What Makes a Society Work

“When you’re a radical, what you are thinking of is power. It’s about power. You adopt this position, you take up that issue, but it’s all about advancing the power. They never think about what it’s going to look like or how they’re going to put it together. I can tell you, a radical never spends five seconds on thinking what makes a society work.”(1)

I have been saying since the 2000 election that the present crop of Democrats, those that are now in power, are not the same as Democrats of the past. They are not people who want to make society better, though they claim to know what it will take. They only want to gain power. They will lie, cheat, steal, distort and subvert. They have no moral stops. They would cause us to lose another war if it will help them win an election. They will precipitate an economic collapse if that will discredit their enemies.

When our founders were creating the documents that today underpin our society, they thought very hard about how to establish political institutions that would prevent coercive powers from dictating to the people. Today, the advocates of radical reform who are in charge of our government are doing everything possible to advance coercive power and dictate to the people. Our Constitutional protections are under attack. The very types of people our founders fought in the revolutionary war have now taken over.

We thought that Marxism was part of the past, but now it has arisen again with the political victory of President Barack Obama. Certainly, the President is not an avowed, open Marxist. He is a soft Marxist, a flimflam man who will bring in Marxism while pretending to be a mainstream “liberal”.

Indeed, the cold war was replete with many people who bought the Marxist party line about American imperialism and the so-called evils of capitalism. It was Herbert Marcuse who once blamed capitalism for the slow progress of socialism. His view was that capitalism duped and blinded people to the corruption of the system by giving them ever better products. This capitalist success forced socialism onto the defensive and made it necessary for socialism to spend more and more on military machines. Marcuse was right, but instead of realizing what was right about capitalism, he continued to believe that socialism was the better system nonetheless.

Why is capitalism superior to socialism? What is it about this system that has enabled it to survive revolutions, revulsion, criticism and hatred by virtually all major intellectuals for almost three centuries? Why has it survived against such ‘nobler’ systems as communism and socialism that have proven ineffectual? Wasn’t capitalism the system that would disappear and become communism? The answer is that the intellectuals have missed something. They were wrong in some way.

What did they miss? They missed the basic fact that capitalism is good for the individual, even the worker who is supposedly the exploited victim of the system. Capitalism gives him a better life because he has chosen to work and prosper in the freedom that capitalism provides. The communists were not successful in turning the American worker into a radical anti-capitalist who hated his so-called slave drivers. The average worker is not a radical revolutionary; he just wants to live a good life. Under capitalism we are all, factory owners and employees, just workers of the world, not born revolutionaries. This fact has destroyed the hopes and plans of the Marxists, not to mention their belief that communism was the next phase of history.

When the founders of our country developed what they hoped would be a society that worked, they instituted individual rights and property rights. These ideas liberated men to produce, to keep the product of their effort and to prosper. These ideas created a capitalist system. Radical anti-capitalists today are merely the proponents of the very dictatorship that the founders sought to hold back. The lies told about capitalism, that it is exploitive, that it steals from the worker, that it is imperialistic and militaristic, that there is an inexorable historical process that ensures socialism, that it is fascist, are all propagated for the sole purpose of establishing the old enemy of freedom that the founders fought a war to defeat: dictatorship.

Soft Marxists like President Obama have only one purpose; to ensure that we don’t realize what they are doing. His job is to make us think that everything is normal, that the Constitution is still the law of the land, while his minions dismantle our freedoms under cover of darkness. His Cap and Trade Program, green collar economy, Government Medical Care, citizen armies, diversity in media censorship, stimulus programs and a host of other programs designed to fund and advance Big Brother-style control were supposed to happen under the radar. The radicals had hoped to accomplish their revolutionary transformation of our country with immediacy and no debate – but for Fox News. They had hoped to blame the Republicans for all the economic consequences of the their own policies – but for the Tea Parties.

How is it that the Tea Party protesters, who exhort us to remember our Constitution, did not miss what the anti-capitalist intellectuals missed? Why do we see today, average people filling the streets in large numbers proclaiming that they want to be free and that the best stimulus program is capitalism? Why are these patriots laughed at by media pundits and administration representatives who see in them ignorant racists rather than thoughtful thinkers who understand our Constitution? I submit that a Tea Party protester knows more than all the radical intellectuals coming out of Harvard and Yale. This is because the protester's paycheck did not come from a university seat or government grant – but from his work. And he knows that capitalism is an opportunity to prosper, not slavery. He knows, like the founders, what makes a society work.

(1)David Horowitz (former radical) on Glenn Beck Show September 4, 2009