“I seen so many things I ain’t never seen before/I don’t what it is, I don’t wanna see no more” is the assessment of the narrator in “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” a song written by Randy Newman and made famous mostly by Three Dog Night’s version. * The fictional character is at a party, where he is “chokin’ from the smell of stale perfume” and from marijuana smoke. His girlfriend is “passed out on the floor” at a party in which he has seen things he “ain’t never seen before.” And regretting his decision to attend the party, he remembers, “Mama told me not to come…’That ain’t the way to have fun, son.’” *
I’m guessing that my late father did not listen to Three Dog Night. They were part of a generation and cultural milieu that differed from the Big Band Era of his the 1930s and 1940s. Born in 1916, and having lost his father when he was only eight, my dad survived both the hardships of the Great Depression and then as a Marine, the battle on Okinawa and two typhoons. He had volunteered after the Pearl Harbor attack, called to duty by a sense of loyalty to the country and by an aversion to anyone who would alter the the country he loved even though he was himself only modestly ever able to achieve its promise “of happiness” in Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence. The mix of loyalty to country and promise of country to individual probably influenced his lifelong political philosophy.
My dad was a traditional Democrat who believed that he participated in the American Dream to some extent. He had, after all, survived the poverty of his youth and risen to relative comfort as a homeowner, a foreman of a printing company, and, in retirement, a golfer, and traveler of modest means, the last two activities of golfing and traveling made possible by relative frugality born in the Great Depression and practiced during his working days. The same sense of loyalty that drove him to join the Marines kept him loyal to the Democratic Party all his life and maintained his belief in unions, even after he had to scramble to establish a 401K when his own union, the International Typographical Union, lost his pension money. For him, the economic enemies were the businessmen and Republicans who ran the nation and profited from the work of their employees. For whatever reason, he imagined their corruption but could not imagine the corruption of union officials or Democrat party bosses who lived as well as many business executives while they espoused “economic equity” for their membership.
Imagery serves many functions according to cognitive psychologists. ** It serves as an avenue to a potential future and as a connection to the past. It helps us solve problems, and it provides us with a metaphorical connection to encode information that is both false and true. It makes “the abstract” into “the concrete,” giving us the ability to turn our chaotic amorphous world into personally and culturally meaningful constructs. It is our ability to imagine that preserves cultural archetypes, such as “the American Dream” and to envision impediments to fulfilling expectations. For my dad, one of those imagined impediments was the Republican Party which he connected to business.
Where did Dad get the image of a political party standing in the way of his personal success? Why did he scapegoat Republicans and businessmen so? Maybe his imagery was the product of his having been an employee and not a business owner. Maybe it derived from promises of FDR after a Great Depression that occurred during a Republican administration. Maybe it derived from the background hum of socialism that grew louder when he was a child as unionism was burgeoning. Or maybe it was the product of overt statements that worked their way into the American psyche, statements like that of Charles Wilson, long-time president of GM, who said during a confirmation hearing whether he saw a potential conflict between his position as Secretary of Defense and the needs of his former company:
“I cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. Our contribution to the Nation is quite considerable.” ***
Yep! In the mind of my dad—and in the minds of many others, particularly socialists, communists, and democrats—the image of business and by extension Republicans was fixed in that statement. GM and other Big Business cabals saw themselves as co-equal with the government. It was that “vice versa” in Wilson’s statement that morphed into the popularized “What is good for GM is good for the country,” and again by extension, “What is good for business is good for the country.” Business first, country second. That didn’t sit well in the mind of my dad.
He did seem a bit bitter or envious—I couldn’t tell which, maybe both—because there were those who were born with proverbial silver spoons in their mouths and because business owners experienced a wealthier lifestyle than their employees. For some reason and even though he was quite intelligent, he could not connect the risks taken by entrepreneurs to their successes or to his having a job that existed only because of a risk-taking boss who started and maintained a printing company that provided my dad with lifelong employment.
Were he alive today, I have no doubt that my father would still be upset over wealth disparity and still be a faithful Democrat. He saw relative wealth from his financial position by looking “upward” and not by looking “downward.” Looking up gave him an image of disparity that looking down didn’t plant in his mind. Realizing his perspective, I once asked him if he saw a disparity between his having a home, a car, two stocked refrigerators and a freezer, and disposable money for vacations and golfing and the plight of a homeless person who lacked all of the above. I did not receive a response.
