Yes, it was interesting. A trifle whiny, but a start.
We have a great system of checks and balances in this country. We are a two-party (+) system for a reason. If the Republicans get too fiscally tight (not including Bush who must stop trying to please everyone), then the people speak and vote Dems in. If we start spending too much on social programs to the detriment of the actual purpose of the federal government, the people speak and vote Republican. Like scales in perpetual motion, we keep moving toward balance without ever getting there, but that's a good thing.
The Dems have a big problem. They allowed the socialists to control their party. They have to figure a way out of that problem if they want middle America to take them seriously.
Russell Kirk wrote great -- and award winning -- ghost stories.
A half century ago, intellectual elites saw the Democrats as the rising party of the common man, but they also saw an opportunity for themselves as the liberal leaders of that party. And they succeeded in doing just that. They put themselves at the head of the movement, and when the turned around the rank and file was gone, or at least wasn't there in sufficient numbers to win elections.
There's probably a connection between the two developments. The more a party is dominated by elites, know-it-alls and world-savers, the more likely ordinary people are to abandon it. Republicans shouldn't gloat, though, as there's a lesson for them in the Democrats' decline. Parties need to be organized to win elections, but the more they become highly controlled, top-down mechanisms that work out the answers in private and impose them on the rank and file, the more likely it is that voters are to turn against them.
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Um, I think that its called Fascism, and there is nothing new about it.
The word fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini's, that
* exalts nation and sometimes race above the individual,
* uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition,
* engages in severe economic and social regimentation.
* engages in corporatism,[1]
* implements or is a totalitarian regime.
bump
btttt
finish reading later.
Europe is also making the disenchanting journey from social democracy, but via a different route. Its elites had not foreseen that a virtually unchecked Muslim immigration might hijack the welfare state and poison the postwar culture of relative tolerance that supported its politics. To the contrary, Europe's leftist elites lulled the electorates into a false feeling of security that the new arrivals were simply doing the work that unprecedented low European birth rates were leaving undone. No social or cultural costs were to be incurred. Transaction closed. Well, it was not quite so simple. And, while the workforce still needs more workers, the economies of Europe have been dragged down by social guarantees to large families who do not always have a wage-earner in the house. So, even in the morally self-satisfied Scandinavian and Low Countries, the assuring left-wing bromides are no longer believed.
Sound remarkably similar to the immigration arguments in the States.