On Socialism and Democracy

This Post appeared on the Facebook page of The Federalist Papers:

DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] Co-Chair Megan Romer did Americans a favor by saying the quiet part out loud.

“We will win by making conditions so intolerable to the ruling class that they would rather give in to our demands than live with the disturbance we cause until we are able to fully seize power ourselves.” [Confirmed]

Read those words again.

This is not a call to persuade voters, win honest debates, or pass legislation through the normal democratic process. It is a declaration that socialists intend to deliberately make life intolerable until people surrender to their demands.

That is what socialists do.

They create disruption, resentment, fear, and economic pain, then present themselves as the solution to the misery they helped produce. The objective is not peaceful coexistence. The objective is power.

Americans should take this threat seriously.

When political activists block roads, occupy buildings, intimidate workers, interfere with law enforcement, destroy property, or attempt to shut down ordinary life, government officials cannot continue treating it as harmless protest. Peaceful protest is a constitutional right. Coercion, vandalism, threats, and organized lawlessness are not.

Anyone who crosses that line should face arrest, prosecution, jail, civil liability, and every other lawful consequence available.

There can be no special exemption because the people causing the disruption claim to be pursuing “social justice.” A crime committed for socialism is still a crime.

The most revealing portion of Romer’s statement is the desire to “fully seize power.” That phrase should destroy the comforting fiction that the DSA is merely seeking a slightly larger welfare state. [My emphasis]

America was founded on limited government, private property, individual liberty, religious freedom, and the right of citizens to live without being ruled by an all-powerful political class.

Socialism attacks every one of those principles.

You cannot claim to love America while working to eliminate the freedoms that make America worth loving. You cannot praise democracy while planning to make life intolerable until your opponents submit.

Believe them when they tell us what they intend to do.

What consequences should people face when political disruption crosses the line into intimidation, destruction, or organized lawlessness?

Source: Commentary magazine, “The Misery Strategy”

The Federalist Papers followed this up in the comments with;

The people calling themselves the enemies of the “ruling class” rarely intend to surrender power once they obtain it. 

This is true. Although the “Democratic” in Democratic Socialism refers to totalitarian democracy—the hideous idea that the right to vote is the most fundamental right that confers on elected politicians unlimited power to do as they please without restraint because they are elected—that same democracy that got Socialism elected can work in reverse, throwing the Socialists out of office. So while the Democratic Socialists (or any dictatorship) will claim their despotic policies are legitimate because instituted democratically, they’ll never submit their rule to voters for continuing validation. After HAMAS won election in Gaza under President Bush’s “Forward Strategy of Freedom,” it immediately canceled all future elections. 

That is why, once in power, the DSA will never allow free and fair elections. They will never allow themselves to be voted out of power. They will either abandon elections altogether or allow only rigged elections (Their advocacy for public funding of elections is a step in that direction). This has been true of Socialism from Vladimir Lenin to Nicolas Maduro. Why? Because elections require certain individual rights—rights to free speech and press, private campaign financing, dissent and opposing ideas, honest debate, association, one-man-one-vote, and so on. For Socialists, it’s not only about power. It’s about principle. They are collectivists. As the 20th Century Socialist Robert L. Heilbroner acknowledged, individual rights fundamentally conflict with Socialism’s collective moral goal—central planning—and thus cannot be allowed. 

Heilbroner, a leading Socialist intellectual and best-selling socialist writer of the 20th century, had no illusions about what Socialism requires. In a Dissent magazine essay titled What is Socialism, Heilbroner wrote:

The rights of individuals to their Millian liberties [are] directly opposed to the basic social commitment to a deliberately embraced collective moral goal… Under socialism, every dissenting voice raises a threat similar to that raised under a democracy by those who preach antidemocracy.

In  The Nature and Logic of Capitalism by Heilbroner wrote; 

Political freedom in modern times has only appeared in capitalist states. Democratic liberties have not yet appeared in any nation that [is] fundamentally anti-capitalist, which is to say within the self-styled Marxist ambit. The . . . separation of realms [politics and economics] creates the essential conditions for political freedom because the state cannot enforce its will though economic sanctions, such as denying work to political dissidents.

Heilbroner also noted that “democratic liberties have not yet appeared, except fleetingly, in any nation that has declared itself to be fundamentally anticapitalist.”

Bolshevik  Communist Vladimir Lenin, the first head of the Soviet Union, banned all other parties and oppositions, internal Communist Party factions, an independent press, and free, fair, and open elections, on the principle that open dissent acted as a counter-revolutionary danger. Socialists use the liberties of free, Capitalist-oriented nations to come to power, then ban those liberties. Socialists can exploit capitalism’s “tolerance of dissent” to gain power, Heilbroner explains in What Is Socialism?, but then must not allow dissent to undermine their power. Once in power, socialists must understand that

Dissents, disagreements, and departures from norms then assume a far more threatening aspect than under bourgeois society, for they hold out the possibility of destroying the very commitment to a moral consensus by which socialist society differs from capitalist.

Nor can we wriggle off this hook by asserting that, among its moral commitments, socialism will choose to include the rights of individuals to their Millian liberties. For that celebration of individualism is directly opposed to the basic socialist commitment to a deliberately embraced collective moral goal.

We can also dispel the delusion that Socialist rule can be anything but total. I quote Heilbroner from What Is Socialism? Page 344:

Socialists have always railed against the invidious striving of the market that forces individuals to subordinate their full personalities to narrow economic roles. Moreover, it is not only the motivations of capitalists that are at stake. . . The issue is the motivation of working people. For the market mechanism is not merely a means to profit. It is also a means to individual betterment by the maximization of one's income. Without this drive, the mechanism will not work. 

But is the drive for private gain compatible with the goal of socialism? I do not see how it can be. The market system, in order to function, requires attitudes of self-seeking that are in direct conflict with the goal of an "other-oriented" society. If socialism seeks to avoid both the anarchy and alienation of capitalism, it must seek to break the hold of the market, not merely over the economy but over the mind.' [Emphasis added.]

Get that? “. . . over the mind,” not only of capitalists but of working people. This is what Socialists mean when they express concern for the “working class”—to break their minds and spirit so as to make them “other-oriented” rather than strivers for self-betterment.

That’s why there has never been, and philosophically and logically never can be, anything but one-party totalitarianism under Socialism, democratic or otherwise.

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Democratic Socialism: The Left Escalates America’s Journey to Totalitarianism

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