Of course, there are people who are inordinately rich just as there are people who are inordinately poor. The disparity is obvious. But so is the hypocrisy of those who have wealth they do not share with others while they preach socialism as a mechanism for eliminating that general disparity. There was a disparity between my dad and the people of lower economic status that he could not see, a disparity between his modest “wealth” and someone else’s deep poverty. Why, Dad, were you not moved to share your house and food with the destitute if you so truly believed that wealth disparity was a Republican or businessman’s identifiable evil?
Don’t misunderstand here. He was a great dad, but we differed in our economic philosophies, more so as he moved into his late eighties and mid-nineties (He died at age 97). I’ll reiterate. He was a great dad, especially in light of his having grown up without a father. Those summer days of catching ball after supper are among my most cherished memories, and his advice concerning furthering my education after high school is the reason I became a college professor, textbook writer, and researcher. (Thanks, Dad, for the love and support)
But with regard to his economic (and political) thinking, I wonder whether he would belong to the Democratic Party for any reason other than a sense of loyalty and an inherent disdain for those who seem to walk in gilded neighborhoods or live in homes two to three times larger than the one he built for $13,000 in 1958. Of course, I’m simplifying here. As everyone is, he was not “just one thing” bereft of complexity. It’s a fool’s analysis that oversimplifies the nature of anyone. As we come to realize with some pondering, everyone who adheres to a single idea harbors the potential for hypocrisy at the worst and contradiction at the least. Dad wanted the promises of socialism but would have argued against the imposition of a socialist government and excessive taxes and giveaways. However, he, like many among Democrat supporters—just as, by the way, the other party’s supporters—would have been the frog in the gradually heated pot of water, not recognizing the change in temperature until it was too late to escape the inevitable boiling.
The Democrat Party he knew under Roosevelt and Kennedy changed through the decades. But of course, the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt has also undergone changes. And runaway capitalism is another pot of frogs on the American stove, as CEOs worth tens to over a hundred billion dollars indicate. Both parties have a history of heating the water and a membership that doesn’t recognize the temperature change. In the twenty-first century, we see, for example, spending under Republican administrations that is as reckless as spending under Democratic administrations, both working separately and sometimes in unison to drive the national debt to its 2021 level of $28 trillion. What would you think, Dad?
A line from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” seems to capture the adherence to party regardless of its changes: “Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds.” The Democratic and Republican parties have changed, but the members of both parties do not alter their loyalty. The Bard writes “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,/But bears it out even to the edge of doom.” Both parties have changed so much that their old versions are, in fact, dead; yet, their members admit no impediments to their loyalty. Nothing came between Dad and the Democratic Party. Nothing “altered” the “love.”
The Democratic Party has long leaned more toward socialism than the Republican Party, and it has long attempted to alter the capitalist system that made the United States the wealthiest country, the most beneficent charity for domestic and foreign organizations, and the most diverse nation. Capitalism, for all its evils, still draws people to the United States from socialist and totalitarian states like Cuba and the former Soviet Block countries. There’s a freedom associated with capitalism that is not associated with socialism, the system under which at least 162,000,000 people were murdered during the twentieth century.
My father would have been insulted if I called him a socialist. Had he not been assigned to fight in the Pacific Theater against the Japanese, he would have, like my uncles, readily taken up arms against the Nazis and their threat to the American Way. Yet, like that frog in the warming water, he would not have recognized the socialist leanings of his party as one of those slippery slopes down which countries like Germany slid. Think this is an overreach of logic? Consider here a statement Hitler made in May, 1927:
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”
Have you heard something similar to this recently? Wasn’t Occupy Wall Street a brief and unsuccessful attempt to do what Hitler advocated? Certainly, there have been voices among Democrats advocating socialism to some degree (Bernie Sanders and a group of young congresswomen come to mind). And then there are the broad social giveaways promised by a party willing to spend trillions of dollars in the hope that government can somehow make people wealthy or achieve economic parity. It can’t, of course, because government has no product to sell, but, instead, relies on wealth made by those who do have products to sell. One needs only look to the failed Solyndra solar panel factory ($500 million giveaway) and to the trillions spent lavishly on continuations of Johnson’s Great Society programs and the War on Poverty, programs that relied on giving away “fish” instead of “teaching how to fish.” Why after so many dollars spent, are there still people living in poverty? Why after great spending are the inner cities still plagued by poverty and crime? Could it have something to do with government’s putting faith in itself and not in entrepreneurs who make things? Could it be that for the greatest number of people, including my family, capitalism made life better than socialism could have made it and done so in spite of its endemic economic disparities?
