Why do many Democrats support Communism?

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mountainclmbr

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Why do many Democrats support Communisn?

I, unfortunately, have to spend time in Boulder, CO. A coworker shared a conversation overheard in a restaraunt. It is similar to my experiences. A Texan raised his voice and said that he was leaving Boulder for TX and that he was considering using his last $100 to get a sign that said "F***** Boulder and all the Communists, I am out of here". A "Boulder" woman" at another table said "communism was working well until people got lazy". My friend kept to himsself and said to his children " After over 100 million killed by communist governments, how many more will it take until it will be considered bad?"


My final thought....how do you deal with avowed communists living among us? These people truly believe that they should be provided for by the government. But, the Democrats they vote for want to be provided for by their constituents....or people that did not vote for them, like ME! MAYBE I SHOULD MOVE TO TEXAS TOO!
 
As far as how to deal with them? I live in what may well be the most conservative rural county in Michigan and we have a nifty little group of honest to goodness communists who run the local used book store and stage the occasional peace protest in front of the court house (today's had two protestors, for instance.) We mostly just tolerate them and use them as a tourist attraction. Sometimes the newspaper consults them if they want an "alternative" outlook, since here, the Democrats run pro-life and pro-2A.

Hmm..even the commies are pro-gun here now, that I think about it. Gosh, I love this place. :)
 
Many Democrats? How many Democrats do you know, and how many of them really like communists? I don't think it's as many as the question implies, unless you stretch the meaning of the term communist to mean anyone who believes the government should have any role in the economy.

There's extremists in every camp. There's Republicans who want to turn the country into a religious theoccracy, or repeal the 4th amendment to fight the drug war, or impose some manner of censorship.
 
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Its not just Democrats. Republicans are good at passing out social welfare also, just look at what the Congress did two weeks ago with the Medicare drug bill. And our "compassionate conservative" president is going to sign it into law.

The Republican party is at least as liberal today as the Democratic Party was in 1965.
 
Ann Coulter is great? har har har

Ann Coulter's books are filled with errors, straw-man arguments, and ad hominem attacks. Go aead and read Coulter for sheer yuck value, but then go read _Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ by Al Franken.
 
Why, the Republicans are the ones supporting the Greens! The Dems support the Communists!

Unfortunately, no one is supporting the Constitution. :(
 
Ann Coulter's books are filled with errors
Click to expand...

I think Ann Coulter's books are pretty good. Yes, she has reached some conclusions I consider in error, but she provides references for most of her statements. Treason blasts the media's lynching of Joseph McCarthy.

As for Al Franken, he is nothing more than a clone of Michael Moore, with the exception he has a voice that rivals fingernails on a blackboard as one of the most annoying sounds in the world. He is a walking/talking reason to make retroactive abortions legal.
 
See Brendan Nyhan, "Screed: With Treason, Ann Coulter once again defines a new low in America's political debate,"
June 30, 2003
http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20030630.html

Also, check out the review of Coulter's book by Dorothy Rabinowitz at The Wall Street Journal.

Here's just problem I have with Coulter. She attributes statements to The New York Times editorial page which actually were statements made by various news figures which ran in news articles in The Times. Do you see how such a practice is dishonest? It would be like taking the stupidest thing ever written by anyone here at The High Road, and then posting somewhere that "according to thehighroad.org..." Coulter does exactly that.

Books by Franken and Coulter are just political fluff, anyway. Franken knows that he is writing comedy while Coulter thinks that she is writing serious political works.
 
You know, it's funny reading threads about Democrats vs. Republicans, because you cannot lump one individual into either category, nor can you make assumptions about them.

The friend I've known the longest is one I met in 6th grade in 1963. His parents were both Democrat Party activists, and their activisim showed in the family life: the regular dinner for the three kids and the folks was hot dogs. I'm not saying that there weren't Republican activist parents who fed their kids the same way, it's just that I didn't know any.

