How Socialists Built America _ Information Clearing House_ ICH

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How Socialists Built America

By John Nichols

This article is adapted from The S Word: A

Short History of an American Tradition Socialism,

published in March by Verso.

April 16, 2011 "The Nation" -- Iftheres one constant in thelite national discourse of the moment, it is the claim thatAmerica was founded as a capitalist country and that socialismis a dangerous foreign import that, despite our unwarrantedfaith in free trade, must be barred at the border. This mostconventional wisdomincreasingly accepted at least untilthe recent grassroots mobilizations in Wisconsin, Ohio,Michigan and Mainehas held that everything public isinferior to everything private, that corporations are alwaysgood and unions always bad, that progressive taxation isinherently evil and that the best economic model is the onethat allows the wealthy to gobble up as much of the Republic
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as they choose before anything trickles down to the great masof Americans. Rush Limbaugh informs us regularly that

proposals to tax people as rich as he is for the purpose ofproviding healthcare for kids and jobs for the unemployed are

antithetical to the nations original intent and that BarackObamas reforms are destroying this country as it wasfounded.

When Obama offered tepid proposals to organize a privatehealthcare system in a more humane manner, Sean Hannity o

Fox charged that the Constitution was shredded, thwarted, thrule of law was passed aside. Newt Gingrich said the Obamaadministration was prepared to fundamentally violate theConstitution and was playing to the 30 percent of thecountry [that] really is [in favor of] a left-wing secularsocialist system.

In 2009 Sarah Palin raised similar constitutional concerns,about Obamas proposal to develop a system of universalenergy building codes to promote energy efficiency. Ourcountry could evolve into something that we do not evenrecognize, certainly that is so far from what the founders of

our country had in mind for us, a gravely concerned Palininformed Hannity, who responded with a one-word question.Socialism?


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Well, she said, that is where we are headed.

Actually, its not. Palin is wrong about the perils of energyefficiency, and shes wrong about Obama. The president says

hes not a socialist, and the countrys most outspokensocialists heartily agree. Indeed, the only people who seem tothink Obama displays even the slightest social democratictendency are those who imagine that the very mention of theword socialism should inspire a reaction like that of avampire confronted with the Host.

Unfortunately, Obama may be more frightened by the S-wordthan Palin. When a New York Times reporter asked the

president in March 2009 whether his domestic policiessuggested he was a socialist, a relaxed Obama replied, Theanswer would be no. He said he was being criticized simply

because he was making some very tough choices on thebudget. But after he talked with his hyper-cautious counselorhe began to worry. So he called the reporter back and said, Iwas hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious abouthat socialist question. Then, as if reading from talking

points, Obama declared, It wasnt under me that we started

buying a bunch of shares of banks. And it wasnt on my watcthat we passed a massive new entitlement, the prescriptiondrug plan, without a source of funding.


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Weve actually been operating in a way that has been entirelconsistent with free-market principles, said Obama, whoconcluded with the kicker, Some of the same folks who arethrowing the word socialist around cant say the same.

Theres more than a kernel of truth to this statement. Obamareally is avoiding consideration of socialist, or even mildlysocial democratic, responses to the problems that confronthim. He took the single-payer option off the table at the startof the healthcare debate, rejecting the approach that in other

countries has provided quality care to all citizens at lower cosHis supposedly socialist response to the collapse of the autoindustry was to give tens of billions in bailout funding to GMand Chrysler, which used the money to lay off thousands ofworkers and then relocate several dozen plants abroadanapproach about as far as a country can get from the social

democratic model of using public investment and industrialpolicy to promote job creation and community renewal. Andwhen BPs Deepwater Horizon oil well exploded, threateningthe entire Gulf Coast, instead of putting the Army Corps ofEngineers and other government agencies in charge of thecrisis, Obama left it to the corporation that had lied about the

extent of the spill, had made decisions based on its bottom linrather than environmental and human needs, and had failed ateven the most basic tasks.


