There's no radical left in America.

I totally agree. I think most historians would confirm that without a shadow of a doubt. Unfortunately, this became a debate of abortion, but I think that issue has paralleled the drift in other issues that have drifted to the left as well.

I would love to hear someone who uses the term "Judeo-Christian tradition" to explain to me what the hell that means. Seems to me it's only used by conservative Christians who have no right to lay claim to the "Judeo" part of the equation...

Two major flaws in that argument.

First, the turn to the left in the Democratic Party in the late 60s, 70s was followed by a turn to the right in the late 80s/90s. Dukakis was less leftist than Mondale (at least on economic policy), and Clinton was considerably more to the right of either (on any count).

Secondly - and way more importantly IMO - is how you focus very narrowly on only post-material, moral/values issues: abortion, gay marriage. At least as important as that axis is the socio-economic axis. Equality, taxes, benefits, social security, employee rights, job security, poverty, etc.

On that axis, the entire spectrum of US politics has swung fiercely to the right, starting with Reagan - and the Democrats have meekly followed the trend, just with some delay and moderation. Where has the power of the unions gone, for example? The politicians who even still propagate it?

In a recent thread, Mesquite posted a brilliantly informative link to this here Tax Rate History. What does it show? Under Eisenhower, the top income tax rate was 91%. 91%!! Any politician proposing anything like that would, in today's world, be branded a commie - and Eisenhower was a Republican. Clinton never dared to go even halfway back to the redistributive taxes of the pre-Reagan era and maxed them out at 40%. Thats how far right today's Democrats have drifted when it comes to socio-economic policy.

Perhaps this explains the difference in perception. As a leftist myself, I judge politicians primarily on what they do against poverty, for equality. In that dimension, US politics is a choice between bad and worse, and the Clinton era at most meant, as Steve Earle sang in '96, "four more years of things not getting worse". You, I am hazarding a guess, are a man of religious or otherwise socially conservative beliefs, and therefore focus on the only issues you've mentioned so far in your argument: abortion and gay marriage - and yes, on those counts society has become a lot more liberal since the days of Eisenhower.

I agree yes, I grew up in a very conservative area, my okie name says it, back in a time when a handshake meant something. I grew up with very good, moral people that cared about their families, and there was very little crime, little social trouble. It was a great time in my view. Before the great society, yes, poor people were poor, but almost every family had a father and a mother, and children grew in much healthier atmospheres than now, and it showed. So my perception of politics includes social attitudes because I believe one follows the other.

Poverty and equality. I am in favor of minimizing poverty and inequality. Who isn't? We need to get over the politics and admit that neither party desires poverty and inequality. We simply disagree on how those conditions can be lessened. I think the argument about left and right boils down is that the left thinks the government and various government programs are the correct and compassionate way to attack those problems. Republicans tend to think the most effective and compassionate ways to attack those problems are not necessarily government programs, or at least there is a disagreement in how the programs should be structured and administered. Communism was invented to eliminate poverty and create a perfectly equal society. History has shown that it fails on both counts.

My personal belief is that poverty and the problem of inequality will always be with us. Let us minimize it as much as possible. I'm all in favor of that. Liberals of today do not call themselves communists or socialists, at least usually. However, if you examine their philosophy and beliefs, they are dangerously close to advocating the same approach as openly communist governments. I happen to think that the liberal leftists of today are very far left. If it looks like a dog and barks like a dog, I think its a dog, regardless whether the dog wants to be known as a dog. So in my opinion, the left of today is very far left and extreme. You don't have to agree. This forum is for expressing opinions. Thats my opinion. Please get over the fact that other people do not always agree with you.

Yeah, nimh. Get over that, will you.

okie

When's the last time you saw a flyer posted or handed out notifying community members of a meeting of marxist/leninists?

Thou smug smart-ass!

I haven't seen one lately. I've never seen one in fact. Marxists/Leninists don't admit to being one, and many don't even know they are. They only hate business and love government to right every wrong. Such people call themselves liberal Democrats instead. Fact is, they sometimes don't even like to be called liberal.

Bravissimo. I should pop in here more often.

So they don't know that they are Marixist/Leninists but you do. Interesting. What would you detail as the differences between Marxism/Leninism and the Liberal Democrat positions? How about a Social Democrat? How would he fit. And perhaps you could lay out the Liberalism of the British or European traditions and how they contrast with Liberalism as voiced in America by, say, Strauss.

The marxist/leninists whom i have known have never hid their beliefs; and if they scorn the label "liberal," it's because of the conservative character they ascribe to those in this country who are called or call themselves liberals. The typical conservative claims about liberalism are only slightly more ludicrous than the idiocy the christian right is attempting to foist on the nation.

