OPINION: I didn’t fight in two wars to watch America descend into Socialism

By Nick De Gregorio 
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The Fourth of July is an exceptional holiday for exceptional people. Every year, we patriotic Americans take a pause from our busy lives to honor our forebearers for giving us the precious gifts of freedom and liberty. We give thanks to our God for his many blessings as we continue to foster peace and democracy around the world. We reflect on those men and women serving in our armed forces, who have sworn an oath to defend the Constitutional principles upon which our great nation was founded.

As a former Marine who has sworn this oath, I am deeply concerned that our nation and state are trending in a disastrous direction. For two generations, we have rejected socialism and all its despicable trappings. With its staggering 100% rate of failure and a track record that has killed millions of human beings, it boggles the rational mind to see such an anti-freedom, anti-liberty, anti-American ideology as socialism picking up steam on our shores.

“Progressives” (a false self-aggrandizement, if you ask me) will argue that there is a difference between socialism and “democratic” socialism.

They will point, as Bernie Sanders often does, to a map of Europe as proof that democratic socialism works.

When I point to places like Greece or other Mediterranean countries whose social democrats have led them down a path of cultural malaise and stagnant economies, they direct me north to Scandinavia. When I explain to them that democratic socialism in Scandinavia has resulted in outrageous taxation (if you make more than $55,000 per year in Denmark, be prepared to surrender 60% of that to the government) and draconian immigration policies aimed at preserving racial homogeneity (you can’t have a welfare state unless everyone starts in the same position; try implementing that in these diverse United States), they call me a racist.

But I’m not one, because I’m not a democratic socialist.

In reality, the only difference between socialism and democratic socialism is whether you are looking at the beginning of the timeline or the end of it. That’s because socialism is an incremental scourge. Its seeds are sown by those who claim to seek it through democracy.

Democratic socialism is an oxymoron, proven by history to be the precursor of a full-blown socialism that is doomed to fail and should stay in the wastebasket of human history, where it belongs.

Sanders. Ocasio. Governor Murphy. What will these socialists do when there are no more millionaires to rob, no more success to admonish, no more tax dollars to be “invested?” I hope we relieve them of their duties before we are all forced to find out. I, for one, did not put myself in harm’s way in two wars, only to come home and raise my family in a welfare state that is doomed to fail.

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Nick De Gregorio
About Nick De Gregorio 13 Articles
NICK DE GREGORIO is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is currently a candidate for Congress in New Jersey’s Fifth District. A Bergen County native, he lives in Fair Lawn with his wife and two young children.