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So we should take the president at his word when he says heacting on free-market principles. The problem, of course, isthat Obamas rigidity in this regard is leading him to dismissideas that are often sounder than private-sector fixes.

Borrowing ideas and approaches from socialists would notmake Obama any more of a socialist than Abraham Lincoln,Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower.All these presidential predecessors sampled ideas fromMarxist tracts or borrowed from Socialist Party platforms sofrequently that the New York Times noted in a 1954 profile

the faith of an aging Norman Thomas that he had made agreat contribution in pioneering ideas that have now won thesupport of both major partiesideas like Social Security,

public housing, public power developments, legal protectionfor collective bargaining and other attributes of the welfarestate. The fact is that many of the men who occupied the

Oval Office before Obama knew that implementation of sounsocialist or social democratic ideas did not put them at oddswith the American experiment or the Constitution.

The point here is not to defend socialism. What we should bedefending is historyAmerican history, with its rich and

vibrant hues, some of them red. The past should be consultednot merely for anecdotes or factoids but for perspective on th

present. Such a perspective empowers Americans who seek arobust debate, one that samples from a broad ideological


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spectruman appropriate endeavor in a country where TomPaine imagined citizens who, by casting their eye over alarge field, take in likewise a large intellectual circuit, and thuapproaching nearer to an acquaintance with the universe, thei

atmosphere of thought is extended, and their liberality fills awider space.

America has always suffered fools who would have usdwindle the debate down to a range of opinions narrowenough to contain the edicts of a potentate, a priest or a

plantation boss. But the real history of America tells us thatthe unique thing about our present situation is that we havesuffered the fools so thoroughly that a good many Americans

not just Tea Partisans or Limbaugh Dittoheads but citizensof the great middleactually take Sarah Palin seriously whenshe rants that socialism, in the form of building codes, is

antithetical to Americanism.

* * *

Palin is not the first of her kind. Theres nothing new aboutthe charge that a president who is guiding big government

toward projects other than the invasion of distant lands is asocialist. In the spring of 2009, just months after Obama and new Democratic Congress took office, twenty-three membersof the opposition renewed an old project when they proposed


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that we the members of the Republican National Committeecall on the Democratic Party to be truthful and honest with thAmerican people by acknowledging that they have evolvedfrom a party of tax and spend to a party of tax and nationalize

and, therefore, should agree to rename themselves theDemocrat Socialist Party.

Cooler heads prevailed. Sort of. At an emergency meeting ofthe committeewhich traces its history to the first Republicaconvention in 1856, where followers of French socialist

Charles Fourier, Karl Marxs editor, and their abolitionistcomrades initiated the most radical restructuring of political

parties in American historyit was suggested that theproposal to impose a new name on the Democrats might makthe Republican party appear trite and overly partisan. The

plan was dropped, but a resolution decrying the march

towards socialism was passed. Thus, the RNC members nowofficially recognize that the Democratic Party is dedicated torestructuring American society along socialist ideals and thathe Democrats have as their clear and obvious purpose

proposing, passing and implementing socialist programsthrough federal legislation.

The Republican Party is currently firmer in its accusation thatthe Democrats are steering the nation towards socialismthan it was during Joe McCarthys Red Scare of the 1950s,


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when the senator from Wisconsin was accusing Harry Trumaof harboring Communist Party cells in the government.Truman had stirred conservative outrage by arguing that thegovernment had the authority to impose anti-lynching laws on

the states and by proposing a national healthcare plan. Butwhat really bugged the Republicans was that Truman, whohad been expected to lose in 1948, had not just won theelection but restored Democratic control of Congress. Tocounter this ominous electoral trend, conservativeRepublicans, led by Ohio Senator Robert Taft, announced in

1950 that their campaign slogan in that years Congressionalelections would be Liberty Against Socialism. They then

produced an addendum to their national platform, much ofwhich was devoted to a McCarthyite rant charging thatTrumans Fair Deal is dictated by a small but powerful grouof persons who believe in socialism, who have no concept of

the true foundation of American progress, and whoseproposals are wholly out of accord with the true interests andreal wishes of the workers, farmers and businessmen.

