This article at Nice Deb yesterday caught my eye:
Russian TV covers the growing Marxist movement in America – it’s not often that a media outlet calls “progressives” what they really are, as RT America does, here.
I’m not going to embed the video as it’s Deb’s story, but both the story and Deb’s headline is off.
It hasn’t “begun” it has been going on for years.
It went on in the 60’s when college students found that they would not longer get the exemptions that the less fortunate had, joining with Marxists and Jane Fonda aiding enemies and directly leading to the death of millions in southeast Asia
It went on in the 70’s as Colleges veered left preaching moral equivalence between the Soviets and the US
It went on in the 80’s when pols like VP Biden and the late Ted Kennedy backed by the media opposed Reagan tooth and nail as he called the Soviet Union what it was and contained and rolled back communism in our own hemisphere.
We had a brief break in the 90’s as the soviets finally collapsed freeing hundreds of millions (while pols who had supported them and academics who considered them superior suddenly claimed they had been against them or expecting this all the time) but the green movement took over trying to advance the same Red system with a green veneer while ignoring the lack of “Green” in places like China and appeasing North Korea.
And this decade we had the left again blaming the US for the attacks on our soil, railing against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while ignoring the excesses of regimes like North Korea the violence of Radical Islam, the Judenrein nature of the middle east and the actions of leaders like Chavez.
The reason why it is out in the open is the fear. Times are tough so a nation that has been taught by people who have never had to sign the front of a paycheck or actually understood the sacrifices that allowed them the freedom to goof find themselves confronted by the left once again trying to sell a repackaged bottle of the same “ism” that has slaughtered more people over the last hundred years than anyone or anything else ever. The times have emboldened them and they hope to take advantage of it.
The truth is this: This is the living of the far left and always has been. The left impulses have always been totalitarian, they don’t trust the people but they trust themselves to rule them and hope to be part of that privileged class that like Saddam’s relatives, and party members in the old Soviet Union will still have the privileges that the average person is discouraged from. They aspire to the comfort of the feudal lords of the middle ages while pretending to be the friend of the people that they would make serfs.
This is an old style being sold to a public that has forgotten.
Update: I would have included this Mike Barone article if I saw it before I hit post but here is the little secret that people don’t know:
In addition, as George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen writes in the American Interest, “The inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well.” Bill Gates may have a bigger house than you do. But you have about the same access to good food, medical care and even to the Internet as he does.
Or consider something as prosaic as food. The supermarkets of the 1960s and 1970s didn’t come close to matching the amazing selection of produce, meats and exotic foods as you find in supermarkets today — and not just in high-income neighborhoods but in modest-income places all over the country.
Or clothing. Stores like Walmart, Target and Kohl’s sell good quality clothes at astonishingly low prices; you can outfit a kid in school clothes for $100 or so a year.
He also nails the elites who cry wolf:
I suspect that most Americans would be thrilled to get a 13th month of pay. But they’re not seething with envy at those who are better off.
So who does? One example is the cartoonist and author Garry Trudeau, a college classmate of George W. Bush, who has been spewing contempt for the Bushes for 40-some years. The strongest class envy in America, it turns out, may be the resentment of those who were one club above you at Yale.
Bingo!
