Comments Posted By Elrod
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OBAMA: THE NEW LEFT TRIUMPHANT
Let me make a historical point here. Lots of people seem to think that "spreading the wealth" or "redistributive economics" is somehow alien to America. It's not. And it has its origins in the very earliest settlements in Puritan New England and later in Jeffersonian Virginia. In fact, Thomas Jefferson - the American Locke - believed firmly in restricting industrial development so as to prevent the division of Americans into rich and poor (his ambivalence on slavery underscores his hesitancy about capitalism). His land expansionism in Louisiana was a massive governmental effort to provide equal land to white settlers (many former indentured servants).
The Jacksonian Democratic Party destroyed the banks so they could keep the wealth more equitably distributed among the small farmers and workers (whites). And Jackson and Polk furthered the territorial expansionism under the rubric of providing the common man a piece of land.
Radical Republicans hoped to remake Southern society after the Civil War by putting the "bottom rail on top" and introducing an egalitarian sort of yeomanry in the old plantation belt.
The Populists fought against concentration of wealth in the hands of Eastern industrialists and bankers.
Progressives, like John McCain's hero Teddy Roosevelt, radically expanded the scope of government to regulate governmental excess and put the economy on the sides of the "people." The crowning achievement of the Progressive Era - the Food and Drug Act and the 17th Amendment allowing the Income Tax - introduced Federal regulation and progressive taxation into American life. To call that socialism is to ignore 100 years of history.
We all know about the New Deal and the Great Society.
The point here is that redistributionist economic policy is as old as America itself. There has always been a counter-argument, obviously. But it is hardly alien or unprecedented.
Barack Obama will, undoubtedly, move the country to the left. Yes, some of his ideas draw from the New Left of the 1960s. But that just may be where the political winds are blowing now after 28 years of the Reagan Revolution. It's cyclical.
Comment Posted By Elrod On 27.10.2008 @ 20:52
