The election is closing in, and voters will have to make choices, not only for the presidency of the United States, but also for various senators, representatives, and other officials at the national, state, and local levels. It would be nice if there were clearly good guys and bad guys, but there are not. All we have to choose from is politicians, who often succumb to bad guy incentives. As the saying goes, power corrupts, and politics is all about power.

What we have this year, however, is not just the usual bad choices. For a number of years, the Democratic party leadership has embraced the very-far left, a virulent, radical socialist left, whose ideals are the antithesis of American individual rights, rule of law, personal responsibility, and the Constitution upon which it is all built. Joe Biden is not a moderate in any sense. He is a wet noodle who has been and will be run over by the radicals, which include his running mate.

The collectivist left has wholeheartedly swallowed identity politics, whereby every person is classified by his or her designated group, rather than being treated as an individual with agency. If you are not a part of an identified victim group, you are automatically a part of the oppressor group. Because the original Marxism has failed so disastrously in every attempt to implement it, the new Marxists had to invent new classes to justify their pet victim/oppressor narrative.

George Floyd, a black man who died while in custody of the police, was not an innocent man who the police targeted. He had allegedly just passed counterfeit currency, on top of a rap sheet of other criminal activity, and was, at the time, apparently overdosing from fentanyl, which can be fatal, causing severe difficulty breathing, as in “I can’t breath!” While that whole incident is unfortunate, the radicals on the left distorted it beyond recognition and used it to ignite mass protests and riots. They were based on the premise that police kill more black people than white people, but that is dishonesty, or at least ignorance of reality. More whites are killed by cops than blacks are, but while you never hear about any of the cases of white victims, every black victim is plastered all over the news media for days or weeks. Nobody knows the name of any white victim. Moreover, anyone who ends up dead in an encounter with the police was most likely violently resisting a legitimate arrest.

Whether or not the protests were legitimate, the riots, burning, looting and mass destruction of property were and are not. Democratic politicians at all levels went out of their way to support and justify them, even though it was obvious from the beginning that none of it was spontaneous, grass-roots activity. Logistics and massive funding enabled the violence and mayhem to continue for months. It is the activity of violent revolutionaries, some with great influence. When anarchists illegally took over a section of Seattle, ruling by thuggery, violating the rights of every person and business in that section, the Democratic mayor praised them as “patriotic.”

Many Democratic party leaders openly embrace socialism. They pretend that they are talking about Sweden, but their decades of praise for the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Venezuela, and other such regimes gives away their deception. Some demonstrate again and again their disdain for America and for the ideals that have made America the nation that immigrants want to flock to, arriving from countries that the leftists want to use as a pattern for America

Democrats, your leaders are radical, anti-American leftists who want to fundamentally change the country, and not in a positive direction, whether that is your inclination or not.

Dan McLaughlin is the author of “Compassion and Truth-Why Good Intentions Don’t Equal Good Results.” Follow him at daniel-mclaughlin.com