The Decline of Morality and Spirituality in Western Civilization

The Socialization of America

By Dr. David Noebel, The August Review
March 27, 2009

In retrospect, we might discover that 1883 was a most significant year. We’re familiar with 1848 giving us The Communist Manifesto and 1859 giving us The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

But 1883 gave us three portentous happenings, and these seemingly unrelated happenings turned history toward socialism:

1. Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London, England. The assumption that Communism died with him was logical since only six people attended his funeral. But the truth is that it had not yet begun its murderous journey through the 20th century.

2. John Maynard Keynes was born on June 5, 1883, in Cambridge, England. His political, economic, and moral influence continues to affect every American.

3. The Fabian Socialist Society was an offshoot of The Fellowship of the New Life, which was born in October 1883 in London, England.

Today’s financial events illustrate that America is not exempt from being led toward socialism. Predictions differ, depending on one’s perspective, as to whether this will be a socialistic paradise or a socialistic hell. Time will tell. In the meantime, we’d do well to listen to warnings from the past.

Russian thinker and author Fyodor Dostoyevsky offered the following take on socialism:

“The future kingdom of socialism will be a terrible Tyranny of criminals and murderers. It will throw humanity into a true hell of spiritual suffering and poverty.”

Socialist George Bernard Shaw added:

“You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner.”

That’s probably why Margaret Thatcher added that the “problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

Today, we can link the U. S. House of Representatives—and its radical, progressive, socialistic societies and caucuses— directly to Karl Marx through Keynes and the Fabians.

Before identifying many of the House members caught up in the socialist web, however, let’s first identify the major economic dogma of the early socialists.

Socialism is the economic system of both the Marxist-Leninist worldview and the Fabian Society worldview. John Maynard Keynes was a member of the British Fabian Society, whose American counterparts were the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and the League for Industrial Democracy. Their American voices were centered in the ideas of Norman Thomas and John Dewey among others. Dewey, you may remember, was an early signatory of The Humanist Manifesto (1933) and its atheistic, socialist gospel.

Socialists are united in their desire to see capitalism destroyed, either forcefully or gradually, and most would rejoice if Christianity were destroyed along with it. Socialists and liberals generally see in Christians “an infallible marker of mental retardation” (Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2008/09, p. 6).

The Christian worldview endorses sound or hard money, fiscal responsibility, saving for a rainy day, deferred gratification, paying off monthly credit card bills, living within one’s means, etc. Keynesian economics, by contrast, argues for consumption, extravagance, and not providing for the future, arguing that “the great vice is saving, thrift, and financial prudence” (Keynes At Harvard, p. 63). Keynesians love huge national spending, debt, and high inflation—anathema to Christians and conservatives.

Socialists see capitalism as an evil economic system founded on the concepts of profit, individualism, private property, private business, freedom to buy and sell products and services, etc. Indeed, a working definition of capitalism is “the peaceful and free exchange of goods and services without theft, fraud, and breech of contract.”

Capitalism is tailored to individual initiative rather than groupthink or community initiative. Nearly all inventions that have furthered the capitalistic enterprise and blessed humanity in the process have been the result of individual initiative rather than committee, group, or government activity (compare previous centuries to the accelerated rate of inventions since America gained its independence in 1776).

Marx advanced the socialist cause by calling for social or public ownership of property and the abolition of private property. He believed that people were best suited to work on state farms, public parks, nationalized banks, or the government bureaucracy rather than for private employers, who would certainly take advantage of their employees, causing them both social and economic harm. Marx was an economic leech on fellow communist Engels, who supported him with his capitalistic father’s monies.

George Bernard Shaw represented the Fabian point of view by calling for “the socialization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange” to bring about an equal distribution of goods and services to all members of society and to make the State “the ALL of social well-being.” The State “subsumes all economic life of the nation.”

In other words, socialism is an economic system that downplays the individual in favor of the group, social order, or the State. It is a system in which the State directs the economic activity of the social order through central planning and by placing economic activity under the jurisdiction of the State. Socialism is also known as collectivism or Statism and, to Marx, Communism.

Today, we call this economic system “interventionism” or Keynesism. Interventionism is a kind of socialism or communism, but without the destruction of the bourgeoisie (which were slaughtered in the millions by Soviet and Chinese communists).

Today’s Fabians/Progressives/Radicals allow their capitalist enemies to create wealth, but acquire it by taxing them instead of slaughtering them (Marx’s “reign of terrorism on the bourgeoisie”). They are then free to distribute the wealth among the economically disadvantaged, the intellectual elites, and the superior governing classes.

Such (re)distribution of wealth ensures the favorable vote of the masses being fed, entertained, housed (with sub-prime loans) and doctored. ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and socialism fit hand-in-glove just as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fit Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, and Chris Dodd to a “T.”

