With capitalism and prosperity came something new: the idea of progress. This is the notion that things are getting better and will continue to get better in the future.
Cautioning against socialist wealth confiscation schemes, Lincoln told a delegation of workingmen during the Civil War, “Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him labor diligently and build one of his own.”28.
Can there be any liberty,” wrote James Otis in 1763, “where property is taken without consent?
Indeed, prior to 1860, the Democratic Party was the party of the slave plantation, and it trafficked in racism as a justification of slavery.
It’s one thing to have the vision for a new business, Schumpeter writes, but entirely something else to figure out how to do it. Here we have the second element of entrepreneurship, which involves organizing the business.
The left also wants to swamp the country with illegals, seeking to make them dependent on the government, so that if they ever get amnesty and can vote, they will vote for the party that sneaked them through and provided them with a steady, if meager, sustenance.
I’m not sure if Mehta knows this. One thing he does know are the left’s political priorities, and he shows by this statement that he’s willing to go to bat for them, even where it makes no sense. That’s why this Asian Indian guy puts on a sombrero.
Again, the Latinos who became Americans in 1848 were not hurt; they were helped.
The strategy is to target an affluent minority that will be shoved up against the wall and forced to pay for the education, healthcare and monthly expenses of Democratic voters. In this way, the Democrats seek to create a majority coalition of dependent voters who can put, and keep, the left in power.
Of course, the whole thing is based on lies. Let’s start with racism, which has become increasingly rare in a society where it is now customary, if not obligatory, to tiptoe around blacks and other people of color, to express deference if not subservience to their demands and to put up with behavior that would be utterly intolerable if anyone else did it. We live in a society of black and brown privilege, yet all that we hear about is “white privilege.
In college I read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which contains this thrilling declaration: “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”23 We seem to have gone, in one generation, from the bracing atmosphere of Mill’s On Liberty to the dark, dank atmosphere of Orwell’s 1984.
The socialist temptation is widely described by conservatives as the temptation to live off “free stuff.” But this is not so – the temptation is actually more complex. It is the temptation to annihilate one’s conscience by feeling justified in living off other people’s work.
In India, I learned a proverb that may seem somewhat heartless: “The tears of strangers are only water.” It means we are obligated to help only our own; if others have a problem, we wish them well, but it’s their problem.
Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him labor diligently and build one of his own.
Essentially his problem was the same as the one Lenin faced: if the working class isn’t up for socialism, where do you find a new proletariat to bring it about? Marcuse knew that modern industrialized countries like America couldn’t assemble the types of landless peasants and professional soldiers – the flotsam and jetsam of a backward feudal society – that Lenin relied on. So who could serve in the substitute proletariat that would be needed to agitate for socialism in America?
Does it follow, then, that progressives and socialists are entirely wrong when they say that there are rich people in the top 1 percent who are greedy selfish leeches, who don’t deserve their money and who have gotten it by contributing little or nothing to society? Actually, no! Such people do exist, and they can be found among the ranks of the progressives and socialists themselves. Let’s consider a few notorious examples.
The truth is that socialism is consistent with human nature; it draws on its worst impulses, which cannot be publicly acknowledged. This may be why the true motives of today’s socialists are not easily recognized.
Consequently, here was a group that could be mobilized against the status quo, and if the status quo could be identified with capitalism, here was a group that should be open to socialism. Through a kind of Marxist transposition, “blacks” would become the working class, “whites” the capitalist class. Race, in this analysis, takes the place of class. This is how we get Afro-socialism, and from here it is a short step to Latino socialism and every other type of ethnic socialism.
We all know about the Clintons, who went from zero to $200 million since Bill Clinton left the White House. The Clintons made money every which way: by renting out American foreign policy, by selling pardons, by siphoning off earthquake aid intended for poor Haitians. I have written about this previously, so I won’t go into it here. But in profiting handsomely from their office and connections, the Clintons are not alone; rather, they are part of a Democratic trend.
Franklin types don’t need Bernie types, but Bernie types need Franklin types. Yet Bernie shows no appreciation. He’s hostile and indignant toward the Franklins of today, even while shamelessly leeching off them. Bernie, like Franklin, may indeed have invented himself. If he ever tells us this, we should accept it as an apology.
The progressives and socialists advanced their own dream in opposition to the American dream.