Truman fought back, reminding Republicans that his policieswere outlined in the 1948 Democratic platform, which had

proven to be wildly popular with the electorate. If ourprogram was dictated, as the Republicans say, it was dictatedat the polls in November 1948. It was dictated by a small bu

powerful group of 24 million voters, said the president, who


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added, I think they knew more than the Republican NationalCommittee about the real wishes of the workers, farmers and

businessmen.

Truman did not cower at the mention of the word socialism,which in those days was distinguished in the minds of mostAmericans from Soviet Stalinism, with which the presidentmean cold warriorwas wrangling. Nor did Truman, whocounted among his essential allies trade unionists like DavidDubinsky, Jacob Potofsky and Walter Reuther, all of whom

had been connected with socialist causes and in many casesthe Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas,rave about the evils of social democracy. Rather, he joked thaOut of the great progress of this country, out of our greatadvances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise toworld leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothin

Confronted by the great record of this country, and thetremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak,socialism.

Savvy Republicans moved to abandon the campaign. Thereturn to realism was led by Maine Senator Margaret Chase

Smith, who feared that her party was harming not just itselectoral prospects but the country. That summer she wouldissue her Declaration of Consciencethe first seriouschallenge to McCarthyism from within the GOPin which


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she rejected the anticommunist hysteria of the moment:

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism inmaking character assassinations are all too frequently those

who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basicprinciples of Americanism

The right to criticize;The right to hold unpopular beliefs;The right to protest;

The right of independent thought.

Republicans might be determined to end Democratic controlof Congress, Smith suggested in her declaration:

Yet to displace it with a Republican regime embracing a

philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honestywould prove equally disastrous to this nation. The nationsorely needs a Republican victory. But I dont want to see theRepublican Party ride to political victory on the FourHorsemen of CalumnyFear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear I doubt if the Republican Party couldsimply becausI dont believe the American people will uphold any political

party that puts political exploitation above national interest.

Most Republicans lacked the courage to confront McCarthy s


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directly. But Smiths wisdom prevailed among leaders of theRNC and the GOP chairs of Congressional committees, whoditched the Liberty Against Socialism slogan and reducedTafts 1,950-word manifesto to a 99-word digest that

Washington reporters explained had been cobbled together tosoft pedal the whole showdown on liberty againstsocialism thing. Representative James Fulton, who likemany other GOP moderates of the day actually knew andworked with Socialist Party members and radicals of variousstripes, was blunter. The cheap sloganeering, he argued, had

steered the party away from the fundamental question for theGOP in the postwar era: whether we go back to Methuselahor offer alternative programs for social progress within theframework of a balanced budget.

Imagine if today a prominent Republican were to make a

similar statement. The wrath of Limbaugh, Hannity, Palin andthe Tea Party movement would rain down upon him. The Clufor Growth would organize to defeat the Republican in NamOnly, and the ideological cleansing of the party of Lincoln,Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Margaret Chase Smithwould accelerate. Some of my Democratic friends are quite

pleased at the prospect; as todays Republicans steer off thecliffs of extremism that they avoided even in the days ofMcCarthy, these Democrats suggest, the high ground will becleared for candidates of their liking. But that neglects the


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damage done to democracy when discourse degenerates, whethe only real fights are between a party on the fringe andanother that assumes that the way to win is to move to thecenter-right and then hope that fears of a totalitarian right wil

keep everyone to the left of it voting the Democratic line.

* * *

If universal building codes and health protections for childrencan be successfully depicted by our debased media as assault

on American values and the rule of law, then the right hasalready won, no matter what the result is on election day. Ana nation founded in revolt against empire, a nation thatnurtured the radical Republican response to the sin of slaverya nation that confronted economic collapse and injustice witha New Deal and a War on Poverty, a nation that spawned a

civil rights movement and that still recites a Pledge ofAllegiance (penned in 1892 by Christian socialist FrancisBellamy) to the ideal of an America with liberty and justicefor all is bereft of what has so often in our history been theessential element of progress.