Unlike my full-time mom, his mom was gone all the time, dividing her time between party activism and her full-time job being a school psychologist. Occasionally she would use one of the kids as a test for something she'd read in some Ken Kesey book. One of the weirdest moments I recall was when my friend and his brother exchanged punches. His mom's punishment was to order my friend to walk down to the end of the hallway and back three times. To this day I don't understand what that hall walk was supposed to accomplish. Under similar circumstances, my dad would have--by words or deeds or both--made sure that the event never happened again.

All I know is that, by 1968, my friend was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. And, by 1970, he'd decided that the Communist Party was too "moderate," and joined a group similar to the Weather Underground. When I went to visit him, I saw all sorts of handguns, rifles and shotguns around his "community house." He and his brethren were afraid of the government. At that point, at least, he wanted the 2nd Amendment.

Today, my old friend is a typical dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who's employed by one of those small community groups that get their monies from state and federal grants. He doesn't work too hard, doesn't have to worry too much about job security, and really doesn't worry about much of anything. He's got his credentials with the local Democrat party and establishment pretty well solidified.

But, today, he doesn't like the idea of citizens owning guns. That's for the police, he says.
 
A possible answer to the original question

First, lets assume that you aren't calling all liberals communists as some on the board do when they make sweeping statements for effect.

But....why do many support communism? I think it is because they see the dicatatorships that killed millions (Stalin, Mao, etc...) as being "incorrect application" of an ideal that they consider good. So they are probably supporters of Marxist ideals, rather than the socialist dictatorships that we have seen. Many "academic communists" would argue that China and Russia under Stalin and on weren't really communism at all. I love that argument. It is like a devoted member of a religion saying "well, when those people were doing evil things in the name of our God they really weren't a christian/moslem/jew/buddhist. -- We hear that line of reasoning a lot today here in the US.

That being said, like all naive ideologues they have to piece together bits and pieces of history to show any evidence of things working. They are hardly alone in doing so though. Just write history books that leave out the details like the death of 10% of your population and voila! Selective history at its best. -- More mainstream Americans do the same thing when they basically say "revolutionary America represented the pinnacle of moral government, freedom and the respect of individual rights and responsibilities. Just ignore slavery, the disenfrancisement of women and that little tiff with the Indians"

Or better yet "Western propaganda is behind the claims that Mao killed millions". Sure if you believe that everything that contradicts your view is propaganda you have no credibility. It is similar to those who say "if my political party did something it was for noble patriotic reasons. if yours did it it was for some corrupt ulterior motive that dooms our nation".

I also think that if you asked these leftists (particularly isolated academics) about the makeup of the American population many would paint a picture of a much browner, poorer, and more economically disadvantaged and socially immobile group than truly exists. If that is the view you have of the country, then you believe that the most "basic" needs of the bulk of the population are not met. For example food, basic health and shelter. Therefore you might believe that resources need to be redistributed. The problem with this vision in the case of the United States is that it is TOTALLY FALSE. They are simply detached from reality.
 
If you poll the millions of registered Democrats and Republicans, you will probably get the same percentage of communist Democrats as you would white supremacist Republicans. So somehow the communists are representative of the Democrats, but the white supremacists are not of Republicans?
 
Where's that "you might be a Democrat" list? The one that has the line "you might be a Democrat if you think the reason communism failed is that the right people weren't in charge."
 
communism works in small doses. Look at the kibbutz system in israel. They work perfectly. An entire town working just fine under a communist system.

Personally, i'm more of a semi-socialist for some issues, like healthcare and education, but i can't see either working under our vurrent government.

BTW, real communists and socialists are pro gun. Actually, real liberals are pro gun too. Gun control is something outside of politics, every basic political belief, outside of athoritarianism, should, by its nature, be pro gun.

Look at communism at its core, not the corrupted governments who claim it as their own. Imagine what people would think of democracy if we told them to look at the United States today.
 
While Communism in its purest form might sound like the ideal form of Government, it, like any other, cannot exist except in the minds of the deluded. The idea that everything is owned by everyone,that all citizens are equal and that society is classless is a pipe dream.

In Civics class many years ago my teacher made the statement that if all the wealth in the country were divided equally among all the citizens of any country, within one generation, or two at the most, things would look exactlly as they do now. 5% of the people would own 95% of the wealth.
At the time I thought he was full of s***. Now I see he was a very astute individual.

