Todays Article Slamming Democrats

BY MICHAEL SEAN WINTERS embodies what I really like about his journalism and what I really dislike about it.   I will pass by the typical and rather superficial comments about Graham Platner,  I have yet to read someone who isn't a long time observer of Maine politics who really gets that.  He is somewhat more at home when talking about New York. 

Like most American journalists, for him Democrats, except for the farthest right of them (see below), can only do wrong.  

Here for example is a paragraph I think is both rather unaware and unfair as it is, in part,  insightful.

The problem with the democratic socialists is not their economics. It is their indifference to the way liberal democracy works.  If they called themselves "social Democrats" they would not be such an easy target. Or, better, if they called themselves "FDR Democrats" they would put their opponents on the back foot. And there is not a single item on their agenda that requires one label over the others.  One suspects that they like the fact that "democratic socialist" sounds more radical.  In a democracy, however, one has to persuade, and this group of progressives prefers to hector. They speak as if their ideas are self-evident.

I would like to have Winters give us a paragraph or two just what is "the way liberal democracy works."  Because as the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, etc. show, it's either not working very well or it isn't working at all.   The turmoil in the United States that gave us things like the phenomenon of the Obama voter becoming the Trump voter and, I will go on to say, so many of those very same people turning from MAGA to FAFO regrets over their support for Trump is exactly that LIBERAL DEMOCRACY NOT WORKING AS ADVERTISED, IN ANY WAY. 

Liberal democracy with its maximum emphasis on "freedom" especially under the name of "liberty" as became a slogan in both the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century has proven to be entirely compatible with inequality, ECONOMIC INEQUALITY most of all, but also the rankest of racial, gender, ethnic, class inequality in terms of political participation and legal rights.   AND ALL OF THOSE AREAS OF INEQUALITY UNDER LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ARE INTERTWINED.   In the Post WWII years, when, through Democrats enhancing the power of organized labor and such massive economic and social leveling under things like the GI Bill and increased support of higher education - the tuition at Land Grant Universities in those years should certainly count as welfare as much as payment to poor families - the white working and middle class flourished as never before.   That was even as Black Americans and other People of Color were far, far less included in that until the passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts in the mid-1960s.   

Once that happened and with the economic consequences of things like spending for the War in Vietnam and increasing transfer of wealth from the working class TO THE RICH and poor and middle class whites felt the pinch, they were either talked into or fell back on those long, long ingrained habits under liberal democracy to kick down and kiss up.  

Michael Sean Winters' liberal democratic habits of thought are one thing that leads his desire for the consequences of egalitarian liberty with the very "freedoms" such as the freedom of the media to lie us into fascism, the freedom of those with money to buy government, the freedom of them to set up guess pools and programming on such as PBS in the past and in online "influencers" like the late Charlie Kirk to propagandize using such notions as "freedom" and, most potently destructive of equality, "free speech." to lie us into Trumpism.  

His notion that Democratic Socialists, who I have certainly been critical of in several ways, would be any more acceptable in 2026 by calling themselves "Social Democrats" or even "FDR Democrats" is naive in the extreme.    If calling themselves either of the two would in any way benefit their chances of getting elected or putting their economic equality agenda into law then that would have happened back when Democrats ran on the memory of FDR and called their agenda "social justice."   So corrupted has the memory of history become, under the liberal democratic definition of "free-press, media, speech" that those wouldn't work any better than "Democratic Socialism."  

He is, though, correct in the fact that so many lefties, especially those with college credentials, seem to be blissfully unaware of,  that in order to govern, make laws and put them into effect,  you do need to win a majority of the votes, though, as I noted yesterday, under our "liberal democracy" with its rigging to ensure that the right and ignorant and influenced by billionaire money actually win, the Electoral College and, especially under Supreme Court usurpation, can short circuit that.    Liberal democracy, American style, is even more corrupt than it is in many of the newer liberal democracies.  Ours is intentionally and explicitly rigged to ensure inequality will always be a major force in American politics.

Almost the entire news media, almost as much of academia and the conventional wisdom of the plutocracy will lie to you about that, never so much as in the month of July 4th and never so much as in a year that ends in a 76 or a 26.  

The most self-evident clause in the Declaration of Independence was rendered moot almost as soon as the leaders of the Revolution, slave owners and their allies, every one,  got actual power.  That was already clear when they got around to the parts about enumeration of population in the slave states and how they would be assessed for taxation at the commencement of the revolution. 

Before giving his article a bit of praise I have to address this obscene passage:

Nowhere is the progressives' morally obtuse self-certainty more obvious, and more troubling, than in the ease with which they accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Everyone is free to criticize any decision of the Israeli, or any other, government. . . 

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO MORAL OR RATIONAL ARGUMENT THAT WHAT ISRAEL HAS DONE IN GAZA IS NOT A GENOCIDE.  If you want to give that decision to the 'experts' there are numerous ISRAELI scholars of genocide who have said that what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is a genocide.   The Nazis did their best to cover up their genocide as they were committing it.  As I recently linked to a piece by a Holocaust scholar noted, there is a rare instance of a soldier writing to his wife in Vienna about what he and his unit were doing in Eastern Europe,  and it is one of the rare instances of something like that.  The genocide by Israel in Gaza has been videotaped and commented on by the genocidalists as they were gleefully committing it TO THE WORLD ON THE INTERNET.  If Winters wants to argue about the definition of "genocide" to defend what the IDF an the widely supported Israeli government is doing as some lesser act, then he is in need of some serious moral reflection.   Maybe he should seriously contemplate a picture of a child shot in the head by the IDF like the baby who was shot while they were breast feeding.  

. . . Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel delivered a master class in how you criticize an ally in his speech in Tel Aviv last week. When a person only criticizes Israel, and ignores Hamas' responsibility not just for the pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, but for repeatedly placing Gaza's civilian population in harm's way and refusing to turn over hostages which would have brought the war to a speedy conclusion, why is that? Avila Chevalier attended a pro-Palestinian rally the day after the Oct. 7 attack. There is a word for looking at a complex problem and only blaming the Jews involved: antisemitism.

Dear Jesus, don't tell me that MSW is going to endorse Emanuel for president.   

There have been myriads of those who condemned the actions of Hamas on October 7th who are fully able to see that the scores and scores of thousands of civilians killed and outright murdered and millions removed from Gaza in what MEMBERS OF THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT AND ZIONISTS INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF ISRAEL ADMIT IS AN ATTEMPT TO DESTROY GAZA AND DEPOPULATE IT, LEBANSRAUM 2026, IN A WORD IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF GENOCIDE .  

What is Israel but a program of putting Jews "in harms way?"   One of the great criticisms of the Zionist project was that it would concentrate Jews in a way that killing them would make it far easier.   And it was seen from before the establishment of the state that it would exist in a perpetual state of war because of how it was built on land stolen from Palestinians, Muslims, Christians and others.   Dorothy Thompson went from an ardent supporter of Zionism - unlike Hannah Arendt, she supported the overtly exclusionary (and racist) Zionist Biltmore Conference - only for her to realize when she saw what was happening for herself to see the Israel project as a deeply dangerous trap for both Jews and Palestinians.   I think Winters would do himself a favor by looking closely at the evolution of Dorothy Thompson's position on the establishment of a "Jewish state" that has turned into an explicitly apartheid state which has steadily expanded its land by terrorizing, attacking and killing Palestinians and those in surrounding states, especially Lebanon.   Thompson was consistent in her opposition to that kind of thing, whether in Europe by Hitler or, eventually, in the middle east by Israel.  

I would love to hear what he would have to say about this recent quote:

 "What is Jewish supremacy? Eighty years after the Holocaust, it's Mein Kampf in reverse. The superior race is us." 

And this one:

"The Israeli government is encouraging Jewish pogromists to dispossess Arabs of their land through abuse, including shooting at them,"

That was said by former Israeli Defense Minister, Moshe Ya'alon .

I could go on with what is wrong with what Winters said,  here is something that demonstrates why he is pretty good in his real area of expertise, recent and past Catholic history and culture.

. . . The record of democratic socialism in postwar Europe is something Americans would do well to emulate. At its heart, it stands for the proposition that the common good needs to play a larger role in setting national priorities, that the hyper-individualism, and most especially the deregulation of capital, that characterized the Reagan-Thatcher revolution was a mistake. John Judis has penned an excellent analysis of the development of democratic socialism in recent years vis-à-vis the Democratic Party.

This is not merely my opinion. That noted leftie pol Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2006 book co-written with Marcello Pera, Without Roots, famously said: "In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness."

Maybe he could get the recent Catholic converts like J.D. Vance to refute the second most adored recent Pope of the trad-caths to good effect.   I have pointed out that, having to deal with both the far more radical than socialist economics of the Mosaic Law or its intensification under the Gospel of Jesus and the earliest church, even the recent reactionary Popes,  Benedict and JPII have sounded like economic radicals in their writings and speeches.   

I would, though, caution that European democratic socialism has rested on a reform of the liberal democratic order* and, so, it has not prevented the devolution of its retained inegalitarian features into neo-fascism and even neo-Nazism.   Which gets us to something we do really agree on,  I agree with MSW that the word "socialist" makes it a political liability if not a non-starter.   The Nazis along with the Marxists, the putrid Fabians and a myriad of other pseudo-socialism have made the word poison in far too many cases.   For the good that came from post-war European democratic socialism, it was certainly not an end of history any more than liberal democracy - you can safely read that "rampant capitalism" - has been. 

NOTE:  I have come to distrust any political or legal or, really, intellectual framing that pretends it can extend the methods of science as used in the more exact physical sciences into the realms of society, economics, and, most dangerous of all, perhaps, civil law.   Liberal democracy is, inherently, that kind of a pretense of extending scientific method way beyond where it can legitimately, honestly or safely be applied.  That danger intensifies with that most dangerous of all such attempts becoming part of the mix, the theory of natural selection.   For the Catholic journalist Michael Sean Winters, he might want to consider the consequences for the Gospel of Jesus under the intellectual framing of "natural selection" which Darwin, himself, said was identical to Spencer's "survival of the fittest." 

The Law, the Gospel, the Epistles, and their equivalent in other religious traditions are  the only secure foundation of egalitarian democracy and you can't find that with the scientific method.  "Liberal democracy" shuns that truth.