You actually seem to think the welfare recipients themselves would be better off if welfare did not exist. They wouldn't. You can tell by looking at countries where there is no welfare.
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How Socialists Built America
- Thread starter KingOrfeo
- Start date
You actually seem to think the welfare recipients themselves would be better off if welfare did not exist. They wouldn't. You can tell by looking at countries where there is no welfare. You know -- you must know -- some Vietnam vets are lefties of one kind or another. And, of those, some were not lefties before the war. Ron Kovic is at least as good an American patriot as you.
badbabysitter
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Wait a second.. you're encouraging putting someone on welfare through trade school? That would imply the government taking a direct role and downright paying for some education
Hate to break it to you , Jen.. but you're encouraging socialism with your idea
We Canucks have programs just like it.. the reason it doesnt happen in your nation is because of politics.. right versus left
off2bed
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I have looked at countries where there is no welfare. The "poor" have more dignity than our "poor." Their "poor" eat well because they grow food on trees instead of getting it from the government tit.
badbabysitter
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Sean Renaud
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I don't know that I would call any of those countries dignified. Unless you think so highly of military service that you think child soldiers are dignified.
Peregrinator
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What an incredibly ignorant post.
An interesting question -- regardless of whether you view it as disaster averted or opportunity lost -- is why socialist politics got such a greater foothold among the general public in Europe, Australia, Canada, etc., than in the U.S. There are "Communists" -- using that name, whatever it means now -- elected to the French National Assembly and many others. There are also "Socialists" and they get far more representation. In the U.S., Communist and Socialist parties are . . . websites. RWs will say that is because American culture is inimical to socialism. There is something to that, but the story is much more complicated. The best treatment of that question I have read is It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, by Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks. They believe it resulted from a combination of factors:
1. American political culture is uniquely antistatist, individualist and libertarian, even compared with other English-speaking countries.
2. Leaving out the systematic submergence of certain ethnic and racial groups, there has never been a rigid social (as distinct from economic) class system in the United States, such as characterized the societies of Marx's Europe.
3. Unlike their counterparts in Western Europe and elsewhere, American socialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries failed to build a power base in the labor unions, which were mostly concerned with bread-and-butter issues like wages, hours and working conditions.
4. Unlike their foreign counterparts, American socialists failed to build alliances with traditional religious believers, and in fact alienated them, to the point where the American Catholic clergy became openly hostile to socialism.
5. In the early 19th century, European socialists got their foot in the door, and established their political presence as defenders of the people, by campaigning for such things as press freedom and universal suffrage. Although these were radical ideas in Europe at the time, they were well established (at least, press freedom and universal white male suffrage were established) in the United States from earliest decades of the republic, which deprived American socialists of the opportunity to fight for them here and reap political benefits thereby.
6. The winner-take-all, first-past-the-post system marginalized American socialists, compared with other countries that had proportional-representation systems. This systemic barrier, however, has marginalized all American third parties of all ideologies.
7. The American federal system prevents Congress, if it ever had a socialist majority, from enacting any thoroughgoing program of socialism on a national scale. However, this cuts both ways: The federal system also provided socialists with more opportunities to contest and win elections at the state and local levels. (See below.)
8. Although American socialists won important offices at the state and local level in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and even controlled the governments of some cities, socialist leaders at the national level failed to build on these achievements. In fact, such non-revolutionary municipal reforms local socialist leaders were able to achieve were dismissed and derided as "sewer socialism" by national party leaders.
9. Compared with more practical and compromise-oriented socialists in other countries, American socialists were unfortunately given over to extremism, sectarianism, and splitting over minor points of doctrine. (That's kind of a socialist thing, but mainly it's an American thing. It runs all through our history, like the New England Puritans splitting into smaller sects and exiling the losers. Once you have a cause, you have to be extreme and self-righteous about it; and you have to be a dick to everyone who doesn't think like you.)
10. The ethnically diverse character of the American working class led American workers to identify with their ethnic group before their class, inhibiting the development of "class consciousness" here. White American proles, for instance, have never wanted to think of themselves as being in the same social class as the blacks.