I view politics as a sliding scale. At one end is a pure form of the ideals of America, as the Constitution designed it, which emphasizes individual freedom and individual responsibility. At the other end of the scale, the government decides everything and takes care of everybody at the expense of individual freedom, private property rights, the list goes on. Along that scale you will find our current American system with a mixture of socialism now incorporated into it, further along you find liberal Democrats vision of government as well as pure socialism, further on the scale is communism, marxism, etc. Now if you want to draw sharp distinctions between exactly where you are on the scale, have at it. I would compare your distinctions to whether you call a rain storm a shower, drizzle, or deluge. Its still raining however you want to look at it.

Concerning the views of liberal Democrats, I can't get into their heads, I can only judge by what they say they want, and by reading between the lines in terms of what they are feverishly supporting and what I think their true end game is. Socialism and communism are not popular words now, but I think the policies advocated by those philosophies are not all viewed necessarily as total losers when presented to the voters in the most attractive manner. That is what the liberals and the liberal press is engaged in now. I will temper my assertion that all liberal Democrats being communists or socialists, many likely just favor certain socialistic or communistic ideas sprinkled into government, some not even knowing what they really are advocating while others might, but some probably are full blown closet socialists or communists. I will stick by that assertion.

I think a big factor is the effects of the leftists more or less dominating higher education for the past many years. I happen to know one that I grew up with and know him pretty well. His father was sort of a communist in the 50's, and because of that, this man has followed the philosophy, has a Phd, teaches history in college, and has progressively become more disappointed in his pursuits of a perfect system so he is coming back around to the logic of traditional American values, but it took a long time. In the meantime, he's been teaching his poison to all of his students. He is one of I am guessing thousands of professors in the colleges and universities that have been doing the same thing for a generation. The result has been a confused generation of young leftist, liberal Democrats.

Well, that's about as nonsensical a thesis as i've recently read. It ranks right up there with christian mumbo-jumbo for self-serving crap.

Okie
Okie wrote: "His father was sort of a communist in the 50's" (sic)

There is no such thing as a sort of a communist, especially in the '50s.

BBB

What does this have to do with Christians?

Also from BumbleBeeBoogie:

You are entitled to your opinion whether its right or not, but a few were around. Actually you are helping my argument that perhaps there are more of them around today than there were then?

[quote="okieAlso from BumbleBeeBoogie:

Okie, you have a lot to learn about American communism in the 1950s. Perhaps this will help:

Family resemblence--idiocy of equivalent order . . .

Communism and National Security: The Menace Emerges
Communism and National Security: The Menace Emerges
by Ellen Schrecker
from chapter 3 of THE AGE OF MCCARTHYISM: A BRIEF HISTORY WITH DOCUMENTS (Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1994)

The restored tolerance for American communism that grew out of the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union did not long survive the victory over Hitler in the spring of 1945. Though there was an ostensible revival of the Popular Front collaboration between Communists and liberals during the war, it was a temporary and essentially superficial phenomenon. The party's patriotism did little to overcome the hostility of its traditional enemies or make it any more popular with the general public. And once World War II ended and the cold war began, the Communist party again came under attack.

This time, however, because of the struggle against the Soviet Union, anticommunism moved to the ideological center of American politics. The cold war transformed domestic communism from a matter of political opinion to one of national security. As the United States' hostility toward the Soviet Union intensified, members of the Communist party came increasingly to be viewed as potential enemy agents. Since that perception was to provide the justification for so much that happened during the McCarthy period, it is important to examine its development in some detail.

The cold war began even before the fighting stopped. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Roosevelt had tried to negotiate an amicable postwar settlement with Stalin, but after FDR's death in April, American policymakers became concerned about the Soviet Union's obvious attempt to dominate the areas of Eastern Europe that its army controlled. As crisis followed crisis over the next few years, the world hovered on the verge of war. Each emergency heightened the tension. First came disagreements over the composition of the Polish government in 1945, then Soviet pressure on Turkey and Iran in 1946, the Greek Civil War in 1947, the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and blockade of Berlin in 1948, the Communist takeover in China and the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949, and, finally, the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950.

At first Truman and his advisers vacillated between hoping to conciliate the Soviets and trying to strong-arm them, but by the beginning of 1946 most of the nation's policymakers had come to see the Soviet Union as a hostile power committed to a program of worldwide expansion that only the United States was strong enough to resist. This may not have been the case. Though there is no question about the horrendous repression Stalin imposed on his own people, his foreign policy may well have been motivated by a desire for security rather than conquest. Whether or not it was, American policymakers never tried to find out, assuming on the basis of the Nazi experience that totalitarian states by definition threatened the stability of the international system.

Similar assumptions pervaded the growing consensus about the dangers of American communism. Part myth and part reality, the notion that domestic Communists threatened national security was based on a primarily ideological conception of the nature of the Communist movement. The sense of urgency that surrounded the issue of communism came from the government's attempt to mobilize public opinion for the cold war. But the content, the way in which the Communist threat was defined, owed much to formulations that the anti-Communist network had pushed for years. J. Edgar Hoover's 1947 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, is an example of this type of thinking, of the vision of communism that came to shape most people's perceptions of the Red Menace. It conformed to the similarly demonized view of the Soviet Union held by the Truman administration and its supporters.

