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Individual liberty anywhere is a threat to the Progressive-Collectivist Cause everywhere.
Given his conduct and rhetoric as president, we have every reason to reopen the question from 2008 and ask, quite simply, What kind of socialist is Barack Obama?(from commentarymagazine.com)
“There will never come a moment when we can say ‘now Socialism is established,’” explained Sidney Webb, Britain’s leading Fabian, in 1887. The flaw of Fabianism, and the reason it never became a mass movement on the Left, is that the revolutionary appetite will never be sated by its incrementalist approach. The political virtue of Fabianism is that since “socialism” is always around the corner and has never been fully implemented, it can never be held to blame for the failings of the statist policies that have already been enacted. The cure is always more incremental socialism. And the disease is, always and forever, laissez-faire capitalism.
What do we call Obama’s “social-ism”? John Judis’s formulation — “liberal socialism” — is perfectly serviceable, and so is “social democracy” or, for that matter, simply “progressivism.” My own, perhaps too playful, suggestion would be neosocialism.
As with Webb’s Fabian socialism, one will never be able to say of Obama’s developing doctrine, “now socialism has arrived.” On the night the House of Representatives passed the health-care bill, Obama said, “This legislation will not fix everything that ails our health care system. But it moves us decisively in the right direction.” Then, speaking specifically of another vote to be taken in the Senate but also cleverly to those not yet satisfied with what had been achieved, he added, “Now, as momentous as this day is, it’s not the end of this journey.”
Under Obama’s neosocialism, that journey will be endless, and no matter how far down the road toward socialism we go, he will always be there to tell the increasingly beleaguered marchers that we have only taken a “critical first step.”
The Bisbee Deportation occurs as vigilantes kidnap and deport nearly 1,300 striking miners and others from Bisbee, Arizona (1917)
Orlyonok, the main Young Pioneer camp of the Russian SFSR, is founded (1960)
b: Mark Hatfield (1922); d: Alexander Hamilton (1804), Wolfram von Richthofen (1945), Arnold Miller (1985)