Conservatives Skewer the Socialist Policies of Today’s Liberals

Today’s liberals offer the security of socialism to young Americans, but there isn’t enough money on the planet to deliver what they promise, the chairman of the American Conservative Union said Thursday before a huge gathering of conservative activists.

“Maybe it was fuzzy math, but the intention was that we’ll hold onto these resources to give you something when you need it,” Matt Schlapp said at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, referring to Democrats’ New Deal programs instituted in the 1930s.

“What they’re talking about today is ‘Nobody pays anything, except the rich,’” Schlapp said. “By the way, the rich are all of you. Anyone with a job is rich. The rich will take care of providing freebies for everyone.”

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, joined Schlapp for a discussion covering socialism, the modern Democratic Party, and the state of Donald Trump’s presidency to open CPAC, which Schlapp’s organization puts together each year.

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Brian Kilmeade, co-host of Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” acted as moderator for the segment called “E Pluribus … Out of Many, What?”

Nowhere in the Constitution, Lee said, is the federal government empowered to give everything to the nation’s citizens, much less illegal immigrants.

“The problem with that is a government that promises to provide everything for you can take everything away from you,” Lee said.

Lee said he was skeptical at first that Trump is a true conservative, noting that he was “one of the latest on the Trump train.”

His doubt went away as soon as Trump took office in January 2017, Lee said, as the president’s economic, social, and foreign policies demonstrated his commitment to conservatism.

Lee said Trump’s greatest achievements include moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem; fighting to repeal Obamacare; cutting taxes and delivering meaningful tax relief to middle-class workers; slashing government regulations to revive business; restoring the separation of powers; and seating almost 200 new federal judges, including Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

This conservative approach is vastly different than the large-scale changes that today’s liberals and socialists aim to make, Schlapp said.

“What Bernie Sanders and the rest of these people– including Barack Obama, let’s not let Barack Obama off the list–say is they want to transform America,” Schlapp said. “They didn’t say they want to improve America. They didn’t say they wanted to clean America up a little bit. They said they want to fundamentally change America.”

Besides existing entitlement programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, he said, liberals advocate “free” government programs such as preschool and tax credits for the energy industry, as if the money didn’t come from taxpayers.

The Democratic Party increasingly has unmasked itself as socialist, Lee said. Democrats used to avoid the moniker like the plague, he said, but many now embrace what they really are.

“I think that brings heat to the moment,” he said.

CPAC, the largest annual national gathering of conservative activists, runs Thursday through Saturday at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, just outside Washington.

COLUMN BY

Allison Schuster

Allison Schuster is part of the Young Leader’s Program at the Heritage Foundation and interns at The Daily Signal.

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