11. The Socialist Party made the crucial mistake of opposing U.S. entry into World War I. This made the party much more popular among German-Americans, but it also drove a lot of Anglo-Saxons out of the party, especially in the Midwest.
For some reason, Marks and Lipset end their analysis with the 1930s and '40s -- the period when much of the Socialist Party's agenda was co-opted by Roosevelt in the New Deal; the party became even more marginalized by sectarianism; many of the Communist Party members, on Stalin's orders, hid their party affiliation while they sought positions of influence in government and the labor unions, and indeed went so far underground that those who escaped the McCarthy-era purges got caught up in their new careers and gradually lost interest in being Communists at all; and the Cold War taught Americans to identify the idea of socialism with treason.
But nothing at all is said about the political upheavals of the '60s and '70s. Apparently, in Marks' and Lipset's view, those do not even merit discussion as lost opportunities for socialism in America.
1. American political culture is uniquely antistatist, individualist and libertarian, even compared with other English-speaking countries.
2. Leaving out the systematic submergence of certain ethnic and racial groups, there has never been a rigid social (as distinct from economic) class system in the United States, such as characterized the societies of Marx's Europe.
3. Unlike their counterparts in Western Europe and elsewhere, American socialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries failed to build a power base in the labor unions, which were mostly concerned with bread-and-butter issues like wages, hours and working conditions.
4. Unlike their foreign counterparts, American socialists failed to build alliances with traditional religious believers, and in fact alienated them, to the point where the American Catholic clergy became openly hostile to socialism.
5. In the early 19th century, European socialists got their foot in the door, and established their political presence as defenders of the people, by campaigning for such things as press freedom and universal suffrage. Although these were radical ideas in Europe at the time, they were well established (at least, press freedom and universal white male suffrage were established) in the United States from earliest decades of the republic, which deprived American socialists of the opportunity to fight for them here and reap political benefits thereby.
6. The winner-take-all, first-past-the-post system marginalized American socialists, compared with other countries that had proportional-representation systems. This systemic barrier, however, has marginalized all American third parties of all ideologies.
7. The American federal system prevents Congress, if it ever had a socialist majority, from enacting any thoroughgoing program of socialism on a national scale. However, this cuts both ways: The federal system also provided socialists with more opportunities to contest and win elections at the state and local levels. (See below.)
8. Although American socialists won important offices at the state and local level in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and even controlled the governments of some cities, socialist leaders at the national level failed to build on these achievements. In fact, such non-revolutionary municipal reforms local socialist leaders were able to achieve were dismissed and derided as "sewer socialism" by national party leaders.
9. Compared with more practical and compromise-oriented socialists in other countries, American socialists were unfortunately given over to extremism, sectarianism, and splitting over minor points of doctrine. (That's kind of a socialist thing, but mainly it's an American thing. It runs all through our history, like the New England Puritans splitting into smaller sects and exiling the losers. Once you have a cause, you have to be extreme and self-righteous about it; and you have to be a dick to everyone who doesn't think like you.)
10. The ethnically diverse character of the American working class led American workers to identify with their ethnic group before their class, inhibiting the development of "class consciousness" here. White American proles, for instance, have never wanted to think of themselves as being in the same social class as the blacks.
11. The Socialist Party made the crucial mistake of opposing U.S. entry into World War I. This made the party much more popular among German-Americans, but it also drove a lot of Anglo-Saxons out of the party, especially in the Midwest.
For some reason, Marks and Lipset end their analysis with the 1930s and '40s -- the period when much of the Socialist Party's agenda was co-opted by Roosevelt in the New Deal; the party became even more marginalized by sectarianism; many of the Communist Party members, on Stalin's orders, hid their party affiliation while they sought positions of influence in government and the labor unions, and indeed went so far underground that those who escaped the McCarthy-era purges got caught up in their new careers and gradually lost interest in being Communists at all; and the Cold War taught Americans to identify the idea of socialism with treason.
But nothing at all is said about the political upheavals of the '60s and '70s. Apparently, in Marks' and Lipset's view, those do not even merit discussion as lost opportunities for socialism in America.
