WHAT IS A SOCIALIST?
Opinion by Allan McNew
(Author's note: this is a letter submitted to the Record Gazette newspaper)
A recent, short series of letters originally presented opposing arguments about the recent Trump impeachment effort and media bias. It culminated, as often happens with these things, in a redirected argument about the merits of socialism based on, an invariable occurrence in the course of political discussion, an out of context rebuttal of incidental references to socialists and socialism.
“Socialism” is a chameleon word with its meaning often opportunistically shifted to support the talking point of the moment. But, perhaps political observation can be akin to a judge’s long ago statement about pornography; “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”
The myth that Scandinavian countries are successful socialist models: Sweden experimented with socialism but rapidly abandoned the effort. The Nordic nations are more free market, laissez-faire than the United States while dabbling in the welfare state model. However, the Scandinavian states still have a work ethic. There are currently enough producers to fund the slackers who spend their lives as perpetual students in the “free” college systems funded through the tax base.
Canada is merely flirting with socialism and Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau is not a true socialist. Trudeau is like a sheltered kid growing up in a safe, upper middle class suburb who tries to act tough while scratching his crew’s moniker onto public restroom toilet seats. Then, when real deal gangsters take over the neighborhood those kids find out what it unpleasantly means to be a poser.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi had that experience with the recent House impeachment circus. The millennial socialists working within the Democratic party in Congress and their grass roots supporters are true believers in “The Revolution”, they have some muscle behind them in the form of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and it’s affiliations, and they are ready to rock and roll - whether in the streets or the chambers of Congress. Whatever Pelosi’s political beliefs and actions may have been during the Vietnam war era “Students for a Democratic Society” (SDS) fueled “Revolution”, Pelosi has until now been a highly successful, politically astute poser.
Presidential socialist candidate Bernie Sanders is a poser too, he used to trash millionaires before he became one himself – now his class warfare bile is generally reserved for billionaires. However, he is currently the vehicle for “The Revolution”, it remains to be seen if that ancient white man is brutally discarded when his usefulness is over or if he is awarded a place among the future socialist oligarchy while his deluded and betrayed followers stand in long lines on “free bread” days, maybe Tuesday and Friday.
Sanders exploits the fervor of the “Revolution”, the militant, street fighter, secular religion of the 1960s New Left which, until now, has been restrained since circa 1975 in favor of Fabian and/or Gramsci gradualism. The grass roots “Revolution” has now come out of its long stay in the campus closet. The members of rival SDS Maoist factions who occupied university administration buildings, incited riots, committed terrorist bombings and armed robberies (like Lenin’s Bolsheviks did to further and finance the “Revolution”) became credentialed academics and have “educated” two and a half generations of college graduates, which is where the Congressional “squad” of Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley as well as much of the media got their political ideology. The core rhetoric and base ideology hasn’t changed much over the last 55 years or so.
Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, nearly the whole of Silicone Valley, George Soros and the far left politicians and activist organizations who take money from them are posers too. The aforementioned haute bourgeoisie are excused by the latter for their capitalist sins by buying off the “Revolution” and the capitalist robber barons may well take their places among the future socialist oligarchy.
Nearly 100 years ago, near the end of his life, Russian socialist Vladimir Lenin is reputed to have said to the effect that his Bolshevik “revolution” resulted in the bourgeoisie reincarnation of the former Tsarist era – complete with serfs. Then Stalin with his Gulag took over. Stalin made Hitler look like an elementary school boy when it came to doctorate level of tyranny and genocide.
In the modern United States, different factions of socialists, communists and progressives ostensibly have somewhat differing ideologies, but it seems to me they pretty much all say, do and intend the same things with the “progressive” label serving as a screen for socialists and communists to hide behind.
It took me a long time to make sense of the contradictory, mixed, murky goals of the far, far left. Collapsing the economy; insistence on college education while ignoring the erosion of work place skill in the last couple of generations of blue collar workers; legalization of any and all kinds of drugs; exacerbating the homeless problem while exploiting it; the economy killing “green new deal” while willfully ignoring the most egregious polluter on earth; wide open borders; employing identity politics to set everyone against the other; the intended redistribution of income to fund young, able bodied, healthy people to be idle; redistribution of national wealth to other nations; blatant, wild, habitual prevarication to further political ends; creating problems then riding in with solutions to the problems they created, solutions which always further the agenda; the apparent policy of bringing about societal chaos; masters of framed narratives and accomplished sloganeers; wrapping the dirtiest of political deeds in moral tones; socialist, societal change by any means necessary. Collective misery and enraged polarity are needed to propel any population to revolt and usher in the decentralized, stateless, egalitarian, one world of the Utopian future.
But, human nature being what it is, the unwashed masses will need to be guided into what is best for them, therefore the socialist elite will do so with a centralized, coercive police state – the addictive, perpetual exercise of the ideology of despotic power complete with haute bourgeoisie oligarchy and downtrodden serfs.
Nothing is free, and the socialist promise of heaven on earth will never be fulfilled.
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