The promises of socialism are always greater than the actualities of its consequences, such as the impoverishment of more people after its institution than before its institution. Think Cuba, Venezuela, and the Soviet Union, none of which uplifted the masses their systems enslaved or controlled. Under Venezuelan communism, at least four million Venezuelans fled the country this century. But why did they flee if socialism is a good idea? Yet, I would guess my dad would have, regardless of socialism’s inevitable attack on personal freedoms and property—freedom to succeed and freedom to fail, freedom to own and freedom to lose—supported the goal of taking everyone toward the mythical “middle” called economic parity or equity.
Remember Teddy Roosevelt? It’s difficult for the twenty-first century American to envision that a late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century-conservationist/anti-trust Republican might have had insights germane to today’s trend toward socialism in the Democratic Party. His actions show the complexity of balancing between runaway capitalism and runaway socialism. Consider some background information. When anthracite miners went on strike in 1902 and the mine owners refused to negotiate, Roosevelt threatened to seize the mines, giving some impetus to the formation of a union. Yeah. There he was, a Republican giving some support to the worker. And read here from his speech to Congress in December, 1901:
“The captains of industry…have on the whole done great good to our people. Without them the material development of which we are so justly proud could never have taken place…Yet is is also true that there are real and great evils…There is a widespread conviction in the mid of the American people that the great corporations known as trusts are in certain of their features and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare. This…is based upon sincere conviction that combinations and concentration should be, not prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled….” **
Roosevelt spoke in a milieu of rising socialist, communist, and fascist sympathies among world populations and at a time when his contemporaries Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller amassed enormous wealth. It was a time when businesses were becoming big, very big. Steel, for example. Coal, too. Shipping, certainly. Oil, definitely. At the same time that impoverished people sought some economic parity, corporations were becoming so large that people like Roosevelt sought to break up monopolies—and, strangely, he was a Republican. Aren’t Republicans all supporters of Big Business? But Roosevelt’s “captains of industry” had gone a bit too far and had created great personal wealth in the midst of struggling masses. Teddy inherited wealth though he was personally uninterested in business; his relative and future Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died worth almost $70 million. Today, Clinton, Obama, and Biden are all worth millions, all without having run successful businesses before they were elected. Where’s the supposed parity?
It was during that milieu of rising socialist sympathies that my dad grew up. Yet, steeped in poverty, he was by his actions a capitalist, seeking to own home and car and to have some spare money for life’s niceties. No slouch, he began working at age eight in 1924, the year his dad died, to help support his mother and two sisters. That was three years before Hitler made the statement I quoted above.
Now with regard to those large corporations that Roosevelt believed could do both harm and good, I wonder whether my dad would favor the Left-leaning corporations of today, large businesses that preach socialism and economic equity while accumulating vast treasure for their executives. And would he be happy with a Democratic politician claiming to be against capitalism while making millions of dollars? I know he had a disdain for Bush I and Bush II because of their wealth. Somehow the wealth of Democrats didn’t seem to bother him.
Given the opportunity to become wealthy, would Dad have turned it down? And if he had become wealthy, would he have relished the chance to share that wealth through some bureaucracy? Probably not. I’m guessing here, but I believe he would continue to note the disparity between CEO wealth and worker wealth. “Sure, I have a million bucks, but So-n-So has a billion. Life just isn’t fair,” not his words, but my imagined words coming from any of a number of today’s Democratic Socialists, maybe one like three-house Bernie, the house on the Vermont lake costing in excess of $600,000.
No, life isn’t fair, but just as capitalism can engender inequities, so socialism engenders them, for the oligarchs live far more lavish lifestyles than the masses they control. Yet, the promise of socialism continues to attract the young who grow up in the relative affluence provided by capitalism but not the young who grow up under socialism. Strange. My father, who had a strong work ethic, was not one to say “gimme, gimme, gimme”; yet, he was a Democrat in a party that fostered victimhood and a “you-owe-me-society.”