Though distorted in many ways, the perception of an internal Communist threat had just enough plausibility to be convincing--especially to the vast majority of Americans who had no direct contact with the party or its members. Above all, it legitimated the McCarthy era repression by dehumanizing American Communists and transforming them into ideological outlaws who deserved whatever they got.

Communist party members were believed to be part of a secret conspiracy, fanatics who would automatically do whatever Stalin told them to do. Though a wildly exaggerated caricature, the image did have some basis in reality. After all, the American Communist party was a highly disciplined organization that did have a connection to the Soviet Union. Whether or not it actually got orders from Moscow, its leaders certainly tried to ensure that the party's policies would be in accord with those of the Kremlin, at least on major issues. It was thus possible to view the congruence between the party's line and the Soviet Union's positions as evidence of dictation.

The notion that individual Communists were under Moscow's control had less basis in reality. True, some party members did display a Stalinist rigidity, following every zig and zag of the party line with unquestioning devotion. And many Communists did behave in what could be seen as a conspiratorial fashion, especially when they tried to conceal their Political affiliation. Nonetheless, most party members were neither so rigid nor so secretive. They did not see themselves as soldiers in Stalin's army, but as American radicals committed to a program of social and political change that would eventually produce what they hoped would be a better society. Even at its peak, the Communist party had a high turnover rate; and by the early 1950s, most of the people who had once been in the party had quit, proving that they were hardly the ideological zombies they were commonly portrayed as. Nonetheless, the assumption that all Communists followed the party line all the time was to structure and justify the political repression of the McCarthy period.

Just as there was a kernel of plausibility in the demonized image of the American Communist, so too was it conceivable that individual Communists, acting as subversives, spies, and saboteurs, could threaten American security. Protecting the nation from these alleged dangers was to become the primary justification for much of what happened during the McCarthy period. The dangers were enormously exaggerated, but they were not wholly fictitious.

Ironically, even though the party's leaders were to go to jail in the 1950s because they had supposedly advocated the violent overthrow of the American government, no one in any position of responsibility seriously worried that the party would mount a successful revolution. A far more tangible danger was the possibility that individual Communists in sensitive positions could subtly influence the nation's foreign policy or undermine its ability to defend itself. There was no evidence that this had happened. But conspiracy theories blossomed, circulated primarily by Republican politicians and their allies who wanted to discredit the Democratic party and the New Deal. Most of these theories involved charges that Communists had infiltrated the State Department, where they induced FDR to give Poland to Stalin at the Yalta Conference in 1945 and then betrayed China to the Communists. Though these allegations had no basis in reality, there were enough tidbits of circumstantial evidence for people like Joe McCarthy to build their careers (and ruin those of others) by creating apparently convincing scenarios.

Communist spies were, however, a genuine threat. Though never powerful enough to influence government policy, individual Communists could easily have stolen secrets--and some of them did. The notorious spy cases of the early cold war bolstered the contention that, as J. Edgar Hoover maintained, "every American Communist was, and is, potentially an espionage agent of the Soviet Union." The ramifications of these cases were considerable, even though exactly what Elizabeth Bentley, Alger Hiss, or Julius and Ethel Rosenberg did or did not do may never be known. Nonetheless, there is enough evidence, mainly from people who either confessed or were caught in the act, to make it clear that some American, British, and Canadian citizens in or near the Communist party did spy for the Soviet Union and did so for political reasons. Most of them were active during World War II at a time when Russia and the United States were on the same side, and they apparently believed that they were helping the Allied cause It is unlikely that the Soviet Union recruited spies from the party during the cold war once communism had become anathematized and the government had eliminated its left-wing employees.

Though the threat of espionage gained national attention, sabotage was the prime concern of policymakers. They feared that Communist-led unions might go on strike or otherwise impede the operations of the nation's vital defense industries. Here, too, the fear was wildly exaggerated. But there were Just enough elements of reality to give it plausibility. Although a party-dominated union like the Fur and Leather Workers posed little threat to national security, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) and the various maritime unions were more strategically positioned. During the Nazi-Soviet Pact period, Communist labor leaders had been involved in several highly publicized strikes in the nation's defense industries. Part of a nationwide organizing drive mounted by unions of all political persuasions, the work stoppages were triggered by economic grievances, not a desire to impede the nation's war effort. Nonetheless, because Communists had been active, these strikes were cited during the early years of the cold war as evidence that the party had tried to sabotage American rearmament. The possibility of similar job actions in the event of a conflict with the Soviet Union could easily justify cracking down on the left-led unions.

The most discouraging part of this post, okie, is your apparent contentment in not challenging yourself to become more educated and knowledgeable regarding what you are talking about. God knows where you are getting these ideas from, but it's not from serious sources. Why not take the example of Abe Lincoln and really dig in and educate yourself (I'm guessing you don't trust schools or universities). You can get great second hand books from ebay now for next to nothing.

In case you haven't heard of the source, its called "common sense." What is it you don't understand about individual rights and responsibilities versus the government taking care of you?