https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/929392/posts
Above link is to an old thread with an even older booklet called “The Revolution Was”, written in 1938 about FDR. I posted this a LOT during the Obama years as he and FDR are so much a like. Some of FDR’s speeches sound just like Obama. The premise of the booklet was that the Communist revolution in America happened with FDR and The New Deal. My premise is that Obama continued it.
Anyway - an excerpt:
No politically adult people [Americans] could ever have been so little conscious of revolution. There was here no revolutionary tradition, as in Europe...
In the naive American mind the word revolution had never grown up... It called up scenes from Carlyle and Victor Hugo, or it meant killing the Czar with a bomb, as he may have deserved for oppressing his people. Definitely, it meant the overthrow of government by force...
Revolution in the modern ease is no longer an uncouth business....Outside of the Communist party and its aurora of radical intellectuals few Americans seemed to know that revolution had become a department of knowledge, with a philosophy and a doctorate of its own, a language, a great body of experimental data, schools of method, textbooks, and manuals...
To the revolutionary this same dreary stuff was the most exciting reading in the world. It was knowledge that gave him a sense of power. One [like Bill Ayers] who mastered the subject to the point of excellence could be fairly sure of a livelihood by teaching and writing, that is, by imparting it to others, and meanwhile dream of passing at a single leap from this mean obscurity to the prestige of one who assists in the manipulation of great happenings; while one who mastered it to the point of genius that one [Obama] might dream of becoming himself the next Lenin.
thankyou
one could argue that the communist (or something akin to it) revolution in USA began with the Progressive movement of the 1900-1916 era
or even the Populist movement of the 1870-1900 era.
However that all may play out,
there are a couple things we could learn from it all,
1. hard times or difficult situations make for public demands that “something needs to be done” to improve things.
Marx was appalled at the (sometimes deplorable) exploitation of child labour in the UK. The Populists were struggling to keep their farms during the great post-Civil-War USA depression of 1870-1900. The Progressives were, in part, responding to the excesses and dangers of the Industrial Revolution (dangerous factory working conditions, sometimes oppressively low wages...). FDR was dealing with the Great Depression...
2. there will always be economic down cycles
3. there will always be SOME people who will unreasonably exploit other people, creating or sustaining unnecessary hardships
3. there will always be some politicians (Whether sincerely-well motivated or cynical opportunists) who will jump to the occasion and offer “solutions”
4. many of these solutions involve spending more money (higher taxes) or restricting Americans’ civil liberties (repressive), or both
5. many of these solutions involve dividing American citizens into sub-groups with the natural tendency of pitting them against each other (thus, more racism, anti-Christian, anti-semitism, more “class warfare” as the chief source of funding for the new programs is from those that have it to remit)
What I take away from all this is,
we must be eternally vigilant to try to protect what remaining liberties we have from the politicians and their “movements” or street gangs. Since the causative or enabling factors for more communistic or oppressive “solutions” will always arise (the economic cycle is pretty innate, as are some evil tendencies in how people can behave).
the problem won’t disappear either by virtue of the communistic programs suddenly starting to work, solve them. Neither will the problem disappear through some sudden magical change for the better in human nature.
Since, imho, neither of these improvements are likely to happen.
:The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”
Cheer,