As if Bernie Sanders's extremist positions alone weren't enough to give one pause, a look at how he intends to enact them is even more disturbing.

According to the Washington Examiner:

LOS ANGELES, California — Addressing a crowd of thousands, Sen. Bernie Sanders gave a glimpse of what his first days as president would look like.

The Vermont senator pledged executive orders effectively legalizing marijuana in all fifty states as well as expunging the records of many of those who have been arrested for possession of the substance.

"We are going to end the destructive war on drugs. It turns out that you can legalize marijuana in every state in this country by executive order," he said. "We will move forward to expunge the records of those arrested for possession of marijuana."

He also said his administration would ensure that 1.8 million illegal immigrants would be protected from deportations.

"We will end ICE raids that are terrorizing people," he said, adding that he would also "end a border policy that allows federal agents to snatch babies from the arms of their mothers."

Sanders's remarks were some of the first detailing how he would use the tools of the presidency to implement his agenda.

According to the Washington Post, his whole governing plan is premised on executive actions:

Mr. Sanders's team has helpfully provided some indication of what the early days of his administration would look like, in the form of a list of possible executive actions, first reported by The Post's Jeff Stein and Sean Sullivan on Jan. 30. Many of them are similar to what other Democratic candidates might do, and, on the merits, laudable — such as raising the number of refu­gee admissions and halting construction of President Trump's wasteful border wall. But in one key policy area, a measure Mr. Sanders is contemplating would simultaneously harm the U.S. economy and help the dictatorships of Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

We refer to his reported plan to declare climate change a national emergency and, using that as legal authority, reinstate the ban on U.S. crude oil exports that Congress and President Barack Obama lifted on a bipartisan basis at the end of 2015. When the United States adopted the ban back in the mid-1970s, it had at least a plausible policy basis. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had firm control of world oil markets, so it made sense to, in effect, force U.S. producers to sell to domestic refiners so that the latter would be less subject to OPEC price-gouging. In today's world, however, OPEC has been weakened by its own divisions and by the emergence of the United States as the world's largest producer. Much U.S. crude is ill-suited, chemically, for U.S. refineries but works well abroad; eliminating exports, now approaching 3 million barrels per day, would eliminate these efficiency benefits. It would also cost billions of dollars; crude oil sales abroad earned $65.3 billion in 2019.

So much for "democratic socialism."  Sanders isn't bothering with that if he becomes president.  Instead of governing through the legislative process, he intends to govern like a dictator, pen and phone in hand, enacting extremely sweeping diktats through one-man rule.

This is pretty much what his heroes, such as Fidel Castro of Cuba, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and Nicaragua's Sandinistas did: proclaim the democratic bona fides, quiet the critics and fool the New York Times — and then move in for the kill, going all in on the maximo leader dictatorship model, proclaiming it in the name of "the people."  You want to know how all socialist regimes end up as dictatorships?  This is how, and we all know who Sanders's heroes up to now have been.  Hint: It's not the Danish.

It's as if Sanders is dreaming of enacting socialism through dictatorship and then proclaiming it all "democratic," same as the Sandinistas did.

That ought to be a warning to any Democrat planning to vote for Bernie: the democratic socialist thing is a smokescreen.  Sanders's plan is to use the current tools out there to remake the U.S. into something its voters, legislators, and courts never wanted it to be.  Sanders could move in on private property, freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and the right to a non-woke education with ease so long as he plans to govern in large part by executive order.  He could take executive orders to a whole different level.

Some of the most radical of leftist presidents — Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt — took executive orders to new heights in quantity.  Barack Obama, meanwhile, took the quality of executive orders, such as enacting DACA even after Congress rejected it, to new heights.  Worse still, leftist federal judges have made it all but impossible for President Trump to reverse it.

It's all very easy to get into such socialist setups, it seems — but just ask a Venezuelan or Nicaraguan how easy it is to get out.

Sanders could act in both traditions and really get the Castro thing going in the States.

It's a warning to anyone planning to vote for him that it's all too easy to be angry at the Democratic establishment and cast a vote for Sanders as a protest, but turning the party over to a man with totalitarian designs and Castro as his model would be a disaster. 

Image credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.