What's that party again?

Chris Matthews amused many of us by asking Debbie Wasserman-Schultz innocently, "What's the difference, really, between Socialists and Democrats?"  Kevin Williamson tries to sort out the socialist-vel-non beliefs of Bernie Sanders supporters by mingling with the crowd:
Aside from Grandma Stalin there, there’s not a lot of overtly Soviet iconography on display around the Bernieverse, but the word “socialism” is on a great many lips. Not Bernie’s lips, for heaven’s sake: The guy’s running for president. But Tara Monson, a young mother who has come out to the UAW hall to support her candidate, is pretty straightforward about her issues: “Socialism,” she says. “My husband’s been trying to get me to move to a socialist country for years — but now, maybe, we’ll get it here.” The socialist country she has in mind is Norway, which of course isn’t a socialist country at all: It’s an oil emirate. Monson is a classic American radical, which is to say, a wounded teenager in an adult’s body: Asked what drew her to socialism and Bernie, she says that she is “very atheist,” and that her Catholic parents were not accepting of this. She goes on to cite her “social views,” and by the time she gets around to the economic questions, she’s not Helle Thorning-Schmidt — she’s Pat Buchanan, complaining about “sending our jobs overseas.”
L’Internationale, my patootie. This is national socialism.
Williamson talks to another fan:
He goes on a good-humored tirade about how one can identify conservatives’ and progressives’ homes simply by walking down the street and observing the landscaping. Conservatives, he insists, “torture” the flowers and shrubbery, imposing strict order and conformity on their yards, whereas progressives just let things bloom as nature directs. I am tempted to ask him which other areas in life he thinks might benefit from that kind of unregulated, spontaneous order, but I think better of it.

2 comments:

  1. The difference between democrats and democratic socialists comes down to private v. public ownership of the means of production. I thought this post was insightful: at this point the danger isn't "socialism" per se, but the gleeful way that big corporations like to "partner" with governments to mutual benefit. That's neither socialism nor democracy, but... well, a soft fascism. Kevin Williamson is trying to put that on Sanders, but it really applies better to Obama and Mitch McConnell.

    Clever joke, though.

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  2. The author of the quoted piece seems to think that PJBuchanan is soft in the head.

    Perhaps if that author had read ALL of Keynes' books, he might understand real-world economics. Or if he knew that Ricardo's "system" was a tautology built on false suppositions, he might understand REAL world-economics.

    But the author is a fool.

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