The only good way to govern our country is by following the guidelines set by our founding fathers. They revolted against mother England for far less tyranny than Americans live under today. Once upon a time, it was just the commies, marxists, and facists from other countries that posed a threat to our nation. Then these factions infiltrated our own country and took over the Democratic party. And since the rise of George W. Bush, the socialist agenda of the Democrats has infected and overtaken the Republican party. There are few true conservatives and constitutionalists left in American politics.
I remember reading a story told by Ezra T. Benson, who served as the Secretary of Agriculture during the Eisenhower administration. The leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Kruschev (who followed Stalin) was going to visit the U.S. and Benson was ordered by Eisenhower to give Kruschev a tour of some of our agricultural facilities. With great reluctance, Benson agreed to do as requested by the President.
During the tour Kruschev remarked to Secretary Benson that communism would eventually consume democracy. Benson replied that Americans would never accept such a drastic change in their form of government as communism. Kruschev then told Benson that it was already beginning to happen.
He said that Americans were being fed one small bite of communism at a time, and that over the course of several years, Americans will have accepted so many communistic ideals, including a massive and uncontrollable federal government, that one day we would wake up to discover that we are a democracy only in name - that our policies and methods of government will be communist in nature. Kruschev concluded that it will be the slow injection of socialist/communist principles into America - not nuclear missiles - that would destroy our nation.
I look around at what happened to my country during the Clinton years, and I am saddened. I look at the accelerated rate of out of control government growth since Bush took office, and I am sickened.
Let me ask you something. When you woke up this morning, did you wake up in the republic of our founding fathers, a socialist-democracy that has lost its way, or under a fascist regime hell-bent on spreading its imperialist control over other nations by brute force? Just what is the United States of America? Are we Reagan's "shining city set on a hill" or are we the fulfillment of Kruschev's prophecy?
There has been a slow wave that has taken over politics and the way people think in this country. They call it social responsibility. I call it socialism. And in the voters who despise conservatism, the Republicans and even George Bush, we see them run in haste to support Obama, Liberalism and the socialist platform of the Democratic party. Don't you people get it? There is nothing democratic about the Democratic party - it's become socialism, even Marxism in its purest form. The Democratic party is nothing like the party of Kennedy, Truman, Roosevelt. Why do you think former (staunch) Democratic Governor (and Senator) Zell Miller was so fighting mad and jumped at the chance to speak at the Republican convention years ago? Miller saw the writing on the wall. Former U.S. Marines are like that. They can smell trouble a mile away.
For conservatives opposed to an Obama presidency, the last few days have brought the wonder of the smoking gun: Obama really is a socialist. A Vote For Obama Is A Vote For Socialism. Combine that hidden paper trail with his Ayers affiliation, and it's reasonable to believe that Obama still holds these socialist political views.
Conservatives' excitement at finally having found the real socialist hiding inside that empty suit is tempered by one thing -- outside of conservative circles, nobody really seems to care. The media, of course, is very aggressive about not caring, but the malaise seems to affect ordinary Americans as well.
The only way to explain this disinterest in Obama's past and its relationship to his present is that Americans no longer consider the label "socialist" to be a pejorative. To them, it's just another content-neutral political ideology. In our non-judgmental age, it falls into the same category as Liberal vs. Conservative, or Left vs. Right. To most people, it just means Obama is a more liberal Liberal, or a leftier Lefty, and they already knew that.
In order to stir ordinary Americans to the sense of outrage those of us in the blogosphere feel, we need to remind them that socialism is not simply a more liberal version of ordinary American politics. It is, instead, its own animal, and a very feral, dangerous animal indeed.
It helps to begin by understanding what socialism is not. It isn't Liberalism and it isn't mere Leftism. Frankly, those terms (and their opposites) should be jettisoned entirely, because they have become too antiquated to describe 21st Century politics. The political designations of Left and Right date back to the French Revolution, when Revolutionaries sat on the Left side of the French Parliament, and the anti-Revolutionaries sat on the Right. Terms from the internal geography of the French parliament as the ancient regime crumbled are striking inapposite today.
Likewise, the terms Liberal and Conservative date back to Victorian England, when Liberals were pushing vast social reforms, such as the end of child labor, while Conservatives were all for maintaining a deeply hierarchical status quo. Considering that modern "liberals" are seeking a return to 20th Century socialism, those phrases too scarcely seem like apt descriptors.