Human nature being what it is, there will always be those who are sheep, and those wo are wolves. Predator and prey, leaders and followers, and nothing can ever change that.

In the great USA there are those who see the role of government as all encompassing, providing everything, and knowing all. They see the world through rose colored glasses, believing that there are no such things as bad kids, or evil people, and that crime is a result of the failure of Government to do enough for them. They believe that the solution to violent crime is to ban the "EVIL GUNS" not the criminal, and IMO also believe in the tooth fairy. We call them liberals or Democrats. In other societies they are called COMMUNISTS!
 
clubsoda has a good point, to which I'd like to add a caveat: Communism can work on a small scale, such a kibbutz, when everyone involved wants to be involved. The Israeli kibbutzim want to be on those farms. The inhabitants of Soviet collective farms would have rather been working their own land.

The communist ideal of their perfect society is all well and good, except that it ignores human nature-that there are people who are greedy, lazy, and evil. Heck, I'll plead to being lazy-if I got paid no matter how little work I did, I'd do as little as I could get away with too.

Big L Liberals, and the true believer communists, believe in the perfectability of man. Small l liberalesm (aka classic liberalism) acknowledges the imperfect nature of man and tries to maximize human freedom while minimizing the damages caused by the imperfections.

That's about as much sense as I can make this early in the morning.

And now I'm going to have to and @#%^# Marx and Engels to my reading list.
 
How do you deal with avowed communists living among us?

1 - Pray that a listeneing and vengeful God strikes them down and takes them out of our misery.

2 - Convince them to live their dream and lead by example. Tell them they should go out and start their own Kibbutz, but of course, they'll need to be well armed in case those evil people sent by Bush come to wipe them out;)

Communism works in small doses. Look at the kibbutz system in israel. They work perfectly. An entire town working just fine under a communist system.

Is that Kibbutz system voluntary? If not, then it's not workable. Is any type of govt forcing me to pay for things I neither want nor need at gunpoint? If not, then it's not communism.
 
Notice that I did not say "all" Democrats support Communism. I said "many". I did not even say "most". If you investigate the Progressive Wing of the Democratic Party you will find Communism.

As a Libertarian, I also have problems with the Republican Party. But, not as many problems as I have with the Dems. The Democrat "Progressives" run the party, so even if you vote for a moderate Democrat, you are giving power to the Progressives.

I was a registered Democrat for about 24 years until I got so disgusted that I switched to the Libertarian party. I sometimes hold my nose and vote for Republicans, but I have not voted for a single Democrat in the last two elections.
 
Communism is, in theory, a wonderful form of government.

In practice it's a freaking nightmare because it can't erase man's natural desire to seize power in a way to benefit himself or his group at the expense of others.

The truest examples of Communistic societies we've ever had were probably the religious orders -- the Shakers, Harmony and New Harmony, for example -- and the other utopian societies that sprang up in England and the United States. Amana, the apliance manufacturer, started out as a utopian society.

Even in those communities, which were purely voluntary, there were serious power struggles and other internal problems that eventually led to most of them disintegrating.

Anyway, the history lesson aside, I really think Democrats like what they see of the Communist ideal because it represents the State ordering and dictating, to a high degree, the lives of the citizens, and there are far too many Democrats who believe, either secretly or otherwise, that the best form of Government is one that provides a cradle-to-grave ordination for the individual's life -- you're born into and cared for by a socialized medical system, you attend state schools and universities where you're indoctrinated with the mantra of the Democratic ideal, you work in a job that is either part of the stateocracy, or one that is highly regulated by the state, etc.

Those who see the "practical benefits" instead of the intangible benefits, see only a way of controlling people. That's what's so appealing to the Democrats.
 
There's a difference between living in a commune and espousing communism.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with living communally - getting together with a group of like-minded people, pooling your resources, and owning what you have in common.

But that's not communism. Communism is the political ideology that it is right and just to force communal living on other people, regardless of what they might think.

As such, it's pure, unmitigated evil.
 
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