Republicans are also Socialists
Republicans are also Socialists
Let’s be clear. If Romney wins in November, we are not out of the woods. We’ve only stopped the bear from attacking us. There’s still a lot of work to do. Republicans are also socialists. They tend to be a slower moving train. They hope to win the liberal dependent classes to vote for them by proposing a program like George Bush’s prescription drug program. It never works. We just get “another day older and deeper in debt.”
In 2009, Lawrence O’Donnell, the stand-in host for loudmouth Ed Schultz of “The Ed Show,” put Rep. John Culberson (R-Tex.) on the spot with a series of questions about Socialism (view here). O’Donnell, sympathetic to Socialism himself, wanted Rep. Culberson to admit that Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare are Socialistic programs, and since they are, why do Republicans object to government-run healthcare; it’s just more of the same.
O’Donnell was parroting the claim by Newsweek that “We are all Socialists Now.” The use of “now” is a misnomer. We’ve been Socialists for quite some time as the above wealth distribution programs prove. And you can add public education as well.
When pressed by O’Donnell, Culberson would not admit that the above programs are the definition of Socialism. O’Donnell even got the history of these programs right. The chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), proposed them, and Adolf Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt patterned their social programs after his. To be fair, O’Donnell would not give Culberson a chance to explain his position, but the question was simple: Are these existing programs socialistic, and if you had been in office when they were up for a vote, would you have voted for them? The questions were simple and direct as the answers should have been: Yes or No?
It’s not hard to trace the history of the rise of social programs in America. There’s no hidden history. What O’Donnell didn’t mention was how Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism (Nazi) party patterned its social agenda after the Iron Chancellor.
William L. Shirer, in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, writes that a generation before Otto Von Bismarck’s policies gradually made the German people “value security over political freedom and caused them to see in the State, however conservative, a benefactor and a protector.”[1] Between 1883 and 1889 Bismarck put through a program for social security far beyond anything known in other countries at the time. It included compulsory insurance for workers against old age, sickness, accident and incapacity, and though it was organized by the State it was financed by employers and employees. Sound familiar? This is American-style Social Security!
Hitler took full advantage of the German state of mind and Bismarck’s early progress in turning the nation into a model of socialist reform. Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf, “I studied Bismarck’s socialist legislation in its intention, struggle and success.”[2]
Hitler was not alone in his admiration of Bismarck and what he was able to accomplish. FDR borrowed Bismarck’s socialist agenda and created what is now known as the Social Security System. Bismarck said that “the State must take the matter in hand, since the State can most easily supply the requisite funds. It must provide them not as alms but in fulfillment of the workers’ right to look to the State where their own good will can achieve nothing more.”[3] Roosevelt and his admirers agreed. P. J. O’Brien, writing in Forward with Roosevelt, links Bismarck’s social policies with those of Roosevelt: “[The quotation by Bismarck] might have been lifted out of a speech by President Roosevelt in 1936, but the Iron Chancellor uttered it in 1871.”[4]
To show that that the debate over healthcare is not solely a Democrat obsession, former Attorney General and Governor of California, later to be nominated to the Supreme Court by Dwight D. Eisenhower and serve as Chief Justice, Earl Warren (1891–1974) “continued to demonstrate a blind faith in big government, becoming the first elected governor in U.S. history to propose compulsory health insurance. His scheme, which was defeated in the legislature, would have forced nearly all state residents into one health plan while giving state government bureaucrats the power to set hospital and doctor fees.”[5]
In order to break an addiction, a person has to admit he has an addiction. It’s one of the key elements that’s made Alcoholics Anonymous a successful recovery program. Republicans need to admit: “Yes. We’re Socialists.” At the same time, they need to develop a viable way to roll back the decades of socialistic meddling. It won’t be easy, but it has to be done. This will mean electing more people who understand the fix we’re in and are willing to put their careers on the line to save this once great nation.
We have a a responsibility as well. We need to stop demanding that the government do things for us while getting someone else to pay for them. It’s our addiction too.