If it were up to me to attach labels to modern political ideologies, I would choose the terms "Individualism" and "Statism." "Individualism" would reflect the Founder's ideology, which sought to repose as much power as possible in individual citizens, with as little power as possible in the State, especially the federal state. The Founder's had emerged from a long traditional of monarchal and parliamentary statism, and they concluded that, whenever power is concentrated in the government, the individual suffers.
And what of Statism? Well, there's already a name for that ideology, and it's a name that should now be firmly attached to Sen. Obama: Socialism.
Although one can trace socialist ideas back to the French Revolution (and even before), socialism's true naissance is the 19th Century, when various utopian dreamers envisioned a class-free society in which everyone shared equally in what the socialist utopians firmly believed was a finite economic pie. That is, they did not conceive of the possibility of economic growth. Instead, they believed that, forever and ever, there would only be so many riches and resources to go around.
The original utopians did not yet look to the state for help establishing a world of perfect equality. Instead, they relied on each enlightened individual's moral sense, and they set up myriad high-minded communes to achieve this end. All of them failed. (For many of us, the most famous would be the Transcendentalist experiment in Concord, Massachusetts, which almost saw poor Louisa May Alcott starve to death as a child.)
It took Marx and Engels to carry socialism to the next level, in which they envisioned the complete overthrow of all governments, with the workers of the world uniting so that all contributed to a single socialist government, which in turn would give back to them on an as needed basis. Assuming that you're not big on individualism and exceptionalism, this might be an attractive doctrine as a way to destroy want and exploitation, except for one thing: It does not take into account the fact that the state has no conscience.
Once you vest all power in the state, history demonstrates that the state, although technically composed of individuals, in fact takes on a life of its own, with the operating bureaucracy driving it to ever greater extremes of control. Additionally, history demonstrates that, if the wrong person becomes all-powerful in the state, the absence of individualism means that the state becomes a juggernaut, completely in thrall to a psychopath's ideas. Herewith some examples:
My favorite example is always Nazi Germany because so many people forget that it was a socialist dictatorship. Or perhaps they're ignorant of the fact that the Nazi's official and frequently forgotten name was the National Socialist German Worker's Party. In other words, while most people consider the Nazi party to be a totalitarian ideology arising from the right, it was, in fact, a totalitarian party arising from the left.
Practically within minutes of the Nazi takeover of the German government, individuals were subordinated to the state. Even industries that remained privately owned (and there were many, as opponents of the Nazis = socialist theory like to point out), were allowed to do so only if their owners bent their efforts to the benefit of the state. Show a hint of individualism, and an unwillingness to cooperate, and you'd swiftly find yourself in Dachau, with a government operative sitting in that executive chair you once owned.
We all know what life was like in this Nazi socialist state. Citizens immediately lost the right to bear arms; thought crimes were punished with imprisonment and death; children were indoctrinated into giving their allegiance to the state, not the family; the government dictated the way in which people could live their day-to-day lives; and people who appeared to be outliers to the harmony of the conscienceless government entity (gays, mentally ill-people, physically handicapped people, Jews, gypsies) were dehumanized and eventually slaughtered.
And here's something important for you to realize as you think about what happened in that socialist state. While a core group of people, Hitler included, undoubtedly envisioned these extremes as their initial goals, most didn't. They just thought that, after the utter chaos of the 1920s (especially the economic chaos), the socialists would calm the economy (which they did), and simply remove from people the painful obligation of having to make their way in the world. It was only incrementally that the average German bought into the ever-more-extreme demands of the state - and those who didn't buy in were coerced because of the state's unfettered willingness to use its vast, brute power to subordinate individuals to its demand.
Why are Americans embracing socialism while the rest of the world is abandoning it? Because Americans have been taught since the first grade that when American governments own enterprises and redistribute wealth, this is free enterprise while when the Soviet and Chinese governments engage in this conduct, it is socialism. Americans have no idea that many decades ago, they abandoned the principles of liberty on which America was founded.
Here's another example: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was very popular to downplay what was going on in the USSR and, instead, chalk up fear of the Soviets to the foul remnants of McCarthyism. This was extreme intellectual dishonesty on our part. The fact is that life in the USSR was always horrible.
From its inception, the Soviet state brutalized people, whether it was the upper echelon party purges or the mass slaughter of the kulaks -- all in the name of collectivism and the protection of the state envisioned by Lenin and Stalin. Most estimates are that, in the years leading up to WWII, the Soviet socialist state killed between 30 and 60 million of its own citizens. Not all of the victims died, or at least they didn't die instantly. Those who didn't receive a swift bullet to the head might starve to death on collective farms or join the millions who ended up as slave laborers in the gulags, with most of the latter incarcerated for thought crimes against the state.