That elementa social democratic critique frequentlycombined with an active Socialist Party and more recentlylinked with independent socialist activism in labor and equalrights campaigns for women, racial and ethnic minorities,


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$3,000 annual income for a family of four, he demonstratedthat nearly a third of the population lived below thosestandards which we have been taught to regard as the decentminimums for food, housing, clothing and health.

Harrington succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The articleled to a book, The Other America: Poverty in the UnitedStates, which became required reading for policy-makers,selling 70,000 copies in its first year. Among the booksreaders, reputedly, was John F. Kennedy, who in the fall of

1963 began thinking about proposing antipoverty legislation,recalls Isserman. After Kennedys assassination, LyndonJohnson took up the issue, calling in his 1964 State of theUnion address for an unconditional war on poverty. SargentShriver headed the task force charged with drawing up thelegislation and invited Harrington to Washington as a

consultant.

Harringtons proposals for renewal of New Deal public workprojects were never fully embraced. But his and othersadvocacy that government should intervene to address thesuffering of those who couldnt care for themselves or their

families underpinned what the author described ascompleting Social Security by providing healthcare for theaged. It urged on the Johnson administrations Great Society,including the Social Security Act of 1965or Medicare.


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Johnson took his hits, but Americans agreed with theirpresident when he argued that the Social Security healthinsurance plan, which President Kennedy worked so hard toenact, is the American way; it is practical; it is sensible; it is

fair; it is just.

Could a plan decried as socialized medicine by theAmerican Medical Association because it was, in fact,socialized medicine really be the American way? Of courseDuring the Medicare debate in the early 60s, Texas Senate

candidate George H.W. Bush condemned the proposal ascreeping socialism. Ronald Reagan, then making thetransition from TV pitchman for products to TV pitchman forBarry Goldwater, warned that if it passed citizens would findthemselves telling our children and our childrens childrenwhat it once was like in America when men were free. But

Bush and Reagan managed the program during theirpresidencies, and Tea Party activists now show up at town hameetings to threaten any legislator who would dare to tinkerwith their beloved Medicare.

Americans would not have gotten Medicare if Harrington and

the socialists who came before himfrom presidentialcandidates like Debs and Thomas to organizers like MaryMarcy and Margaret Sanger and the Communist PartysElizabeth Gurley Flynnhad not for decades been pushing


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the limits of the healthcare debate. No less a player thanSenator Edward Kennedy would declare, I see MichaelHarrington as delivering the Sermon on the Mount toAmerica. The same was true in abolitionist days, when

socialistsincluding friends of Marx who had immigrated tothe United States after the 1848 revolutions in Europe werecrushedenergized the movement against slavery and helpedgive it political expression in the form of the RepublicanParty. The same was true early in the twentieth century, whenSocialist Party editors like Victor Berger battled attempts to

destroy civil liberties and defined our modern understandingof freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right to

petition for redress of grievances. The same was true whenlifelong socialist A. Philip Randolph called the 1963 March oWashington for Jobs and Freedom and asked a young preachenamed Martin Luther King Jr., who had many socialist

counselors besides the venerable Randolph, to deliver whatwould come to be known as the I Have a Dream speech.

* * *

Again and again at critical junctures in our national journey,

socialist thinkers and organizers, as well as candidates andofficials, have prodded government in a progressive directionIt may be true, as historian Patrick Allitt suggests, thatmillions of Americans, including many of these critics [of th


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Obama administration], are ardent supporters of socialism,even if they dont realize it and even if they dont actually usthe word to describe public services that are organized alonsocialist lines, like schools and highways. In fact,

contemporary socialists and Tea Partiers might actually findcommon (if uncomfortable) ground with Allitts assertion thasocialism as an organizational principle is alive and well her

just as it is throughout the industrialized worldeven as thewould disagree on whether thats a good thing. Programsorganized along socialist lines do not make a country

socialist. But America has always been and should continue tbe informed by socialist ideals and a socialist critique ofpublic policy.

