”
After a visit to the Soviet Union in 1919, the worst that Steffens could bring himself to say was that the country was in “a temporary condition of evil, which is made tolerable by hope and a plan.” The plan, the plan! It’s always the plan that matters to communists, socialists, and their fellow travelers. Visionaries with total power will somehow “plan” the rest of society into a blissful nirvana. Even if they must crack a few eggs along the way, the result will be an omelet that’s worth it (see Where Are the Omelets?).
Austrian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek would later demolish such pretentious fairy tales. Hayek, for example, argued convincingly that “The more the state plans, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual” and “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they imagine they can design.”
In reviewing Peter Hartshorn’s 2011 biography, I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens, Kevin Baker noted that “like any sucker, Steffens could not let go of his delusions.” He was “hornswoggled by the biggest lie of all,” namely, that Lenin’s Bolshevism would somehow morph into a socialist utopia. Baker wrote in The New York Times,
He became one of the first of that sad little band of Western intellectuals who fell head over heels for the Soviet Union. Unlike most of them, he did not deny the stories of atrocities leaking out of the workers’ paradise. Even more chilling, he simply believed them necessary to bring about the great changes to come. He never wavered from his infamous first impression of the U.S.S.R., “I have seen the future, and it works.”
In 1932, Stewart Chase, who coined the phrase “the New Deal” asked, “Why should the Russians have all of the fun?”
As Chase wrote in his 1932 work, “A New Deal”, “Why should the Russians have all of the fun of remaking a world?” Admiration was strong in the Roosevelt White House for the huggable Russian bear. Mandatory union membership was proposed, as a prelude to moving away entirely from the messy business of private business decisions, in favor of the more scientific State control of industry and trade. The only careful avoidance was the use of the “C” word, even though communism was unfamiliar to many Americans.
In 2009, Jonah Goldberg described the American left as having “Liberal Views, Belgian Brains:”
Also, one needn’t visit Europe to have a European mindset. The Pew Research Center, among others, has found time and again that the attitudes of American liberals and the attitudes of Europeans are converging on a wide spectrum of issues, from the role of government and charity to the value of religion and patriotism. In short, the more liberal your views, the more Belgian your brain. Maybe all of these millions of Americans studied in Europe and have Kerry-esque hair, but I doubt it.
More important, liberalism has openly yearned to “Europeanize” American social policy for decades. Liberals point to European health-care systems, union rules, tax policies, industrial policy, foreign policy, and even sexual mores, and say: “We need to be more like them.”
This is a very old story. The founders of modern liberalism, led by Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts, were quite open about their effort to adopt a more European approach to political economy. The progressive leader William Allen White said in 1911: “We were parts, one of another, in the United States and Europe. Something was welding us into one social and economic whole with local political variations. It was Stubbs in Kansas, Jaures in Paris, the Social Democrats in Germany, the Socialists in Belgium, and I should say the whole people in Holland, fighting a common cause.”
But it was FDR’s New Deal that truly aimed to “assimilate the American into the ‘European’ political experience,” according to historian Daniel Boorstin.
Pouring buckets of foreign money into the Democrats’ coffers helps to accelerate that process greatly, but then as with Britain and Nigel Farage, the American left shouldn’t be surprised when a figure like Trump emerges.
