Making Several Right Turns to Avoid the Left

By Michael J Badagliacco, “MJB”

The great Rush Limbaugh used to say you “making several right turns to avoid the left”. The line works as well in politics as it does behind the wheel. When the map, the media, and a growing share of one party keep pointing you toward a hard left, you do not split the difference and ease into the turn. You keep going right until the destination is no longer the one they picked for you.

What the Socialist Push Actually Wants

The current obsession with socialism has made the goal plain. The Democratic Socialists of America and the activists who now set the pace on the left want to dismantle the American Constitution and the way of life that grew out of it. Their platform calls for eliminating the Senate, replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to a newly expanded House of Representatives, and placing major industries under public control. The closest working model is Communist China, where a single legislature sits at the top of the chart and the party directs production.

That is not a smear. It is the published program. Equal representation of states in the Senate is treated as a defect. An independent president and an independent court are treated as obstacles. Private ownership of energy, manufacturing, and finance is treated as the problem to be solved. Once those pieces are removed, there is no remaining check on whatever majority happens to control the House.

They Have Never Lived Under It

None of this should surprise anyone who has watched the argument for a decade. The people selling the plan have never lived under it. They are, in the main, uneducated grifters who treat government as the source of every good thing and markets as a moral failure. They talk about “democracy” while proposing to scrap the very institutions that keep a temporary majority from steamrolling the rest of the country. They have no memory of empty shelves, political courts, or a legislature that answers only to itself. They have theory and slogans. They do not have the record.

The Right Turns Are Not Complicated

Avoiding that destination does not require a new theory of government. It requires refusing the first left. Keep the Senate as two members per state. That bargain is why small states ratified the Constitution in the first place. Leave the Court at nine and the presidency as a separate, elected office with its own term and its own veto. Keep the means of production in private hands. Those are not radical positions. They are the operating system that produced the wealth and the liberty the reformers now want to redesign.

Right turns look like ordinary political work. Vote for candidates who will not “meet in the middle” with a platform that rewrites Article I and Article II. Defend federalism so states can still say no. Shrink the agencies that already behave as if they own whole sectors of the economy. Teach the difference between a republic with separated powers and a unicameral assembly that claims to speak for the people while answering to the party. Do it at school boards, in state legislatures, and in Congress. Do not wait for a national conversation to grant permission.

The left turn is advertised as compassion and modernity. It is a transfer of power from fifty states and three co-equal branches to one chamber and the activists who staff it. Several right turns keep the old map. That is the whole strategy.