A high-school friend (from when Richard Nixon was President) posted this on Facebook.

     Republicans warn of a socialist country if Democrats become the party of power. But Democrats are not socialists. They instead are capitalists who believe in a level playing field. To Republicans giving everyone a level playing field is socialism (which of course is bullshit). They say socialist-like public policies take away the notion of personal responsibility. But I would argue that things such as everyone not having equal access to health care and more money being spent on the primary education of white children ($13,500/year) than children of color ($11,500/year) is what takes away the notion of personal responsibility. Even the Pope agrees. He recently wrote that the marketplace by itself cannot resolve every societal problem and that proponents of free-market capitalism resort to the magic theories of "spillover" or "trickle" as the only solution to society's problems.

I realize convincing those enmired in liberal thinking to understand conservative values is terribly unlikely. So why do I write these essays? Partly because hope springs eternal. Mostly I write these essays so people who think as I do, who understand America's history as I do, who love America as I do, and who are as frightened of liberalism as I am can appreciate why they're right.

     Let's look briefly at the blather above before using it as a springboard for a more-legitimate discussion of Democrat and Republican values. The Democrats have called their platform Democratic Socialism and it matched last generation's National Socialism line for line: harsh government controls (tyranny), economic redistribution, government funded education, gun restriction, government racial policy, pseudo-science dictating regulation, government deciding what we can do for a living, government deciding what we can manufacture, government deciding what we can buy, and health care from the government. More recently anti-Israel anti-semitism was added to the Democratic platform to make the alignment complete. In case you were wondering if this is just fluff, I'll point out the Democrat, left-wing progressives backed the self-proclaimed socialist governments in Russia, Germany, Cuba, China, and Venezuela. By definition, a policy of aggressive redistribution of wealth is not "capitalism." For the past century Democrats opposed a level playing field in favor of equal results no matter how unequal the effort and accomplishments of different people and groups. The notion that better-off people spend more on education shouldn't surprise anybody and it shouldn't surprise anybody that white children come from more-prosperous families than children of color in America, although I understand that gap has narrowed since 2016. I don't see anything about "personal responsibility" there nor do I understand why some kind of spillover or trickle is required to justify our country being free and prosperous. I'm also at a loss as to why the Pope would be some kind of an expert on political policy.

     Okay, let's put that away and concentrate on the values, or lack of values, badly suggested in this piece.

     The message appears to be that we can improve free-market capitalism by turning it into something better by using government to enforce equal access to services. This means using force to take from one community that works hard and produces a lot to give to another, less-fortunate, less-productive community, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," and that's okay with these people. We called those values "communism" in my day, with "socialism" and "fascism" being the versions that retain private property with that property being under control of the state. (If the government owns the means of production, the factories, then it's "socialism" and if the government merely controls those factories, then it's "fascism.")

     My version of America's list boils down to five values, human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract. A community where government determines what health care we can have, what we can learn in school, what we're allowed to produce, and racial quotas has a different view of liberty than I do. A community where government tells us what professions we're allowed to persue and what racial mix we have to hire has a different view of livelihood than I do. A community where government redistributes wealth according to somebody's perception of fairness has a different view of property than I do. There are similar, more subtle, arguments that the Democrats see human life and contract differently than I do.

     The values I describe above are the American foundation. Human life, liberty, and property are clearly delineated in our Constitution. I believe livelihood and contract are also part of the story and we all have anecdotes where those values are basic. Sure, the rest of the world respects these values to a degree and they give lip service, but history, current events, and my own travel experience tell me these are characteristically American. The United States of America is two percent of the world's land area and five percent of the world population, so it's not hard to find a place outside of it where different values dominate the social and political scenes. I know people who do not appreciate America's values and have made their homes in other places on our planet.

     The values of the Democrats have been elusive to me. I try to nail them down and they keep moving. They admit government health care and education are more expensive and serve fewer people than their private counterparts, they say they want these things to be "universal," they admit that government programs have egregious favoritism, yet they favor the government programs because, somehow, they're "fairer." They admit that economic welfare programs spend an upper-middle-class income and put at least one family breadwinner out of work for each family that they support at a poverty level, but they favor them anyway because they're "a level playing field."

     Whatever the left-wing, progressive, liberal, Democrat values are, they have been around for two hundred years, even before there were Democrats and Republicans. The Democratic Party was started in 1854 to promote slavery, a political movement that was well underway in 1820. The notion that our lives and livelihoods are subject to governmental control has been a hallmark of progressivism since 1913. The action arm of the Democratic party has changed name and color from the White Knights to the Black Panthers and, more recently, Black Lives Matter (BLM), but the violent racism and anti-semitism have been constant. While two United States Presidents were White Knights, Wilson and Truman, the most racist and anti-Jewish Presidents seem to be Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) and Lyndon Johnson (LBJ). The Democratic Party has pursued a consistent vision of human degradation.