My dad loved his Democrat Commander in Chief. He served under him in World War II. It was FDR who framed much of the American version of socialism inserted into the politics of Johnson, Carter, Obama, and now Biden. In 1941, FDR enumerated “four freedoms” he believed are “essential human freedoms”: 1) freedom of speech and expression, 2) freedom of worship, 3) freedom from fear, and—here’s the key one—4) freedom from want. From want! The problem that my dad could not comprehend is that “want” is both subjective and culturally variable (I want access to illegal drugs; I want three flat screens; I want a Mercedes; all these wants mixed in with I want food, shelter, health care, and free college education; I want you to refer to me as “Your Highness”; I want a tuition free Harvard eduction; I want free energy).
After a difficult recession in 1958 under a former Army general whose leadership in the European Theater had no bearing on his service in the Pacific Theater, my dad supported another Democrat, the inordinately wealthy Kennedy, who, I believe, stayed more on the conservative side of the economic fence as evidenced by his proposed large tax cut and his resistance to the “New-Deal-like” spending proposed by his Council of Economic Advisers; he opposed a large debt (at that time $7 billion).
Kennedy’s predecessor, Eisenhower, was not a puppet of the Right, however. In 1962 Ike said, “I have no patience with extreme Rightists who call everyone who disagrees with them a Communist, nor with the Leftists who shout that the rest of us are heartless moneygrubbers.” To Dad, all Republicans were moneygrubbers as the blinders he wore prohibited him from seeing the proven and suspected graft of Democrats. How, I once asked him, are some politicians millionaires even though their only occupation seems to have been “politician”?
Oh! How different the Party now! Would Dad approve? Let’s enumerate the current proposed $3.5 trillion spending bill: 1) $200 million for universal preschool in spite of studies that showed the ineffectiveness of Upward Bound after third grade; 2) free community college, guaranteeing that community college staffs will have no worries about funding; 3) federally paid-for medical leave providing 12 weeks of guaranteed paid leaves for who knows what variations on reasons over a ten-year period;that, I believe, equates to $1,000 guaranteed per week that has to come out of the employers' pockets in lost labor; 4) universal dental, vision, and hearing Medicare benefits; 5) enhanced ACA subsidies, probably extended to illegal aliens, also; 6) carbon controls and increased power grid dependence on “emissions-free” sources, even though the price of natural gas in Europe started to rocket as an August and September period of low winds deprived those giant windmills of their power—good news for the Russians who supply natural gas to Europe through, of all things, pipelines (Can anyone say the word Keystone Pipeline and proposed limitations on fracking?); plus a climate control agency--wait till the officials turn down your thermostat. Would Dad have approved of those 11,000 lost union jobs because a Democrat shut down a pipeline that had jumped every environmental hurdle?
“Mama told me not to come/Mama told me not to come”: “This is the craziest party that could ever be.” So, now my deceased father’s beloved party is on the threshold of mandating “for the good of the people.” No exceptions, of course, because socialism can’t abide exceptions. His beloved party insists that Americans get vaccines or be ostracized from both work and social settings while at the same time it is allowing more than 1.3 million border-rushers entrance into the country without vaccines (because “it’s voluntary for them” according to Homeland Security officials). The party he loved is pressing for more taxation to cover the proposed trillions of dollars in spending, much of it on social programs and on demonstrably ineffective energy systems. In eight months of Democrat rule, gasoline prices have soared. Terrorists might be knocking at the door—check that, might be breaking down the door—but his party sees an existential threat in global warming that no adherence to a Paris Agreement by his country will alter even at the expense of lower and middle class wealth. And his party just did what no Marine would have been taught to do: Leave Americans behind enemy lines in Afghanistan. “This is the craziest party that could ever be.”
Yet, regardless of the current circumstances, I believe my dad would remain a Democrat in opposition to “those damned Republicans who only care about business and money.” I believe he would still go to that crazy party. But then, I could say the same about the opposite beliefs in Republicans and their stalwart supporters. On both sides people ask irrelevant questions to dodge the reality of changing party philosophies and actions. They ask about whether we want "whiskey in our water," "sugar in our tea," when they should be asking, "If I adhere to this trend, what's going to happen to me?"
Notes:
*You can read the lyrics online or see a performance of “Mama Told Me Not To Come” on YouTube.
