Comment Re: Western liberalism ... (Score 1) 99
At those schools you indicate favor Soviet influenced liberalism, they actually aren't that into communism and are really into democracy.
While the soviets said communism was their official philosophy, they were in fact socialist. And all communists claim to like democracy, but (and Karl Marx supported this) that there was to be no freedom of speech (and effectively, no democracy either) until they complete the revolution and fully transition to communism, which in practice never actually happens. You might also notice that at least some democrats going all the way back to FDR have supported the so-called economic bill of rights. Bernie and AOC call this socialism, but in fact it is not. It is in fact economic fascism, which was very popular at the time it was written, even well after the west had largely rejected fascism as a political concept.
When progressives today talk about socialism, what's actually in their head is typically economic fascism. Sometimes they cite the Nordic countries, but they really have very little understanding of how they're run. They're actually very much free market driven (even more so than the US, with even their education system privatized) with a welfare component added to it. Notice that, among other things, they don't even have the concept of a minimum wage in those countries. Contrast that to fascist Italy who had one long before the US, same with Nazi Germany, and even more, they introduced the concept of a maximum wage, which is also a thing favored by modern democrats. If you ever happen across rsilvergun posts, he talks about how great he thinks it would be all the time. (And by the way, as a percentage of GDP, the US basically the same as most Nordic states. The country with the largest welfare spending as a percentage of GDP is in fact France.)
And when you tell these guys why socialism doesn't work, which mostly has to do with the way command economies fail to respond fast enough to market changes, assuming they ever respond (hence it would take ten years and a huge amount of money just to buy a turd of a car behind the iron curtain) then they start talking about how they'd like something "in between", which basically looks like a market economy with very heavy-handed government control over every business, including things like price controls, wage controls, and even forcing companies to alter their own business model or make different strategic decisions basically because the government says so. And we've already seen that "in between" before -- this is what fascists referred to as the "third way" or the "third position." Just like today's progressives (by the way, they also referred to themselves as progressives) they hated free market capitalism AND they hated socialism (though unlike today's progressives, they all knew exactly what socialism meant) instead opting for terms like "state socialism" to draw a distinction between themselves and actual socialists.
It's worth noting also that the reason Hitler detested the word socialist is because people in his circle simply didn't like the word, and would have denied it if you told him he was. This is the exact same reason today's progressives don't like to call themselves economic fascists, and they too will deny it, even though all you have to do is take any fascist propaganda and replace every occurrence of the word 'fascist' with 'socialist', and suddenly they'll talk about how great that would be.
Keep in mind, I reject outright, both socialism AND fascism. Why? Because they're both, undeniably, very illiberal. Just like progressives.
https://fee.org/articles/econo...
https://www.vox.com/2014/8/6/5...
https://oecdstatistics.blog/20...
