A reply to a tweet I made regarding Sen. Bernie Sanders’ economic views was quite illuminating, though not as the responder likely intended.
@ThePoliticalHat @BernieSanders pic.twitter.com/BArDeeN9km
— aumlicious (@mydakini) February 12, 2016
In essence, “democratic socialism” seeks to squash the free interaction of free individuals when it threatens the policy of the state, and to channel money towards whatever social schemes the Nomenklatura have in mind. Further, the state should step in and guide society both socially and economically to meet what the state consideres “desirable ends”.
In other words, democratic socialism “sees in the world not only those superficial, material aspects in which man appears as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.”
The collective is the only liberation of the submissive individuals since “[Classical] Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual” while the new way “reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual”.
Thus, true socialism must be embraced to bring for “the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered as it should be from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, the mightiest because the most ethical, the most coherent, the truest, expressing itself in a people as the conscience and will of the few, if not, indeed, of one, and ending to express itself in the conscience and the will of the mass, of the whole group ethnically molded by natural and historical conditions into a nation, advancing, as one conscience and one will, along the self same line of development and spiritual formation”.
Let us not forget that the “democracy” that we have are anything but: “Democratic regimes may be described as those under which the people are, from time to time, deluded into the belief that they exercise sovereignty, while all the time real sovereignty resides in and is exercised by other and sometimes irresponsible and secret forces. Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical, and destructive than one, even if he be a tyrant.” Instead, we are offered am “organized, centralized, authoritarian democracy.”
Meh, it was better in the original Italian…
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