**Leahey, Thomas Hardy and Richard Jackson Harris. 1997. Learning and Cognition. New Jersey. Prentice Hall. pp. 133-136.
***Strohl, Daniel. 5 Sept 2019. Fact Check: Did a GM president really tell Congress
”What’s good for GM is good for America”? Online at https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2019/09/05/fact-check-did-a-gm-president-really-tell-congress-whats-good-for-gm-is-good-for-america Accessed September 29, 2021.
I’m guessing that my late father did not listen to Three Dog Night. They were part of a generation and cultural milieu that differed from the Big Band Era of his the 1930s and 1940s. Born in 1916, and having lost his father when he was only eight, my dad survived both the hardships of the Great Depression and then as a Marine, the battle on Okinawa and two typhoons. He had volunteered after the Pearl Harbor attack, called to duty by a sense of loyalty to the country and by an aversion to anyone who would alter the the country he loved even though he was himself only modestly ever able to achieve its promise “of happiness” in Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence. The mix of loyalty to country and promise of country to individual probably influenced his lifelong political philosophy.
My dad was a traditional Democrat who believed that he participated in the American Dream to some extent. He had, after all, survived the poverty of his youth and risen to relative comfort as a homeowner, a foreman of a printing company, and, in retirement, a golfer, and traveler of modest means, the last two activities of golfing and traveling made possible by relative frugality born in the Great Depression and practiced during his working days. The same sense of loyalty that drove him to join the Marines kept him loyal to the Democratic Party all his life and maintained his belief in unions, even after he had to scramble to establish a 401K when his own union, the International Typographical Union, lost his pension money. For him, the economic enemies were the businessmen and Republicans who ran the nation and profited from the work of their employees. For whatever reason, he imagined their corruption but could not imagine the corruption of union officials or Democrat party bosses who lived as well as many business executives while they espoused “economic equity” for their membership.
Imagery serves many functions according to cognitive psychologists. ** It serves as an avenue to a potential future and as a connection to the past. It helps us solve problems, and it provides us with a metaphorical connection to encode information that is both false and true. It makes “the abstract” into “the concrete,” giving us the ability to turn our chaotic amorphous world into personally and culturally meaningful constructs. It is our ability to imagine that preserves cultural archetypes, such as “the American Dream” and to envision impediments to fulfilling expectations. For my dad, one of those imagined impediments was the Republican Party which he connected to business.
Where did Dad get the image of a political party standing in the way of his personal success? Why did he scapegoat Republicans and businessmen so? Maybe his imagery was the product of his having been an employee and not a business owner. Maybe it derived from promises of FDR after a Great Depression that occurred during a Republican administration. Maybe it derived from the background hum of socialism that grew louder when he was a child as unionism was burgeoning. Or maybe it was the product of overt statements that worked their way into the American psyche, statements like that of Charles Wilson, long-time president of GM, who said during a confirmation hearing whether he saw a potential conflict between his position as Secretary of Defense and the needs of his former company:
“I cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. Our contribution to the Nation is quite considerable.” ***
Yep! In the mind of my dad—and in the minds of many others, particularly socialists, communists, and democrats—the image of business and by extension Republicans was fixed in that statement. GM and other Big Business cabals saw themselves as co-equal with the government. It was that “vice versa” in Wilson’s statement that morphed into the popularized “What is good for GM is good for the country,” and again by extension, “What is good for business is good for the country.” Business first, country second. That didn’t sit well in the mind of my dad.
He did seem a bit bitter or envious—I couldn’t tell which, maybe both—because there were those who were born with proverbial silver spoons in their mouths and because business owners experienced a wealthier lifestyle than their employees. For some reason and even though he was quite intelligent, he could not connect the risks taken by entrepreneurs to their successes or to his having a job that existed only because of a risk-taking boss who started and maintained a printing company that provided my dad with lifelong employment.
Were he alive today, I have no doubt that my father would still be upset over wealth disparity and still be a faithful Democrat. He saw relative wealth from his financial position by looking “upward” and not by looking “downward.” Looking up gave him an image of disparity that looking down didn’t plant in his mind. Realizing his perspective, I once asked him if he saw a disparity between his having a home, a car, two stocked refrigerators and a freezer, and disposable money for vacations and golfing and the plight of a homeless person who lacked all of the above. I did not receive a response.
