DEMOCRATS ARE COMMIES WHO HATE AMERICA!!!!!
Every once in a while, a friend of a friend on Facebook worms her way onto my feed and yells stuff like that into the ether. She's swallowed the Kool-Aid whole, full on MAGA. The fact that Putin is the BFF of her savior Donald Trump doesn't bother her. Maybe she's mad at those other Commies, the Chinese. After all, the Chinese are better than the USofA at capitalism, and that must hurt.
What's that, you ask? China better at capitalism? Think about it. Capitalism profits most by forcing cheap labor to work in intolerable conditions, creating products using inferior components in order to meet a particular price point and designed to be fall apart the day after the warranty expires. Who does that better than the Chinese?
Wikipedia stops listing the name of Chinese billionaires after the first 100. That doesn't sound very much like a communist state to me.
Why are we talking about Commies at all?
Didn't you know that those crafty democratic socialists are really Commies in disguise? So, no difference.
OK. Where am I going with this? What got me to thinking about this stuff? Why does the progress of social orders move as it does in the title of this rant? While streaming a panel discussion recently, a talking head posited that democracies cannot move to socialism without first dealing with fascism. The 1% will not abide the diminishing profits that socialism would bring about without a fight. And that fight will center on grabbing control of the economy through any means necessary - centralizing power, gutting regulation, marginalizing the courts. In America’s democracy, the 1% floods money and favors into the political process, creating a political class willing to further their agenda in hopes of enriching themselves and joining the monied class. Their political platform is jingoistic, populist, and nativist. Ideologues are welcome as long as their ideology includes bending the knee to their patrons when it comes to legislation, regulation, or judicial rulings.
To be clear, Trump and Musk and Ellison wouldn't be wasting so much time doing what they're doing if there wasn't money in it. Big money. They manipulate democracy, and they've got real fascists doing their work for them, but they are not in it because of political philosophy. Democracy isn't the problem. Capitalism is.
So, I'm feeling uncomfortable that the hypothetical has democracy as its starting point. If the problem is money, and if in the USofA the money that has undermined the system comes from uber capitalists, maybe capitalism should be where the discussion begins.
Only internal revolution or external intervention could end such a fascist state, the panel continued. Think of the end of the fascist National Socialism in Germany - never really socialism at all, regardless of the name. Once National Socialism had been defeated and the dust settled, Europe was built from the bottom up. Governments throughout the continent re-imagined themselves as one form or another of social democracy.
OK. I assume that we can agree that fascism is not desirable. But now I'm uncomfortable with the implied ideal landing place for a post-fascist society in the title. It's not socialism. It's democratic socialism.
Take the example of Norway, for many years listed as the most democratic society in the world by multiple organizations that rank such things.
Norway's constitutional monarchy was established in 1905, the year that the country separated for the final time from Sweden. (Don't get either a Swede or a Norwegian talking about the relations between their two countries unless you have a lots of time and a full glass,) Having been occupied by the Germans during WWII, Norway reorganized its constitutional monarchy after regaining control of its government at the end of the war, but with one important change. Norway decided to maintain sufficient stake to be in virtual control of a number of strategic industries that the Germans had seized - banking, telecommunications, energy production and the like.
But Norway also has its share of billionaires. Not as many as China, certainly. But you can make good money in Norway farming, in real estate, selling groceries, and running cruise ships - Viking Cruises, in this case.
Thus, I end where I should have started. Fascism must be overcome if a society is to move from capitalism to social democracy. Of course, what we need now is a fully formed definition of democratic socialism as applied to the USofA. Tricky that, without knowing the manner of death inflicted on the emergent American fascism. Topic for another day.
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