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Socialism Without the “Socialism”

On Super Tuesday (yesterday), the Democratic Party may have stepped from the brink of a full-throated endorsement of truth-in-labeling.  Appearances matter a lot, and most Dem voters seemed appalled at appearing to fondle a cranky septuagenarian holdover from the days of Tom Hayden and the SDS.  They seem to want their socialism in an accumulation of smaller doses and without the “socialism” title.  Comrade Sanders scraped a few wins in hard-left bastions (read California) and lost in many other locales that turned out to be more hospitable to another doddering septuagenarian of the plodding socialism-lite wing.  A Super Tuesday vote for slow motion socialism?

When that great uncle, fresh from the dementia unit in a chronic care facility, becomes a party’s alternative to the ranting great uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, you know that the Dem bench is nearly empty.  They both are nuts: one literally so, and the other a lifetime believer in falsehoods.

One wants to replicate the carnage of a long-dead Swedish socialism, thinking that the adjective “democratic” makes it all better, while extolling the virtues of totalitarian health care and literacy campaigns for the purpose of mind control.  After all, Castro, Maduro, and Lenin can’t be all that bad … he says.

The other wants to dial back from “11” – to, let’s say, “9” – every one of the half-baked ideas to ooze out of the minds of the Squad and that good ol’ SDS crank.  Instead of a real Green New Deal, the other wants a lime-green one.  Instead of a full-on Medicare for All, he proposes a more haphazard government takeover but will, over time, eventually transform all health care workers into government employees.  As for any damaging fallout, well, another group of government employees will be hired to clean up the mess, ad infinitum.  Take each childish blathering of AOC and he will adopt it … but add a little water.

So, Dems, you have a choice between honest and damaging socialism and honest and damaging socialism-lite.  And while you’re at it, vote to make pre- and post-natal abortion, along with gun confiscation, a commonplace.  Both the honest fool and the demented one insist on it.  They only differ in the amount of lead on their throttle-pressing foot.

RogerG

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Frighteningly Familiar

Today’s movie recommendation: “The Rope” by Alfred Hitchcock, 1948, starring James Stewart.  Two well-to-do young men, fresh from their elite colleges, both considered smart with above average IQ’s, committed a murder because they thought themselves to be above morality.  Hitchcock probably got the idea from a famous 1924 murder case.  The script and the reality are eerily similar.

A scene from the movie with the James Stewart character between the killers.

The reality: On May 21, 1924, Richard Loeb (age 19) and Nathan Leopold (age 20) planned and executed the killing of 14-year-old Bobby Franks as he as walking home from school.  Loeb, the son of a millionaire Sears and Roebuck executive, and Leopold, the son of a millionaire founder of a box manufacturing company, would be legitimate Mensa Society members.  Leopold was a scholar of botany and ornithology, mastered 10 languages, and translated classics from their original Greek and Latin.  Loeb was the youngest graduate, at age 17, of the University of Michigan in 1921.  They would reunite in a couple of years for their ultimate and horrifying stick-it-to-the-man caper.

Nathan Leopold (l) and Richard Loeb at their trial. Their kinship for each other developed into a sexual relationship.
Bobby Franks, age 14, shortly before his murder.

Both were fascinated with the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, in an extremely garbled fashion.  They were attracted to Nietzsche’s notion of the rise of “supermen” after he predicted the fall of traditional institutions and norms, an idea that resonated with both National Socialists and the Bolsheviks: Lenin had his “vanguard elite” and Hitler his Aryan supermen.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It wouldn’t stop there.  An emphasis on an elite of “smart” people with the appropriate college credentials would be a keystone of late 19th-century Progressivism.  Progressives valued an unelected class of administrators and regulators – a technocratic elite – to govern society.  The conceit is still with us in our expansive administrative state, and as Democrats parade about with their constant use of the term “expert” to nullify opposing views.  Their proposals – The Green New Deal for instance – would fast-track the ongoing trend of transferring great power to their preferred class of elite college-credentialed overlords in ever-expanding agencies.

Have we been softened-up to accept this state of affairs?  As a 30-year veteran of the classroom, I think so.  In the movie, a prominent teacher (James Stewart) is presented as a powerful influence on the minds of the killers, until the teacher discovers too late the wayward extent that they took his classroom musings.  The earlier pride in his clever mental gymnastics in the classroom is wiped off his face as he discovers the body later in the story.  Then he comes to realize his huge mistake.

A similar corruption of the mind was noticed by CS Lewis in his famous tract “The Abolition of Man”.  Lewis worried about the dehumanization of young minds occurring in British classrooms of the mid-20th century.  In a chapter titled “Men Without Chests”, he wrote of the degradation of rampant subjectivism and relativism in English instruction.  Out goes firm standards of good and evil, in comes the unrestrained individual.

CS Lewis

Progressivism performs a similar trick.  Essential to their understanding is a denigration of the past as corrupt while the present is an improvement on the way to a better world.  There’s not much veneration for the old and true.  No wonder church attendance is down. Our schools and culture are depressing it.

How about some serious thought of what we are doing to ourselves?  Watch the movie.

More on the Leopold and Loeb murder case here.

RogerG