Democracy and other slogan manipulations

Why do Socialists love using the word “democracy” so much? After all, there has never been anything “democratic” about actual Socialist regimes in history. Even today, all you have to do is look at Cuba and Venezuela to see what’s it’s done to these formerly free and prosperous countries. In practice, socialism and democracy are mutually exclusive terms.

I was listening to a “New Discourses” podcast by James Lindsay on this subject called, “The Woke Manipulation of Democracy” that got me thinking about this. I highly recommend that you listen to this if you have the time.

Before we get started, it’s important to note that America is NOT a democracy. It never was. Just because we keep using that word to explain our form of government doesn’t make it so. While we have democratic elements within our Constitution, we are a representative republic.

We misunderstand this point at our own peril. I talked about this in “Why the Electoral College STILL matters.” Our Founding Fathers were very clear that they did not want a democracy. This was founded on their careful study of democracies throughout history, understanding that pure democracies do NOT work. Historically, all of them eventually implode.

As Tara Ross, a lawyer and author who specializes on this subject, said:

“Democracy has been colorfully described as two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner. In a pure democracy, bare majorities can easily tyrannize the rest of the country.”

The current cancel culture and suppression of free speech by Big Tech is just a small foretaste of things to come from this kind of “democracy.”

Our general misunderstanding of our form of government is just one of the reasons why the “woke” left is so effective at manipulating us. According to Lindsey, they trade off the public’s expectation that words mean what they usually mean, while they have some specialized meaning to them. Words like tolerance, equity, racism, diversity, and inclusion means something quite different to them than their common meaning.

We’ll just refer to this as Orwellian “doublespeak.”

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” (Orwell, 1984).

Take the word, “democracy” for example.

A Socialist politician may stand up and say, “We need more democracy!” And we might respond, yeah, that would be good.

But, according to Lindsay, “democracy” means something much more sinister when the woke neo-Marxist uses the word. It mean is that they will decide how everyone should live. And anyone who disagrees with their “concensus” either gets canceled or put in the gulag.

Again, all we have to do is look at governments who have embraced Socialism. They get your vote under the guise of “democracy,” but eventually turn tyrannical and the “common people” starve (or are shot).

As it’s been said,“You can easily vote your way into Socialism, but you must shoot your way out.”

If you naively think that Socialism is the way to go, just ask an immigrant from the former Soviet Union block countries, or refugees from Cuba and Venezuela, on what they think about your assumption.

Dr. Bella Dodd was a lawyer, union activist and member of a the US Communist Party from 1932 to 1949. She talks about how easy it is to get sucked into Socialism because it plays on our compassion for the underdog:

“The Communist support seems to be large because people are sucked into things which seem to be good in themselves. They don’t recognize that the Communist Party uses these slogans, these generalizations, in order to break down their resistance, and ultimately they are tied in with the Communist movement. Some were against discrimination. We are against repression, against war, against fascism, and the Communist Party takes our best instincts and uses them against us by twisting us into a program which they want us to follow.” (Testimony of Bella Dodd to HUAC in June 1953 in Columbus and November 1953 in Philadelphia (PDF)).*

Here’s a quote from Alexander Trachenberg on these word manipulations:

“When we get ready to take the United States, we will not take it under the label of Communism; we will not take it under the label of Socialism. These labels are unpleasant to the American people, and have been smeared too much. We will take the United States under the labels we have made very lovable; we will take it under liberalism, under progressivism, under democracy. But, take it we will.”—Alexander Trachtenberg, member of the CPUSA’s Central Control Committee, at the Communist Parties National Convention, Madison Square Garden, 1944*

Of course, Communism is just the end goal of Socialism.

It’s important we understand this in America right now, because like the frog being slowly cooked in the kettle; we’ve been slowly and methodically manipulated by these word slogans for decades. Josef Pieper said the following about this:

“The abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word, indeed, finds in it the fertile soil in which to hide and grow and get ready, so much so that the latent potential of the totalitarian poison can be ascertained, as it were, by observing the symptom of public abuse of language. The degradation, too, of man through man, alarmingly evident in the acts of physical violence committed by all tyrannies, has its beginning, certainly much less alarmingly, at that almost imperceptible moment when the word loses its dignity.” —Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language – Abuse of Power, 1974*

There’s never been a more critical time in our nation’s history for some clear criticial thinking. And, as followers of Christ, we must not allow ourselves to be fooled by their clever twisting of words. Socialism is an anti-Christ religion at its very core.

“Socialism is precisely the religion that must kill Christianity. [It is a] religion in th sense that it too is a faith…[and] because it has substituted for the consciousness of the transcendental God of the Catholics, trust in man and his best strengths as the sole spiritual reality.”—Antonio Gramsci, “Audacia e Fede”*

* All emphasis added.