President Trump has repeatedly vowed that “America will never be a socialist country,” America’s been sliding toward Socialism for over a century. Trump may have slowed down the slide, but he won’t be President forever despite the fear-mongering of the mainstream media.
Bernie Sanders claims his 2016 socialist campaign planks were the springboard for the many 2020 Democratic hopefuls voicing their own anti-freedom. pro-Socialist promises. Truth be told, the socialist philosophy and the elimination of our individual freedoms espoused by today’s Democratic Party started a century before Bernie. And for most of that century, the Socialist movement (sometimes called progressivism) was surreptitiously trying to take over America.
A critical tenet of Socialism is collectivism, which is antithetical to the version of democracy practiced in the American republic since the Constitution was enacted. The US version of democracy insists that (with some exceptions), the rights of the individual are superior to the rights of the collective or the government. But in 1887, three decades before Woodrow Wilson became President, he wrote an essay trying to fool the American public about Socialism.
One of it’s most famous passages was:
“It is very clear that in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.”
Today, Wilson’s political descendants present the false concept that Socialism is the best way of attaining equality. This is especially ironic because Wilson segregated the military, and was arguably the most bigoted person to ever sit in the White House. He hated immigrants (notably from Italy and Poland), and hated Jews and African-Americans.
During his 1912 Presidential campaign, Wilson sounded a socialist theme that is still used by Democrats today.
“The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing.”
A “living” constitution was a favorite concept of Barack Obama and is popular with the Democratic Party today.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” Socialism’s believers listened to honest Abe. John Dewey, who was a progressive leader, was crowned “the father of American Education,” some even call him the best educator who ever lived.
During the late 19th and first half of the 20th-century, Dewey pushed to make school a tool for leftist-progressive social engineering. Dewey advocated conveyor belt education—training a conditioned response in students to have them better conform to the “one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity, thus making them more equipped for their future workforce.” Many believers of the failed common core system used the words of Dewey as evidence it should be implemented.
Dewey’s “ethical ideal of humanity” was Democratic Socialism:
Dewey was a critic of laissez-faire liberalism and its accompanying individualistic view of society from his early writings. This criticism was amplified during the Depression, where he expressed a form of liberal and democratic socialism in writings such as—Individualism, Old and New(1930), Liberalism and Social Action (1935), and Freedom and Culture (1939).
In 1945 F.A. Hayek saw what was being taught and implemented in free democracies and issued a warning via his classic tome, “The Road to Serfdom.” As Richard McKenzie Neal explained:
Hayek argued that Western democracies, including the United Kingdom and the United States, have “progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.”Society has mistakenly tried to ensure continuing prosperity by centralized planning, which inevitably leads to totalitarianism. We have in effect undertaken to dispense with the forces which produced unforeseen results and to replace the impersonal and anonymous mechanism of the market by collective and ‘conscious’ direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals.” Socialism, while presented as a means of assuring equality, does so through “restraint and servitude”, while “democracy seeks equality in liberty”
For decades educators have America’s youth away from individualism and independent thinking into collective zombies. The only way to be successful in school was (and is) to adopt the teacher’s socialist-type philosophy, those teachings are echoed in today’s progressive/socialist street protests under the banners of “resist,” “white privilege” and more. Even the socialist doctrine of international redistribution of income, cloaked as the climate change movement, began as environmentalism—which was shoved down the throats of our youth starting in the 1980s.
That may be behind the appeal of Bernie Sanders to Millenials. In some ways, he looks and sounds like the college professors who were indoctrinating those Millenials with Socialism when they were in college just a few years earlier.
Aside from Dewey and academia, political players have been trying to convince American’s about Socialism. A 1970 New York Magazine piece by economist and adviser to JFK [and Bubba Clinton Presidental Medal of Freedom honoree] John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, “Richard Nixon and the Great Socialist Revival.” At the time, Nixon was a very popular president, and Galbraith (who spent a lifetime working tor advance progressivism and what he called social justice) was implying that if Nixon liked socialist programs, they couldn’t be too bad.
Chicago Tribune columnist Walter Trohan warned against America’s Socialism at the same time. He wrote
“It is a known fact that the policies of the government today, whether Republican or Democrat are closer to the 1932 platform of the Communist Party than they are to either of their own party platforms in that critical year.”
A year later Trohan wrote that it might be too late as the only difference between the two parties was that the GOP slid toward Socialism a bit slower:
Conservatives should be realistic enough to recognize that this country is going deeper into socialism and will see expansion of federal power, whether Republicans or Democrats are in power. The only comfort they may have is that the pace will be slower under Richard Nixon that it might have been under Hubert H. Humphrey.
After the socialist-type programs of FDR, America reacted with the conservative Eisenhower. While communism was an external threat through the 1960s, it was sold as a military threat that ignored the danger of internal moves toward the progressive/socialist loss of individual rights.
Galbraith and Trohan were correct in saying that Nixon was not a conservative. His creation of the Office of Management and Budget or the Environmental Protection Agency are just two examples of his rejection of Hayek via his belief that centralized, big government took precedence over individual liberty. Even the Watergate scandal was an example of the belief that the government took precedence over individual freedom and thinking.
The socialist slide continued with Jimmy Carter before the public put a stop to elect Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s surprising election, as well as the popularity of his presidency, was based on his belief in the power and wisdom of the individual American vs. the collectivization of progressive/socialist government. As some of his most famous quotes reflect that philosophy. Such as “In this present crisis, the government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” or the oft-quoted nine most dangerous words in the American language. “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Reagan’s signature tax cut program took away wealth from the collective government and restored it to the individual voters.
Reagan’s drive to restore American’s belief in the individual and stop the slide towards Socialism turned around a horrible economy was met with fake claims racism and warmongering from the press (it was all MSM back then) and the democrats.
After two terms of The Gipper, the slide returned with the election of Bush #41. Under Obama, the “slide” became a gallop.
As the election of Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, was a voter reaction to the move away from America’s individualism towards Socialism’s emphasis on the collective. The meaning of his campaign themes of “Make America Great Again,” and “America First” is making Americans powerful again. More importantly, his redesign of the economy—deregulation and tax reduction- was each designed to empower the individual.
But as they did with Reagan, the supporters of progressivism/socialism are attacking Trump with false charges of racism/white supremacy, and warmongering. As they learned a long time ago, the best way to fight freedom is to call their opponents names, and they claim the goals of his opponents’ programs is equality. However, America’s version of equality is freedom of opportunity, their version is the Socialist–equality of result.
Trump’s 2020 emphasis on fighting against Socialism and for individual freedoms will lead to his reelection. But will America ever become a socialist country? It depends on who comes after. Will future presidents continue the century-long slide toward Socialism? Who knows? The socialist practitioners never really explain what they are selling. They call it progressivism or liberalism as they push policies that take away our individual freedoms, our healthcare decisions, our faith, and push programs that will take away our freedoms. For example, the green energy plan restricts what we can eat (cows), how we travel (planes), and even how we keep ourselves warm (fossil fuels).
The President believes his claim that “America will never be a socialist country.” I think it will never happen as long as he is POTUS. However, there are
American’s must be vigilant about who comes next. Other GOP presidents, even ones who claimed to fight against the freedom-stealing socialist movement, have accepted the march away from individual liberty. In the end, it is up to the voters. Do we become complacent and forget how Presidents such as Reagan and Trump stopped the slide? If we forget, it may be too late because our freedoms will be too far gone.
As Lincoln said:
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
America Socialism, America Socialism, America Socialism, America Socialism, America Socialism, America Socialism,
https://lidblog1.wpenginepowered.com