     (Before you get into a snit about the history of the Democratic Party presented here, go out there and look it up. Look up Pete Seeger's politics and causes and remember he was the darling of millions of liberal followers. Ask people who grew up during the times of Stalin and Hitler about Democrat support for them and look at the history of Democrat-run cities in America.)

     Whatever the left-wing, progressive, liberal, Democrat values are, their causes have not done well throughout their history. The list of causes Democrats supported and Republicans opposed include the racial strife of slavery, Jim Crow laws, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, forced segregation, forced integration, and the insidious quotas and marginalization of Affirmative Action. They include the despotic genocides of Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Mao, Chavez, Mandella, Arafat, and ISIS. They include the pseudo-sciences of eugenics, impending ice age, running out of oil by 2000, mercury in tuna fish, DDT, the ozone layer, global warming, climate change, and now the COVID-19 scare. They include the economic ravages of FDR's New Deal, LBJ's Great Society, Jimmy Carter, and the Obama presidency. They include the corruption of Mayor Richard Daley changing the election results from Nixon to Kennedy in 1960 through the massive corruption of and around the Clintons. I created an economic chart from 1977 through 2018 with the three houses of the federal government, Senate, Representatives, and White.

     Getting Black people, then called Negroes, the right to vote was a terrible battle by the Republicans with violent resistance from Democrats. Getting women the right to vote was also a Republican initiative and was met with far less resistance from Democrats.

     Some say, "Oh, but those were the old Democrats, not today's Democrats." Since 2016 November, I have been in the live audiences of seven famous, representative folk singers giving their allegiance and approval of Pete Seeger's politics. He sang for Stalin and Hitler and Ho Chi Minh and he never retracted or regretted those opinions. Neither have these liberal supporters of his politics.

     This has nothing to do with one candidate being nasty and orange and the other being stupid and a pervert. Yes they are, but that's not my primary concern. My primary concern is what is going to happen to America. After the horrors of Democrat control from 2007 to 2014, we have seen genuine growth economically and politically from 2015 through 2019.

     People tend to do what they're told. Look at COVID-19 for heaven's sake. Science, observation, pragmatism, and political acumen all point to lock-downs as terrible tyranny and wearing masks as silly. Even the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) has rescinded their claim that it's a pandemic, but the government controls remain. Do you wonder how thirteen million people got on trains to concentration camps when you see people wearing masks alone in their cars with the windows closed? (Are the male drivers also wearing condoms?) Whatever the extent of COVID-19 may be, it's not Donald Trump's fault any more than SARS was Bush's fault or swine flu was the Obama administration's fault. I figure five percent (5%) of all human beings who died in the century from 1921 to 2020 died at the hands of their own socialist governments. Count the deaths from Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Idi Amin, "Uncle Bob" Mugabe, et cetera and divide that by the total number of people who have died. It's not pretty.

     Jews should be especially concerned. One in four Jews who stopped breathing sometime in the century from 1921 to 2020 died at the hands of their own socialist governments. I believe the two reasons we're not about to have another holocaust in the United States are our Second Amendment and the existence of the State of Israel. Maybe you can see why the Democrat gun-control lobby and the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement make me nervous.

     On the positive side, this administration has been a joy to me. There have been no new wars, for the first time down-and-out non-whites have good chances at getting jobs, manufacturing is returning to American shores, and we're self-sufficient in energy. I'm not just proud to be American, it's fun to be American.

     Over the generations, I've waited nineteen and a half centuries (1950 years) to see travel and commerce between Israel and her Arab neighbors. Seeing an Israeli airliner flying over Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emerites is a moment worthy of the same kind of joy we felt when the Berlin Wall came down.

     My last issue is simply one of respect and obligation. Nobody had to come to America. Crossing the ocean to get here was a long journey under difficult conditions. Things had to be pretty awful back home. So why are you all trying to make things here like they were back there? We had something wonderful here, something without government telling us what to do and something without government taking what we earned, and we enjoy the most free and most prosperous nation at every level of our economic ladder. Our poor are so much richer than the poor everywhere else that the comparison is almost silly. All these things deteriorated significantly under Democrats. I'd like to say they improved just as dramatically under Republicans, but the best I can say is they didn't get any worse. President Trump's administration, on the other hand, really has started to restore these things, especially in our poorer communities.

     Is it so terrible to embrace what we have? If you don't like it and you don't want to go somewhere else, then suck it up, enjoy the ride, and enjoy the pride.