In normal times, over-the-rainbow rhetoric could be dismissed as window dressing. But these days, Democrats, raging at Trump and emboldened by Bernie Sanders’ campaign in 2016, are deadly serious about a hard left turn.
Even with the total collapse of Venezuela before their eyes and the undeniable horrors of life under communism and socialism, American leftists are no longer embarrassed to espouse ideologies that have failed miserably every place they’ve been tried.
In many ways, then, de Blasio is made for the moment. He and his equally radical wife, Chirlane McCray, spent their 1994 honeymoon sneaking into Cuba, in defiance of a US travel ban. Earlier, he had supported the Sandinistas, the Nicaraguan communist group involved in a bitter civil war, with the American government on the other side.
Yet by the time he first ran for mayor in 2013, de Blasio had scrubbed all references to far-left activism from his Web site. He was just a progressive, eager to make deals with the real-estate industry, which in turn filled his slush funds with cash.
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