Camel's Nose Under the Tent

The other day I was having a conversation with my dad about the current political/economic climate. He listed several current progams and some that have been proposed, and said: "That's socialism!"

He said it again, and paused for effect.

In his generation, and partly in mine, those words were a serious charge. He graduated high school and college during the days of the "Red Scare" (the second one). When I was in high school, I read Robert J. Ringer's book on libertarianism Restoring the American Dream, and remember thinking that if you took away the labels of communism and socialism, a lot of people would otherwise accept the policies. Fast forward to today, and it's probably even more so. Critical thought has become a scare commodity.

It's very clever how the cultural wars are fought. Maybe a dozen or so years ago, [Argentine Marxist] Che Guevara's image on t-shirts became an accoutrement de rigueur on college campuses and in high schools. More recently I've seen an Adidas branded cap bearing the hammer and sickle (I've seen photos, but couldn't corroborate this from their web catalog, but did find a "Cuban" camo cap like Castro's). By infusing the imagery of Marxist revolutionaries as fashion statements for American youth, the camel has got its nose pretty far under our tent.

In my conversation with my dad, I told him that my perception is that few today seem to care if we're headed toward socialism (actually, we're there), or totalitarianism. The label of "Socialist" or "Communist" is no longer the rallying cry, as no one seems to have the foggiest idea of why those are failed ideas.

Heaven help us...