Chris Matthews asks Hillary Clinton, who can't answer. Apparently Matthews had already asked her puppet, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and received the same non-answer.
The question isn't hard to answer, so it's interesting that these figures are dancing around the answer.
A Socialist believes that, to the greatest possible degree, the means of economic production should be owned by the Public and not by individuals or corporations. Practically this means that the government should own the means of production as much as is practicable.
A Democrat believes that, to the greatest possible degree, power should be invested in the citizenry broadly considered, rather than in some elite. It is opposed to monarchy, aristocracy, but also technocratic systems in which judicial or lawyerly or scientific elites rule over us as our betters.
There is thus no necessary connection between the ideologies. One can be a non-democratic Socialist, as the Communists often were. One can be a Democratic Socialist, as European parties sometimes claim to be. And one can be a non-socialist Democrat, as in fact most American Democrats have historically been.
The connection between the two is nevertheless not accidental, even if it is not necessary. Aristotle explains in the Politics that democracy is government by the many (rather than the few or the one), and that the poor are always more numerous than the rich. One of the thing the poor tend to want from government, even in ancient Greece, is for it to redistribute wealth to them from those who have it currently.
Aristotle warns against this tendency strongly. It will destabilize the state, he says, for the rich to be deprived of both power and their property. They will respond by hiring mercenaries to overthrow the democracy, which will lead to the harms of political instability or war. On the other hand, in a system that is governed by an elite (an aristocracy, for example), redistribution of wealth is an important point of public policy. The poor must be made physically secure from starvation and the harms of poverty in order to support a state that denies them political power. They can cause an insurrection too if their interests are completely ignored by the powerful.
Thus, Socialism should be regarded as the sickness of Democrats. It is an illness to which they are particularly prone. That does not mean that Democrats are wrong to favor government by the many. It just means that the position entails certain risks which have to be guarded against faithfully. Other positions entail other risks, so it is not a unique failing of Democrats that such a risk exists. This one just happens to be the one to which they are especially likely to fall prey.
As, apparently, they are currently doing.
6 comments:
It is opposed to monarchy, aristocracy, but also technocratic systems in which judicial or lawyerly or scientific elites rule over us as our betters.
They cannot be opposed, since they are a monarchy, a technocracy, and an aristocracy at the same time.
Hussein Obola isn't using democratic voting. Green corporations and other Leftist cons aren't the government taking money, it's corporations setting up monopolies. Technocratic caste systems don't like Palins and Joe Plumbers in either.
A Democrat believes that, to the greatest possible degree, power should be invested in the citizenry broadly considered, rather than in some elite. It is opposed to monarchy, aristocracy, but also technocratic systems in which judicial or lawyerly or scientific elites rule over us as our betters.
Is this really true anymore, though?
I see broad endorsements of what they consider "right action" by the federal government in the Democrat party right now, with little distrust of elites (I think the governing class are elites, yet many Democrats want to give them more rather than less power over every day Americans).
I think they see federal intervention/control as the antidote to racism and sexism and all those other icky 'isms', and don't see much evidence that they trust ordinary people with much power at all.
Case in point: during the Evil Bu$Hitler years, the Dems railed against the Senate because representation there didn't reflect the populations of each state. And they loved the House.
But under a Dem president, the opposite is true: suddenly they want to tamp down the dangerous populism of the House :p Thank God for the Senate!
Their enthusiasm for representational democracy seems to me to depend very much on whether those pesky citizens support their preferred policy positions.
Well summarised
Is this really true anymore, though?
There's a serious question about how democratic the Democratic Party currently is. I was talking with a Sanders supporter today about how odd it is that the party relies so heavily on superdelegates -- an elite of party loyalists -- whose votes end up being able to override the votes of popular supporters. How strange a feature in a party of supposedly small-d Democrats!
On the other hand, it has been historically an important feature, and remains so in some factions. The union guys, for example, do not like the idea that some smarty pants thinks he knows better than them -- whether it's a corporate smartypants or a government one.
Still, it may well be that the party's leadership and rich-kid supporters have fully transitioned to an elitist socialism instead of an embrace of democratic politics. In that case, they're misusing the words by describing themselves as democrats.
People are misleading themselves when they think of the Left as a political party to begin with, Democrat or Republic based or not.
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