Of course, there are people who are inordinately rich just as there are people who are inordinately poor. The disparity is obvious. But so is the hypocrisy of those who have wealth they do not share with others while they preach socialism as a mechanism for eliminating that general disparity. There was a disparity between my dad and the people of lower economic status that he could not see, a disparity between his modest “wealth” and someone else’s deep poverty. Why, Dad, were you not moved to share your house and food with the destitute if you so truly believed that wealth disparity was a Republican or businessman’s identifiable evil?
Don’t misunderstand here. He was a great dad, but we differed in our economic philosophies, more so as he moved into his late eighties and mid-nineties (He died at age 97). I’ll reiterate. He was a great dad, especially in light of his having grown up without a father. Those summer days of catching ball after supper are among my most cherished memories, and his advice concerning furthering my education after high school is the reason I became a college professor, textbook writer, and researcher. (Thanks, Dad, for the love and support)
But with regard to his economic (and political) thinking, I wonder whether he would belong to the Democratic Party for any reason other than a sense of loyalty and an inherent disdain for those who seem to walk in gilded neighborhoods or live in homes two to three times larger than the one he built for $13,000 in 1958. Of course, I’m simplifying here. As everyone is, he was not “just one thing” bereft of complexity. It’s a fool’s analysis that oversimplifies the nature of anyone. As we come to realize with some pondering, everyone who adheres to a single idea harbors the potential for hypocrisy at the worst and contradiction at the least. Dad wanted the promises of socialism but would have argued against the imposition of a socialist government and excessive taxes and giveaways. However, he, like many among Democrat supporters—just as, by the way, the other party’s supporters—would have been the frog in the gradually heated pot of water, not recognizing the change in temperature until it was too late to escape the inevitable boiling.
The Democrat Party he knew under Roosevelt and Kennedy changed through the decades. But of course, the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt has also undergone changes. And runaway capitalism is another pot of frogs on the American stove, as CEOs worth tens to over a hundred billion dollars indicate. Both parties have a history of heating the water and a membership that doesn’t recognize the temperature change. In the twenty-first century, we see, for example, spending under Republican administrations that is as reckless as spending under Democratic administrations, both working separately and sometimes in unison to drive the national debt to its 2021 level of $28 trillion. What would you think, Dad?
A line from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” seems to capture the adherence to party regardless of its changes: “Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds.” The Democratic and Republican parties have changed, but the members of both parties do not alter their loyalty. The Bard writes “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,/But bears it out even to the edge of doom.” Both parties have changed so much that their old versions are, in fact, dead; yet, their members admit no impediments to their loyalty. Nothing came between Dad and the Democratic Party. Nothing “altered” the “love.”
The Democratic Party has long leaned more toward socialism than the Republican Party, and it has long attempted to alter the capitalist system that made the United States the wealthiest country, the most beneficent charity for domestic and foreign organizations, and the most diverse nation. Capitalism, for all its evils, still draws people to the United States from socialist and totalitarian states like Cuba and the former Soviet Block countries. There’s a freedom associated with capitalism that is not associated with socialism, the system under which at least 162,000,000 people were murdered during the twentieth century.
My father would have been insulted if I called him a socialist. Had he not been assigned to fight in the Pacific Theater against the Japanese, he would have, like my uncles, readily taken up arms against the Nazis and their threat to the American Way. Yet, like that frog in the warming water, he would not have recognized the socialist leanings of his party as one of those slippery slopes down which countries like Germany slid. Think this is an overreach of logic? Consider here a statement Hitler made in May, 1927:
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”
Have you heard something similar to this recently? Wasn’t Occupy Wall Street a brief and unsuccessful attempt to do what Hitler advocated? Certainly, there have been voices among Democrats advocating socialism to some degree (Bernie Sanders and a group of young congresswomen come to mind). And then there are the broad social giveaways promised by a party willing to spend trillions of dollars in the hope that government can somehow make people wealthy or achieve economic parity. It can’t, of course, because government has no product to sell, but, instead, relies on wealth made by those who do have products to sell. One needs only look to the failed Solyndra solar panel factory ($500 million giveaway) and to the trillions spent lavishly on continuations of Johnson’s Great Society programs and the War on Poverty, programs that relied on giving away “fish” instead of “teaching how to fish.” Why after so many dollars spent, are there still people living in poverty? Why after great spending are the inner cities still plagued by poverty and crime? Could it have something to do with government’s putting faith in itself and not in entrepreneurs who make things? Could it be that for the greatest number of people, including my family, capitalism made life better than socialism could have made it and done so in spite of its endemic economic disparities?
