Long read regarding socialist statism and voting Democrat.... - Granite Grok

Long read regarding socialist statism and voting Democrat….

Kiddy Socialism: Obama Redistributes LegosI regularly get into political scrums with leftists in various venues.

What follows is one where I got set off enough to pen a major lecture to a local socialist (I’ll call him “Chuck”). He was going on about what a successful President Barack Obama is, and how he truly deserves to be re-elected, and how all the “minorities” and “groups” targeted by Obama will vote for him.

So it began like this. I told him….

Just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you’re stupid. Just because you’re black doesn’t mean you’re stupid. Just because you’re Hispanic doesn’t mean you’re stupid. Alas, stupid people vote for socialism and other forms of statism by voting Democrat, thinking “the government will take care of them.” Bad bet, as history abundantly shows. Republicans have a big tent, with all races, creeds, colors, nationalities, religions, origins, etc. What they do have in common is…they’re not stupid enough to believe what the Democrats are telling them. It’s simple, really….

Well. He didn’t buy that, and shot back: “A pretty big tent? LOL! Maybe if you are an older white male….”

So I decided to Explain It All to the guy, and let loose with the following learned rant:

Alas, I guess I need to be more specific in response to Chuck. So…. Chuck, my point is that it is self-destructive—and thus “stupid”—to vote for politicians and political parties that advocate and implement destructive policies…economic and otherwise. There is a very fundamental difference between conservative Republicans (not all are conservative; there are plenty of bad Republicans too) and Democrats. The latter seek to “define and divide” different groups in America, all the better to win elections. This is why we see you and Joe asserting the “lack of diversity” of the GOP after I pointed out that the GOP has a “pretty big tent.”

The GOP Big Tent concept is that anyone and everyone is welcome into the Republican Party, so long as they believe in a certain set of pretty clearly defined values. Those values, to which virtually all Republicans pay homage (including those who fake it), include small government, low taxes, reduced public spending, individual responsibility, limited bureaucratic interference in people’s personal and economic lives, and adherence to the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Those values constitute the open secret of the astonishing historical success of the polyglot people who make up what is known as the U.S.A. In order to understand (and thus believe in) those core values, it makes no difference if you are black, white, Hispanic, immigrant, native-born, male, female, gay, straight, etc. By hewing to those values, the conservatives in the Republican party ensure the existence of the “big tent” for all who choose to join.

The Democratic Party, by contrast, rather than seeking to unite, divides up voters into “interest groups,” appealing to each separate group by promising that government will “give” them something “for free.” This was the cause of the phenomenon, early in Obama’s Presidency, of people publicly asserting that that he would “pay their mortgage” and “fill up their gas tank.” It was also the source of the spectacle of people at Obama appearances publicly appealing to him for a nicer place to live, kitchens, automobiles, etc. (still stranger was his response that they should be sure to “speak to my staff,” presumably so that the entreaties could be fulfilled).

Thus, my larger point was not so much that people are stupid for voting Democrat (although they are, and the phenomenon is destroying this country even as the Democrats celebrate), but that it is stupidly destructive to appeal to and expect to be “taken care of” by the federal government, and to be “given” certain conveniences and consumer goods “for free” (i.e. at the expense of someone else) that were and are each person’s responsibility to provide for themselves. Because today’s Democrat Party is very specific in promising virtually anything—including medical care—at the expense of someone else (see “the Buffett Rule”), they divide rather than unite Americans.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the Democrats will lose elections. After all, if there are enough Americans who believe it is the obligation of others—“the 1%,” or “rich people,” or “millionaires”—to pay for their wants and needs, then the Democrats will win. The upcoming election is a test of that very thesis. Obama and the Democrat Party leadership have made it so, and very explicitly, moreso than in any other election in the history of this country.

Is it “wise” or “smart” for people to believe that government can and should seize and “re-distribute” wealth as Obama and the leading Democrats say is their right and the government’s obligation? Of course not. I assert that such policies and beliefs are “stupid.” Why? Because those policies and beliefs will lead to disaster. They are leading to disaster, as everyone knows. That is because today’s Democrat Party policies are based upon a philosophy referred to as “statism” (to find out more about statism, read about Mark Levin’s book Liberty and Tyranny). More particularly, the variant of statism I’m talking about here is generically known as “socialism” (thus Newsweek’s famous magazine cover, early in Obama’s Presidency, proclaiming that “We Are All Socialists Now”).

So the question becomes, what are the entirely predictable results of a majority voting in favor of the type of statism known as socialism? After all, we have plentiful historical examples. One variant of socialism is known as “communism.” The results of that subset of statism are observable in the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1989. The horror of living under it were and are observable in countries as diverse as Leninist, Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia; Post-WW II Eastern Europe; Maoist China; and today’s North Korea and Cuba where people daily risk the lives of themselves and their families to escape their country.

Another type of socialist statism was the National German Socialist Workers Party—the Nazi party—under Hitler. The Nazis and communists were deathly enemies who fought it out for power in Weimar Germany in the 1920’s, but were actually close ideological allies otherwise. The only large difference was that one was based upon internationalist communism which targeted “class enemies” for extermination, while the Nazis were based on “national” socialism which specifically targeted Jews for extermination. Although not as many people were murdered by the Nazis as the communists, that was probably because history contrived to stop the Nazis before they had as many years to implement their form of socialism as the communists ultimately had. (The similarity between the two socialist movements has been noted by philosophers, economists, and political scientists as varied as Eric Hoffer, “the longshoreman philosopher,” in The True Believer, and Friedrich Hayek, who wrote Nazism is Socialism in 1933).

Then there is “democratic socialism,” which is yet another variant of statism; the unfolding results of it are observable today in the slow-motion collapse of all of Western Europe, from Greece to Spain to Italy to Ireland to Great Britain to Portugal to France, and all the rest (some being more advanced in their cultural and national dissolution than others, but all headed in the same direction). Still another brand of socialist statism is “populism.” Argentina gives us “one of the most interesting cases of culturally induced economic failure that we see on the world stage” resulting from “economic populism.”

How about America itself? Since the era of Franklin Roosevelt—where the federal government massively intervened in an economic correction, thereby creating a 10-year-old “Great Depression—increasing numbers of Democrats have been winning elections by appealing to a certain mix of statist socialism that might be called “welfare statism” (which is now shading over into overt socialist policies). During that time, how has America fared economically, now that we are deeply in debt and running federal budget deficits in excess of $1 trillion dollars each year? How has our educational system fared, as mountains of money have been spent on it, even while quality and results have deteriorated? How about people’s individual freedoms, as laws such as the “Patriot” acts and the current National Defense Authorization Act feature ever-increasing government power and control while the Constitution and Bill of Rights are simply ignored? How, indeed, is our national standard of living today, compared to the past, and what is our trajectory? How is our manufacturing base doing? How many individual states are running unsustainable yearly government spending deficits? How’s California doing? How about America’s cities?

It doesn’t take genius-level insight to see that running trillion-dollar-plus federal budget deficits every year, borrowing more than half of every dollar government spends, illegally failing and refusing to even pass a national budget, and continuing to vote in favor of such disastrous policies, will eventually bring us to a cataclysmic economic collapse. Just like the Soviet Union. Just like Argentina. Just like Greece. It is entirely predictable.

And that, Chuck, is why people who vote in favor of continuing such policies are “stupid.” Since today’s Democrat Party is the main purveyor of these policies and prescriptions, it is therefore “stupid” to vote Democrat in the upcoming elections.

Sorry.

 

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