Here’s another golden oldie
Norman Thomas—remember him? Socialist who ran for President about ten thousand times?
Here’s a prescient remark he made:
The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened
His grandson, Evan Thomas, writes on politics for Newsweek. Make of that what you will.
Norman Thomas was right, I was just hoping we could fend it off a little longer.
Even “liberalism” is not a sure fire way of advancing the socialist agenda. It has long ago lost its luster — so much so that some politicians become quite defensive when being called liberal. The tack that seems to work best now is … well, I don’t think there’s a word for it but you can spot it immediately. You can spot a socialist agenda by its rubric “SAVE THE”. Save the children, save the environment, save the planet, save Title IX, save the rain forests, ad infinitum.
“”You can spot a socialist agenda by its rubric “SAVE THE”.
Geopal””
That and “RAISE AWARENESS” is another tip off.
I already have felt that we are in the twilight zone — i.e. how can this possibly be happening? We do live in a rational world with rational people, right?
Wrong! Even if G-d smiles on us tomorrow and John McCain does manage to eke out a win, the fact that so many are so willing to throw out basic common sense to vote a stranger surrounded by literal and metaphorical bomb-throwing radicals into the highest office in our land, and therefore the world, whose agenda is re-making our country into a socialist republic.
If all these people hate our systems, why not move to Venezuela? They’re much farther along toward socialism (looks like Argentina is fast catching up!). Live it up in Utopia!
I still say: Beware what you wish for!
csimon,
Your concerns are exactly mine. I agree, even if a miracle happens and McCain wins, the fact that socialism is still not defeated and keeps gaining strength does not bode well for us.
I am still trying to understand why I was able to think my way out of being an adherent of Marxism and so many cannot do the same: do the hard thought-experiments and inner exploration of ideas necessary to leave socialist thought behind.
It has been a failure everywhere it has been tried. Not one success story. Some European socialist countries have had brief periods of relative success, but they have long since faded. Any serious examination of every socialist experiment shows that socialism is not compatible with human nature and human nature is not capable of changing, uniformly, so that socialism can work. There can be no Utopia on earth in this dimension. All it takes is humble intellectual honesty to realize this.
Neo, the recent heartfelt concern among Republicans for an America slipping gently into the good night of socialism is indeed touching. My only question is — where the hell have they been for the past 70 years? America has been on a somewhat wiggly road to socialism since FDR, sometimes aided and abetted by those same Republicans that now decry the Socialism of Obama. Prescription drug benefit, anyone? Oh, sorry, that was done by their guy.
A revealing quote indeed! I do take some small comfort in the fact that the language has to be changed to disguise the agenda. — It cannot be put past the American electorate, as Thomas’ statement acknowledges, by any other means. But then I find myself dismayed that the meaning of “liberalism” has been so warped in U.S. politics (away from its classical definition) that it’s not immediately apparent to anyone and everyone, as it ought to be, how deeply antiliberal these repackaged socialist ideas fundamentally are.
“A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century” -Baron de Montesquieu
God help us. They are pulling the wool over the eyes of many of our fellow citizens, who are happily putting a noose around their own necks. One day we may wake up in a socialist dictatorship and wonder how in the heck this special place called America was lost.
it’s what I’ve been saying for years, that in the U.S., `liberalism’ is just a euphemism for socialism.