The promises of socialism are always greater than the actualities of its consequences, such as the impoverishment of more people after its institution than before its institution. Think Cuba, Venezuela, and the Soviet Union, none of which uplifted the masses their systems enslaved or controlled. Under Venezuelan communism, at least four million Venezuelans fled the country this century. But why did they flee if socialism is a good idea? Yet, I would guess my dad would have, regardless of socialism’s inevitable attack on personal freedoms and property—freedom to succeed and freedom to fail, freedom to own and freedom to lose—supported the goal of taking everyone toward the mythical “middle” called economic parity or equity.
Remember Teddy Roosevelt? It’s difficult for the twenty-first century American to envision that a late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century-conservationist/anti-trust Republican might have had insights germane to today’s trend toward socialism in the Democratic Party. His actions show the complexity of balancing between runaway capitalism and runaway socialism. Consider some background information. When anthracite miners went on strike in 1902 and the mine owners refused to negotiate, Roosevelt threatened to seize the mines, giving some impetus to the formation of a union. Yeah. There he was, a Republican giving some support to the worker. And read here from his speech to Congress in December, 1901:
“The captains of industry…have on the whole done great good to our people. Without them the material development of which we are so justly proud could never have taken place…Yet is is also true that there are real and great evils…There is a widespread conviction in the mid of the American people that the great corporations known as trusts are in certain of their features and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare. This…is based upon sincere conviction that combinations and concentration should be, not prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled….” **
Roosevelt spoke in a milieu of rising socialist, communist, and fascist sympathies among world populations and at a time when his contemporaries Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller amassed enormous wealth. It was a time when businesses were becoming big, very big. Steel, for example. Coal, too. Shipping, certainly. Oil, definitely. At the same time that impoverished people sought some economic parity, corporations were becoming so large that people like Roosevelt sought to break up monopolies—and, strangely, he was a Republican. Aren’t Republicans all supporters of Big Business? But Roosevelt’s “captains of industry” had gone a bit too far and had created great personal wealth in the midst of struggling masses. Teddy inherited wealth though he was personally uninterested in business; his relative and future Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died worth almost $70 million. Today, Clinton, Obama, and Biden are all worth millions, all without having run successful businesses before they were elected. Where’s the supposed parity?
It was during that milieu of rising socialist sympathies that my dad grew up. Yet, steeped in poverty, he was by his actions a capitalist, seeking to own home and car and to have some spare money for life’s niceties. No slouch, he began working at age eight in 1924, the year his dad died, to help support his mother and two sisters. That was three years before Hitler made the statement I quoted above.
Now with regard to those large corporations that Roosevelt believed could do both harm and good, I wonder whether my dad would favor the Left-leaning corporations of today, large businesses that preach socialism and economic equity while accumulating vast treasure for their executives. And would he be happy with a Democratic politician claiming to be against capitalism while making millions of dollars? I know he had a disdain for Bush I and Bush II because of their wealth. Somehow the wealth of Democrats didn’t seem to bother him.
Given the opportunity to become wealthy, would Dad have turned it down? And if he had become wealthy, would he have relished the chance to share that wealth through some bureaucracy? Probably not. I’m guessing here, but I believe he would continue to note the disparity between CEO wealth and worker wealth. “Sure, I have a million bucks, but So-n-So has a billion. Life just isn’t fair,” not his words, but my imagined words coming from any of a number of today’s Democratic Socialists, maybe one like three-house Bernie, the house on the Vermont lake costing in excess of $600,000.
No, life isn’t fair, but just as capitalism can engender inequities, so socialism engenders them, for the oligarchs live far more lavish lifestyles than the masses they control. Yet, the promise of socialism continues to attract the young who grow up in the relative affluence provided by capitalism but not the young who grow up under socialism. Strange. My father, who had a strong work ethic, was not one to say “gimme, gimme, gimme”; yet, he was a Democrat in a party that fostered victimhood and a “you-owe-me-society.”
My dad loved his Democrat Commander in Chief. He served under him in World War II. It was FDR who framed much of the American version of socialism inserted into the politics of Johnson, Carter, Obama, and now Biden. In 1941, FDR enumerated “four freedoms” he believed are “essential human freedoms”: 1) freedom of speech and expression, 2) freedom of worship, 3) freedom from fear, and—here’s the key one—4) freedom from want. From want! The problem that my dad could not comprehend is that “want” is both subjective and culturally variable (I want access to illegal drugs; I want three flat screens; I want a Mercedes; all these wants mixed in with I want food, shelter, health care, and free college education; I want you to refer to me as “Your Highness”; I want a tuition free Harvard eduction; I want free energy).