We live in complex times, when profound economic, socialand environmental challenges demand a range of responses.

Socialists certainly dont have all the answers, even if pollingsuggests that more Americans find appeal in the wordsocialist today than they have in decades. But withoutsocialist ideas and advocacy, we will not have sufficientcounterbalance to an anti-government impulse that has less todo with libertarianism than with manipulation of the debate b

all-powerful corporations.

Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt,Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy were not socialists.


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Login

Soylent Red +9

But the nation benefited from their borrowing of socialist andsocial democratic ideas. Barack Obama is certainly not asocialist. But he, and the nation he leads, would be well serve

by a similar borrowing from the people who once imagined

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the War on Poverty.

Comments (20)

Sort by: Date Rating Last Activity

4 weeks ago

Control the Language, control the people. I agree 110 %, just read the

words of the Preamble which starts out with "We the people...and what

the hell do they mean by posterity and general welfare? How did the

continent get settled in the first place? Why were the forts built? How

and why did the railroads get built?

How did the interstate highways get built? How were we able totransition from a peace time economy is WWII without the government

intervention?

These fascist neocons would make Orwell proud as to how they've

corrupted the language. When I talk to my conservative friends I like to

break it down to the local level - beginning with homeowners

associations all the way up the county level. They are amazed as to

how socialism they unconsciously partake in.

They don't seem to realize that our owners like the idea of socialism

too, but only for themselves which is what the argument is really all

about. The military is a good example of socialism. One way is the

military lifestyle in itself , and the other is what is real purpose of the

military - to protect the interest of the ruling class.
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ReporRe l

Chris Harlos +11

ReporRe l

humanbeing +6

ReporRe l

Reader -6

4 weeks ago

The writer's call is futile, as the pendulum has swung away from the

modest, social democratic reforms of our managed capitalistic system inthe early-mid 20th century. The U.S.'s 30 year devolution into a

regressive, oligarchic police state is unstoppable at this juncture: there

is simply too much money and power concentrated in too few hands,

and rest assured those hands hold America's vibrant, progressive (or

even radical) traditions in utter contempt, if they know of them at all.

4 weeks ago

"But I dont want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on

the Four Horsemen of CalumnyFear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear"

Then you need to cover your eyes. Those are the revered principles of

the Republican Party.

4 weeks ago

I understand what you mean, that the little normalcy that ever existed in

your empire was not the work of totalitarian conservatives. Yet, the

ideological ground of your empire, as of all empires, is totalitarian

conservatism, i.e. the effort of a tiny group of rapacious rich thugs to

oppress and exploit everyone else, so the only things your "socialists"

succeeded was to strengthen the position of the rightwings bastards. If

you want anything else than rightwing terror you must first get rid of

your "union".
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ReporRe l

Larry Carney +4

ReporRe l

An Australian +1

ReporRe l

Worldist +1

1 reply active 104953 weeks ago

4 weeks ago

Great article! and great to have the name of Michael Harrington brought

back into the picture! This writing stimulated a couple of new insights

and thoughts for me: like on the use of words and terms - "the dangersof big government", as Ronald Reagan made it popular. What really is

BIG GOVERNMENT when you look at it? He opposed unions, where

the people band together to protect themselves from the abuses of big

money and big power...sounds like democracy iin action to me. And if

we look back at the French revolution, was big government the tyranny

of the king or the power of the little people who were being starved to

death? They basically had to band together in a union ...that got a bitwild in reactions with their violence, but that is typical when the violent

and abusive use of power goes too far. (as it seems to be going today,

but so far Wisconsin has been non-violent!)

4 weeks ago

The US got so used to the good life in the last half century that it lostthe ability to even see poverty. Unfortunately, as the economy tanks

and the middle class is shredded, all the hard lessons that go with

tough economic times will have to be re-learned.

