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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (431090)	2/27/2020 9:28:48 AM
From: Wharf Rat	1 Recommendation Recommended By Sam Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543395

People who campaign on "The hegemony of the oligarchs must be broken" lose elections. Nobody knows what they're talking about. "Are you forgetting FDR's 1936 speech" FDR fought the socialists.... What FDR Understood About Socialism That Today’s Democrats Don’t He ruled at the height of government activism, but saw ideology as something to fear, not embrace. By PETER CANELLOS August 16, 2019 Peter Canellos is editor-at-large of Politico. President Franklin D. Roosevelt arrived at Franklin Field on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in characteristic style: beaming, from the back seat of an open car. He had earned this smile. It was June 27, 1936, and he had just been re-nominated by acclamation in the smoke-filled Philadelphia Convention Center a few blocks away. It was, arguably, the high-water-mark of his career. Thanks to the monumental initiatives of Roosevelt’s first term, it was also a moment of transcendent significance in the nation’s history, though none of the 100,000 people sweating in the yellow-brick football stadium realized it. This was the pinnacle of American socialism, by that or any other name. In the four years just past, Roosevelt had transformed the purpose of the United States government, making it a constant companion in the lives of Americans. The Social Security Act of the previous year was merely the crowning achievement. Roosevelt’s initiatives, meant to curb the misery brought on by the Great Depression, directly funded millions of government jobs, employing everyone from photographers to brush-clearing conservation workers. To pay for this, he raised the income tax—which hadn’t even existed two decades earlier—to 75 percent on the highest incomes. The rich were subsidizing the poor, and that was A-OK with FDR. The giant crowd bristled with excitement to hear their hero defend these policies. What followed was his so-called “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech, which historians rank among the greatest of his career, a tall order from the man whose oratorical roster included “nothing to fear but fear itself,” and “a day that will live in infamy.” But while those speeches perfectly captured individual moments, Roosevelt’s “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech came far closer to revealing his inner theories and motivations: Never before or after would he lay out his vision in greater clarity. That vision included one truly insistent message: He was not a socialist. Though he never used the term socialism in his speech, Roosevelt’s anger at those who accused him of ideological motivations, of applying an economic theory that was anathema to the United States, exploded from the lectern. In line after line, the fiery president defended his actions as pragmatic responses to the real, glaring needs of a changing society. The rich who criticized him, who cloaked their greed in an affinity for capitalism, were dangerously missing his point. He knew the ideological threats of communism and of fascism were real, and were overtaking democracy in European countries. An etched-in-stone commitment to the status quo would be an invitation to extremists everywhere. By fulfilling the government’s obligation to assist its people, he was instilling confidence in the American system. He was vindicating the Founding Fathers. Now, in a time of far less suffering and little sense of economic crisis, some Democrats are embracing the very title that Roosevelt shunned. It is, in their eyes, truth in packaging. Their proposals sound much like Roosevelt’s: using the power of the federal government to create a fairer society, in which essential services are subsidized by higher taxes on the wealthy. But unlike FDR, they say that, yes, these programs amount to socialism. The Republicans who inveigh against them aren’t misstating their intentions, as Roosevelt claimed. The GOP may be dead wrong to demonize them—to turn a benignly descriptive word like socialism into a scare word—but, yeah, they’re socialists in pursuit of a socialist platform. politico.com = "Same trip totally with Bernie, which is why the progressive movement backs him so strongly" That race will be won or lost in the middle, not the edges. Right now, socialism's favorability rating is 30 points under water... 28-58. npr.org That's a good way to lose. "we need to address global warming realistically " There are many states, including mine, that take on climate change with capitalism.