After a difficult recession in 1958 under a former Army general whose leadership in the European Theater had no bearing on his service in the Pacific Theater, my dad supported another Democrat, the inordinately wealthy Kennedy, who, I believe, stayed more on the conservative side of the economic fence as evidenced by his proposed large tax cut and his resistance to the “New-Deal-like” spending proposed by his Council of Economic Advisers; he opposed a large debt (at that time $7 billion).
Kennedy’s predecessor, Eisenhower, was not a puppet of the Right, however. In 1962 Ike said, “I have no patience with extreme Rightists who call everyone who disagrees with them a Communist, nor with the Leftists who shout that the rest of us are heartless moneygrubbers.” To Dad, all Republicans were moneygrubbers as the blinders he wore prohibited him from seeing the proven and suspected graft of Democrats. How, I once asked him, are some politicians millionaires even though their only occupation seems to have been “politician”?
Oh! How different the Party now! Would Dad approve? Let’s enumerate the current proposed $3.5 trillion spending bill: 1) $200 million for universal preschool in spite of studies that showed the ineffectiveness of Upward Bound after third grade; 2) free community college, guaranteeing that community college staffs will have no worries about funding; 3) federally paid-for medical leave providing 12 weeks of guaranteed paid leaves for who knows what variations on reasons over a ten-year period;that, I believe, equates to $1,000 guaranteed per week that has to come out of the employers' pockets in lost labor; 4) universal dental, vision, and hearing Medicare benefits; 5) enhanced ACA subsidies, probably extended to illegal aliens, also; 6) carbon controls and increased power grid dependence on “emissions-free” sources, even though the price of natural gas in Europe started to rocket as an August and September period of low winds deprived those giant windmills of their power—good news for the Russians who supply natural gas to Europe through, of all things, pipelines (Can anyone say the word Keystone Pipeline and proposed limitations on fracking?); plus a climate control agency--wait till the officials turn down your thermostat. Would Dad have approved of those 11,000 lost union jobs because a Democrat shut down a pipeline that had jumped every environmental hurdle?
“Mama told me not to come/Mama told me not to come”: “This is the craziest party that could ever be.” So, now my deceased father’s beloved party is on the threshold of mandating “for the good of the people.” No exceptions, of course, because socialism can’t abide exceptions. His beloved party insists that Americans get vaccines or be ostracized from both work and social settings while at the same time it is allowing more than 1.3 million border-rushers entrance into the country without vaccines (because “it’s voluntary for them” according to Homeland Security officials). The party he loved is pressing for more taxation to cover the proposed trillions of dollars in spending, much of it on social programs and on demonstrably ineffective energy systems. In eight months of Democrat rule, gasoline prices have soared. Terrorists might be knocking at the door—check that, might be breaking down the door—but his party sees an existential threat in global warming that no adherence to a Paris Agreement by his country will alter even at the expense of lower and middle class wealth. And his party just did what no Marine would have been taught to do: Leave Americans behind enemy lines in Afghanistan. “This is the craziest party that could ever be.”
Yet, regardless of the current circumstances, I believe my dad would remain a Democrat in opposition to “those damned Republicans who only care about business and money.” I believe he would still go to that crazy party. But then, I could say the same about the opposite beliefs in Republicans and their stalwart supporters. On both sides people ask irrelevant questions to dodge the reality of changing party philosophies and actions. They ask about whether we want "whiskey in our water," "sugar in our tea," when they should be asking, "If I adhere to this trend, what's going to happen to me?"
Notes:
*You can read the lyrics online or see a performance of “Mama Told Me Not To Come” on YouTube.
**Leahey, Thomas Hardy and Richard Jackson Harris. 1997. Learning and Cognition. New Jersey. Prentice Hall. pp. 133-136.
***Strohl, Daniel. 5 Sept 2019. Fact Check: Did a GM president really tell Congress
”What’s good for GM is good for America”? Online at https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2019/09/05/fact-check-did-a-gm-president-really-tell-congress-whats-good-for-gm-is-good-for-america Accessed September 29, 2021.
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