Most Americans are totally unaware that the U.S. House of Representatives crawls with a large, well-organized assembly of socialist organizations. These organizations are dedicated to (a) bringing about the destruction of the capitalist economic system (portrayed as greedy, conservative, religious, and/or filthy rich), and (b) slowly but surely bringing production, education, food, and health care under the complete control and regulation of the federal government [which is run by the elite ruling class; i.e., the international banking cabal - editor's note].

A prime example of this governmental takeover is the carbon tax currently under discussion. It would punish business and industry’s use of gas and oil products (which according to Al Gore will warm the planet by one degree over the next 100 years) by “allowing the federal government to ‘control every aspect of our economy,’ according to Christopher Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute” (The Weekly Standard, March 16, 2009, p. 17).

The legislators involved in this socialistic undertaking belong to one or more radical House organizations: the Progressive Democrats of America (6 House members), the Congressional Progressive Caucus (74 House members), the Congressional Black Caucus (43 House members), and the Democratic Socialists of America.

Incidentally, the Democratic Socialists of America do not identify their House members since they consider all members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus part of their membership due to the fact that “they both shared operative social democratic politics.” The most prominent national member of DSA is AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney, who could well be the most powerful influence in the House of Representatives. And for the record, the Chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus is Congressional Progressive Caucus member Barbara Lee (CA-9). The interconnections between all these socialist-based organizations is staggering.

These organizations and their members quite literally comprise a Socialist Red Army within the very contours of the House of Representatives. According to the Wikipedia article on the organization:

“The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) is the single largest partisan caucus in the United States House of Representatives and works together to advance progressive [socialist] issues and causes. The CPC was founded in 1991 by independent [socialist] Congressman Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who remains a member as Senator. [The CPC] represents about a third of the House Democratic Caucus. Of the twenty standing committees of the House, eleven are chaired by members of the CPC.”

When the CPC claimed 64 members in 2006 (now 74 and gaining), the leftist publication The Nation boasted:

“The largest ideological caucus in the new House Democratic majority will be the Congressional Progressive Caucus, with a membership that includes New York’s Charles Rangel, Michigan’s John Conyers, Massachusetts’s Barney Frank, and at least half the incoming chairs of House standing committees” (The Nation, November 12,2006).

These current eleven chairs are CPC members:

George Miller (CA-9)—Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee;
Henry Waxman (CA-30)—Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce;
Bob Filner (CA-51)—Chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee;
Barney Frank (MA-4)—Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee;
John Conyers (MI-14)—Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee;
Bennie Thompson (MS-2)—Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee;
Nydia Velazquez (NY-12)—Chairwoman of the House Small Business Committee;
Charles Rangel (NY-15)—Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee;
Louise Slaughter (N Y-28)—Chairwoman of the House Rules Committee;
Bob Brady (PA-1)—Chairman of the House Administration Committee; and
Edward J. Markey (MA-7)—Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

As of February 20, 2009, the Co-Chairs of the CPC are Raul M. Grijalva (AZ-7) and Lynn Woolsey (CA-6). The Vice Chairs are Diane Watson (CA-33), Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX-18), Mazie Hirono (HI-2), and Dennis Kucinich (OH-10). Incidentally, the CPC website was “hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America” until 1999, a group affiliated with the Socialist International, which was founded by Karl Marx, Saint-Simon, and Fourier!

The Commission for a Sustainable World Society is one of the Socialist International’s sub-organizations. Until President Obama picked Carol M. Browner as his global warming czar, Browner was a member in good standing of the Socialist International. Upon her appointment, her name and biography were removed from its website, “though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group’s congress in Greece was still available” (The Washington Times, January 12,2009, p. 1).

We can expect Browner to manipulate and push for every piece of socialist legislation to advance the defeat of capitalism and the imposition of more government on the American people. Oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy represent capitalism, and we can expect Congressional socialists to do everything in their legislative power to thwart their discovery, drilling, usage, and distribution. Socialists promote wind(mill) power because they know it alone cannot meet the energy needs of a capitalist economy and will, therefore, hasten the death of capitalism.

Browner will enjoy a great deal of support from the newly appointed Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, who is also a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. And when Browner needs further help, she can rely on the committee chairs, co-chairs, and vice chairs listed above to assist her in using the global warming/climate change scare to bring the United States of America into a socialistic world governing body. She can also count on former CPC member Nancy Pelosi (who is already manifesting dictatorial tendencies) to drive the socialist agenda as fast as humanly possible. Pelosi’s San Francisco district (CA-8) is synonymous with socialism / progressivism / collectivism / statism / leftism / radicalism that in turn are synonymous with scientific socialism / communism / Marxism / Leninism / Maoism.

