By Victor Davis Hanson
When you can’t pick an industrial or commercial activity in which the government is not extensively involved, such that kids need permits to set up sidewalk lemonade stands, you’re a socialist country whether anyone admits it or not. From Victor Davis Hanson at amgreatness.com:
In the end, perhaps the best definition of socialism is simply “The endless war against merit.”
Sometimes when you are in the midst of a revolution, you do not even know it.
I doubt all the Germans who voted in National Socialism quite foresaw what quickly was to come. Those who overthrew the Bourbons or the Romanoffs had no real idea that they had sown the wind and were soon to reap the Jacobin and Bolshevik whirlwind.
Socialism With a Whimper
So it is with our “woke”—a euphemism for the socialist revolution we are in and do not fully appreciate or even understand.
Socialism is variously defined. The Merriam-Webster dictionary emphasizes the role of the state in near-communist terms: “Any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.”
The Cambridge Dictionary more accurately notes that socialism is “the set of beliefs that states that all people are equal and should share equally in a country’s money, or the political systems based on these beliefs.”
The latter definition perhaps best sums up much of the operative ideology of the new Democratic Party, the Biden Administration, and its subordinates, both elected and administrative.
But perhaps socialism in America 2023 is even better described as something like “the doctrine of enforced ‘equity’ by government redistribution of money and power from one ‘oppressive’ group to another ‘oppressed,’ with the caveat that the elite redistributors have the right to supersede the law based on their own self-professed superior morality, and the assurance that they will never be subject to the baleful consequences of their own unnatural ideology.”