Union members and officials are no more corrupt in general than any other group.
So again, without trying to be jerk, what are you suggesting here? If I agree that everybody’s corrupt, then where do we go? Is nothing worth doing anymore, since it will inevitably be corrupted anyway? If so, why would you bother advocating the election of conservative politicians? Should we totally give up on society and go live in Somalia or something? At the other end, again accepting your thesis, that still gives one no reason to come down on either side. My point is, you can’t do anything with the argument you’re making. What’s your point?
That’s what they called their fascism, yes.
Stalin was whatever was convenient at the moment, although I think we can, for most purposes, safely put him safely in the “statist” category (even though his true goal was abolition of the state and the achievement of communism).
Well, yeah. We do it here, too, we just don’t use the word “socialism,” because it’s become so tainted. But when the people have to elect you, you couch your platform in popular, democratic terms. In countries past, it’s been “socialism” (in the past, socialism had very moral connotations, which is one reason it used to be so popular) In this country, it’s “accountability,” “transparency,” etc. It boils down to the same thing: “I’m going to make your life better.” Is it really surprising that this is consistently the message?
I don’t think the idea of the American Dream could have been responsible for the “fall” of socialism. In fact, there was a very active socialist movement in the United States for a while right alongside the concept of the American Dream. The feeling was that the capitalist system made the Dream just that, a dream, i.e., it did NOT reward one for hard work, and so the socialist movement was born as a way to make reward commensurate to one’s work. On the contrary, socialism does NOT allow one to be lazy, because it would abolish all sources of income other than work. Early American socialists did not campaign for welfare (with the exception of pensions, disability pay, and so forth). In fact, they wanted the opposite–employment, something many could not obtain under capitalism.