Many terms get tossed around today as if we know what we are talking about, “America is becoming socialist,” or “What that guy said is communist,” or “America is a Democracy”… on and on, yet I would be curious if people really understood the meaning or ideas behind those concepts or ideologies or political types of government.
Then out come the old quotes that defend our personal perspective. It is funny how quotations work. In my mind, quotations are symbolism. They remind us of perspectives. Now, unless you are quoting from an academic study, you are likely dealing with a conversational quote. And like I said, those quotes are just symbolic. For example, for a while now I had heard about a quote from someone named Alexander Tytler, who was said to say that democracies only last about 200 years at which point voters vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. Well, if you are a fiscal conservative (like me) then you look at that statement and you want to quote the piss out of it like you are naming something from the periodic table of elements. The trouble is, while the statement was first well circulated in the 1970s, nobody knows where that really came from. It could have been my grandma. We will never know. My point is, just because it is an old statement doesn’t make it significant or profound, but everybody pulls out their quotes. What is more interesting is history and the symbolism of quotation to provoke thought. If we abandon either of those, then we go brain dead.
So for a bit of history, here is the first of 6 blog-posts that will investigate the history of 4 different forms of political government: Democracy, Socialism, Communism and Republic. I will identify the major ideological perspective of that form of government and suggest how I think America is either like or not like those forms. I will also see if I can find out the state of those forms of government (do they work; are they successful; what makes them successful.)
Here is a video to get you interested in the topic:
This will be pretty therapeutic for me because I have been thinking that America is moving toward a Socialist form of government and feel that has proved to be a poor decision in the history of our Earth. You can help me keep it honest by not allowing me to turn this into a propaganda piece (which will admittedly be difficult… but we will see.)
I am going to try and keep this pretty short (I know, not my usual thing) so each post will be easier to digest. Hopefully that won’t result in an over simplification of the facts and symbols. All of the following blog posts will link to each other so that it is easy to read through the full thread when I am done. As I write these blogs posts I will go back and update the links.
Here are the links to the blog posts:
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