I've got another example for you: the People's Republic of China, another socialist state. One sees the same pattern as in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia: individuals were instantly subordinated to the needs of the state and, as the state's needs became ever more grandiose, more and more people had to die. Current estimates are that Mao's "visionary" Great Leap Forward resulted in the deaths of up to 100 million people. The people died from starvation, or were tortured to death, or just outright murdered because of thought crimes. The same pattern, of course, daily plays out on a smaller scale in socialist North Korea.
Those are examples of hard socialism. Soft socialism is better, but it certainly isn't the American ideal. Britain springs to mind as the perfect example of soft socialism. Britain's socialist medicine is a disaster, with practically daily stories about people being denied treatment or receiving minimal treatment. Invariably, the denials arise because the State's needs trump the individual's: Either the treatment is generally deemed too costly (and there are no market forces at work) or the patients are deemed unworthy of care, especially if they're old.
British socialism has other problems, aside from the dead left behind in her hospital wards. As did Germany, Russia, and China (and as would Obama), socialist Britain took guns away (at least in London), with the unavoidable result that violent crime against innocent people skyrocketed.
Both history and current events demonstrate that the socialist reality is always bad for the individual, and this is true whether one is looking at the painfully brutal socialism of the Nazis or the Soviets or the Chinese, with its wholesale slaughters, or at the soft socialism of England, in which people's lives are ever more tightly circumscribed, and the state incrementally destroys individual freedom. And that is why Obama's socialism matters.
Regardless of Obama’s presumed good intentions, socialism always brings a society to a bad ending. I don’t want to believe that Americans who live in a free society that allows people to think what they will, do what they want, and succeed if they can, will willingly hand themselves over to the socialist ideology. They must therefore be reminded, again and again and again, that socialism isn’t just another political party; it’s the death knell to freedom. So remember, while McCain wants to change DC, Obama wants to change America.
What is the reaction of Americans? Cheering the efforts of freedom advocates overseas, they instead move in the opposite direction at home. The best example is with respect to publicly-financed sports arenas. These are the classic example of socialism being used to steal from the poor to give to the rich. Money is plundered through the political process from those who have, usually the poor through the use of a regressive tax, and given to those who need — the wealthy stadium and team owners. The idea that the wealthy should have to round up the necessary investment funds on their own is an anathema to them; like their socialist counterparts overseas, they would rather use government to steal the money for them.
Why are Americans embracing socialism while the rest of the world is abandoning it? Because Americans have been taught since the first grade that when American governments own enterprises and redistribute wealth, this is free enterprise while when the Soviet and Chinese governments engage in this conduct, it is socialism. Americans have no idea that many decades ago, they abandoned the principles of liberty on which America was founded.
Morever, Americans have been taught that if American businessmen support a government enterprise, then it must be free enterprise. After all, haven't we all learned in our government schools that American businessmen favor free enterprise? The unfortunate truth, however, is that the American businessman of today, unlike his counterpart of the 19th century, is all too ready to run to government for his welfare. He wants nothing to do with such notions as self-reliance, private ownership, unhampered markets, and private capital investment. He wants partnerships with the politicians to ensure that his potential losses will be covered by the citizenry whether they like it or not.
Will Americans ever abandon socialism? Probably not. After all, the most enslaved slave of all is the one who falsely believes he is free. Americans look at airports, sports arenas, government-funded universities, and other publicly-owned or subsidized operations, and think of all of the "benefits" which have been brought to the community through "free enterprise." They block out of their minds that the money to build these enterprises was taken from them, the people, and would have otherwise been spent on other things. They cannot conceive of all of the goods and services which would have come into existence had they been free to spend their money in their own way, rather than have it spent for them by politicians, bureaucrats, and the politically privileged. And so, unlike their counterparts in the rest of the world, Americans respond to the pleas of politicians, bureaucrats, educators, and businessmen with, "Tax us more! Take more of our earnings and savings! We are here to serve you!"
But the spirit of liberty lies dormant deep within the souls of certain individuals. Throughout history, there have been great awakenings which have inspired men and women to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to recapture and fulfill that spirit. Hopefully, it will be ignited in Americans before it is too late. Hopefully, it will be the Americans who will yet lead the world to the greatest achievement of freedom in the history of man.
Walter
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