Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Jesse Singal's youth beat at the The Boston Globe continues, showing us once again how shallow and vacuous much of today's youth is: To young voters, socialism isn't a bad word. Of course, this is little different from yesterday's youth, or the day before yesterday's youth, etc... The difference is that in the past this might be viewed as something to lament and correct -- a concern and a responsibility for society's elders. Unfortunately, in today's youth-obsessed culture, it seems something to be exalted and pandered to:
TIM ROESCH, a 46-year-old tea party supporter at last Wednesday's rally on the Common, was not happy with a group of nearby college students.
"You should get a group picture and send it to your parents,'' he grumbled at them. He was displeased with the signs they held, which he found offensive; one referred to folks like him with a derogatory sexual term. He blamed the youthful flippancy on a lack of critical thinking and genuine knowledge as to how the world works. "They don't understand what socialism means. They don't understand what democracy means.''
But it's not that the youngest voters don't know what socialism means. It's that most aren't scared of it -- and find it bizarre that, decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a political movement would center itself around opposition to it. The fact that both the tea party and the Republican Party have made vociferous opposition to "socialist'' policies a key part of their rhetoric helps explain the tepid response among young adults...
This is reminiscent of a previous Singal effort -- youth don't remember the Holocaust, so it doesn't guide them, they don't live near Iran, so it doesn't bother them. This is the J Street constituency, and the grown-ups at J Street (such as they are) aren't interested in educating, they're just interested in selling product -- their own. Back to today:
...Naveed Easton, a 19-year-old Emerson student, said he thought the group was out of touch. "You can notice the shift in society over the past 30 years,'' he said. "It's just getting more and more open-minded, and some people are just very resistant to a progressive society. Especially when it comes to, like, 'Oh, that's a socialist program!' ''
And if the health care reform bill actually were socialist? He shrugged off that concern. "Socialism itself isn't terrible,'' he said, unless it involves the abrogation of individual rights.
You just can't put anything past these kids these days.
Easton is just one college student, of course -- a liberal one in a liberal town. But his views are far from radical among his peers. A year ago a Rasmussen Reports poll found that Americans under 30 are essentially equally divided on whether socialism or capitalism is a superior economic system...
Our schools have failed.
Of socialism, Michael Medved is fond of repeating, and repeating, the notion that Obama is no socialist - which is true in any narrowly defined or doctrinaire sense - but he very much is a neo-socialist, wherein a regimen of conspicuous and aggressive regulatory oversight, together with other methods of control/coercion over otherwise private sector activity (e.g., health care, mandatory buyins therein) serves much the same purpose. But so what? Few socialists are doctrinaire, if they were they wouldn't be politicians, they would be theoreticians.
Mussolini was both, Lenin as well, both theoretician and pragmatist, but once they left the theoretical behind, they were utterly practical in ensuring their ideologies were put in place, via whatever force was deemed necessary.
Supportive material: Michael Barone, Tea Partiers Fight Culture of Dependence.
And dependence is precisely the proper word. It is in fact the culture at large which is at issue.
"Socialism is the idea of ‘the political, economic and social emancipation of the whole people, men and women, by the establishment of a democratic commonwealth in which the community shall own the land and capital collectively and use them for the good of all.’" – Peter d’A. Jones, as quoted in T.J. Clark’s review of modernism, Farewell to an Idea
If you aren't a socialist at 18, you have no heart. If you aren't a conservative at 40, you have no brain.
It is normal, and right, that youth be idealistic, strive to help the poor and weak, and show compassion to those at the bottom of the heap. It helps make up for the self-centredness and apathy of everyone else.
Or they are working exactly as designed:
Turning out legions of pro-socialist, "progressives" who have learned nothing and have forgotten everything.
"Socialism itself isn't terrible,'' he said, unless it involves the abrogation of individual rights. --- Naveed Easton
Indeed. The power of the government is used to abrogate individual rights, via taxation, to transfer wealth. Where an armed robber also transfers wealth via threat of injury.
BTW, in a libertarian society, you are free to choose socialism, health insurance is an example, but you are also free not to choose socialism. The key is no one is threatening you. There are many other such voluntary associations which are socialist. The key is that they are voluntary thus no ones individual rights are being abridged.
I was a radical libertarian in my youth, now Im a classically liberal Christian conservative.
The Nationalization of GM is socialism. There was no systemic risk in GM entering bankrupcy procedures. Now the workers income and benefits are ensured by the state, and paid by wealth transfers from lower paid employees in the South (Toyota, Honda, Mercedes, BMW workers). Votes go to the Leftist politicians that continue the flow of subsidies.
From the definition quoted in #2
"Socialism is the idea of ‘the political, economic and social emancipation of the whole people, men and women, ...
I take it, going by today's examples of socialist states, that the "emancipation" is from responsibility for one's own well being in life.
Certainly it is not freeing the person to pursue life according to their own will.
Sooner or later the as the controls imposed by the nanny states of Britain and Europe increase in number it is going to be one big oppressive "idea".
Being forced to march in step for every little thing is going to deprive those "under 30s" of "doing their own thing", as ignorantly, they are herded into a commonwealth of mediocrity and lowest expectations.
The key note in that definition, in #2, is the dependence emphasized; the ideal of socialism is one thing, the reality is another.
The reason small Tolstoyan and Marxian and to some extent religious based socialist kibbutzim could work in Palestine, after the second and third aliyas (roughly 1905 and following WWI respectively, at least as I understand it) was because they were relatively small, homogeneous communities. By contrast, once they become much larger and less homogeneous (e.g., the Paris commune, c 1871), they break down rather readily.
In the U.S., with a large and extremely heterogeneous or pluralist society, highly fragmented due to a variety of reasons, not least of which is a type of formally enforced fragmentation due to various post-modern currents and insinuations, the experiment will would breed inter-generational dependencies writ large.
E.g., c. 1955 the out of wedlock birthrate was around 4%, about 10% in the black community; c. 1965 (D.P. Moynihan's study), the out of wedlock birthrate was around 8% nationwide and roughly 20% in the black community; presently it is 40% nationwide and 60% in the black community. That's intended as a general indicator only, a trend, but it's certainly broadly correlative with the general social/cultural environment in the wake of LBJ's "war on poverty," and all that accompanied that massive governmental initiative and assault.
Blaming it all on the Welfare State, War on Poverty is wrong. There was a broad spectrum attack on "capitalist, white Euro, Christian, bourgeois social norms and institutions as well. "Consciousness itself."
Marriage, promotion of promiscuity devoid of consequences, any behavior should be devoid of consequences.
The Welfare state aggravated these problems, and encouraged them in their own right, but it does not account for every degradation and debauchery. The Welfare State does have affects, and social capital is diminished with "diversity," but a broader attack has been waged.