3 replies active 4 weeks ago

4 weeks ago

From the very beginning, America like Canada was a colony of Europe

and Britain and imported its barbaric culture from them. Slaughter of

innocents to slavery and economic disparity based on theft of land and

resources with exploitation of slave labor in the beginning, to wage-

slave labor today. Its only natural that Marxian Ideas soon develop and
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ReporRe l

Follow the Facts +5

follow as self-awareness grows about the need to abolish Capitalism to

establish a harmonious Socialist world of abundance for ALL through

democratic common ownership and a production for USE economy

world-wide. Not for the exclusive profit of a tiny class of gross useless

parasites. Go to http://www.worldsocialism.org/

1 reply active 4 weeks ago

4 weeks ago

...this article is problematic on so many levels, it's hard to know where

to begin...but be that as it may, I am not even allowed to post about the

subject matter, since I can't use the word that is at the core of the

article in the first place. The "S"-word....This is Tom Feeley's approach to "freedom of expression." (He can

explain that to me if he cares to, he's got my email address)

But what it is all about in this article obscures the fact that for the

prevailing (US) power, the all overriding issue is the maintenance of the

centralized system of political power to the detriment of localized

control, which is what genuine "democracy" is all about. As long as

such local control is prevented, the center will not have to fear the

emergence of any "disturbing tendencies" or "new ideas" from the

periphery. All parts carry the exact same formula for political

governance.

And with the iron grip of centralized, Imperial Power well established,

"disturbing ideas" or ideologies supposedly harmful to the whole, as

defined from the center, will always be useful in order to distract from

the very fundamental and unequivocal fact that an involuntary and

exceedingly centralized political union, can NEVER be a condition under

which the citizenry as a whole can exercise their inalienable right to

self-determination.
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ReporRe l

Follow the Facts +2

The two are fundamentally opposed and by definition incompatible

"democracy" assumes "local control" centralized union, depends on its

ability to prevent same.

Watch carefully the evolution of the European Union this is explicitly,

unlike the North American Union a voluntary proposition, but the

yearnings from the center will be very similar always more

centralization, never less.

Involuntary Union is always anti-thetical to ANY notion of "democracy"

or genuine, popular self-governance.

This should be the 9th post...will a new page be created, as is the TomFeeley MO or will this make it onto the "first page"....we'll soon see....

Let There Be No Political Unions Between States, Nations or Countries.

4 weeks ago

...wow...I made it...and all you guys freely use the "S"-word above...!

...what a hoot...if I try I get my post subject to "evaluation"....(...by the

Secret Board of Governors"...?)

...cool to see the emergence of awareness of the consequences of

"union" between states resulting in removal of critical aspects of self-

governance and the prevention of any possibility of serious challenge to

the centralized system of power.

Take California, if you will...if the Californians via their locally elected

representatives want to legislate in favor of more environmentally

protective regulations, etc, they can do that, but if the Centralized Power

sees it as onerous to the capital interests of some other part of "the
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23/29



ReporRe l

Reader 0

ReporRe l

Enter text right here!

whole", it will be stopped. California can not be allowed to be "better"

than anyone else...the Center decides the speed of "progress"...

And anyone could find analogous examples with ease....

I don't care if you self-identify as a "leftists" or hard-core totalitarian

right-winger, you want centralization...because you yearn for that power

to

"set the whole straight" in accordance with your ideas of "what's best for

the people"....and THAT's how "democrats" and "republicans" are

always in perfect harmony when it comes to the most centralized

proposition of all Violent Assault on other nations....always in favor,

always in favor, always in favor....

A Centralized System NEEDS war to enforce its preferences on the

whole.

4 weeks ago

I agree with almost every word you wrote here. I only want to point out

that US politicans and rightwingers never ACTin order to achieve

"what's best for the people". They are only telling this lie, they act in

order to achieve what's best for their capitalists, but it is nothing they

can say aloud, so they must tell a lie.

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