We have yet to address the ideological role played by John Maynard Keynes in the demise of American capitalism and Christian influence. Anyone with a Christian, conservative-bent fears the reality that the United States is falling headlong off the cliff into socialism and all that this will entail.

It is no secret that the radical left is both anti-capitalist and anti-Christian. Marx would be ecstatic, no doubt, realizing that his life’s work of dethroning God and destroying capitalism are about to be accomplished.

Zygmund Dobbs conducted the research for Keynes at Harvard (KeynesatHarvard.org) and summarizes the political, moral, and economic slant of Keynes and his friends at Cambridge University:

“Singing the Red Flag, the highborn sons of the British upper-class lay on the carpeted floor spinning out socialist schemes in homosexual intermissions...The attitude in such gatherings was anti-establishmentarian. To them the older generation was horribly out of date, even superfluous. The capitalist system was declared obsolete and revolution was proclaimed as the only solution. Christianity was pronounced an enemy force, and the worst sort of depravities were eulogized as ‘that love which passes all Christian understanding.’ Chief of this ring of homosexual revolutionaries was John Maynard Keynes… Keynes was characterized by his male sweetheart, Lytton Strachey, as ‘a liberal and a sodomite, an atheist and a statistician.’ His particular depravity was the sexual abuse of little boys.”

Keynes, like Marx, had a fixation that should have been a clue to his character. Marx practiced phrenology (the study of bumps on one’s head), and Keynes practiced chirognomy (the study of people’s hands). After studying the hands of Charles Darwin’s brother, Sir George, Keynes remarked, “His hands certainly looked as if they might be descended from an ape.”

Overall, Keynes despised free or private enterprise, considered homosexuality superior to heterosexuality, sought to replace the gold standard with fiat paper money which was more easily produced by government printing presses, did not believe in the family unit, despised “savings” as a stumbling block against the march of socialism, called on the state to control the number of children per family.

The Keynesian economic formula fits all totalitarianisms, including Fascism, Nazism and Communism. Sir Oswald Mosley, for example, was a Fascist leader and a member of the Fabian Society. Lauchlin Currie, a prominent Keynesian advocate, was a Soviet spy and an economic aide to F.D.R. Joan Robinson, a Marxist economist, assisted Keynes in some of his economic writings, arguing that “the differences between Marx and Keynes are only verbal” (Keynes At Harvard, p. 68; also see Mark Skousen, The Making of Modern Economics, p. 433).

Keynes also had a strong relationship with the notorious Soviet spy Harry Dexter White. Keynes considered White to be “the central figure in the Keynesian manipulations in the United States.” Harry Dexter White just happened to be the Assistant to the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Even after White was exposed as a Soviet spy, Keynesians to this day “see nothing wrong in White’s Soviet role,” a “typical . . . attitude of Fabian socialist elements toward the whole coterie of spies and Fifth Amendment communists in the United States” (Keynes At Harvard, p. 83).

It was Keynes himself who admitted that by “a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but confiscate arbitrarily: and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some [e.g., Al Gore]. The process engages all of the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner that not one man in a million can diagnose.”

Thus it is astounding that Larry Summers, head of President Obama’s National Economic Council and former president of Harvard University, when asked by Charlie Rose “what idea, what person has most influenced your thinking on how to deal with this [financial] mess?” without hesitation answered “Keynes.”

Following the economic advice of Keynes (huge government spending, debt, and inflation) is kissing the American capitalist system goodnight! His advice is what every socialist would give, even though clear-thinking, common sense Americans know that excessive debt and excessive spending are the main ingredients that created this current financial mess (with the help of Congressional Progressives like Barney Frank hatching socialist schemes in the House of Representatives).

When Whittaker Chambers took up his sling and aimed his rock at Communism, he admitted that he hit “something else.” What he hit “was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.”

That inching is fast becoming a rout with national and international socialists alike thinking their best opportunity to strike a deathblow to the greatest, freest economic system in all of human history is now.

Because capitalism has raised more human beings out of poverty than all other economic systems combined, we should remember the wisdom of Robert Heilbroner, a former Marxist economist who changed his position before the fall of the Berlin Wall:

“The Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe have given us the clearest possible proof that capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism: that, however inequitably or irresponsibly the marketplace may distribute goods, it does so better than the queues of a planned economy; however mindless the culture of commercialism, it is more attractive than state moralism; and however deceptive the ideology of a business civilization, it is more believable than that of a socialist one.”

Little wonder that Winston Churchill painted socialism as a philosophy of failure, a creed of ignorance, and a gospel of envy whose inherent virtue “is the equal sharing of misery.”

Dr. David Noebel is founder and president of Summit Ministries and a best-selling author. He is recognized as an expert on worldview analysis and the decline of morality and spirituality in Western Civilization.