Donald Trump is a Socialist (4 Viewers)

[cpwill]

A point I've been repeatedly making: this kind of top-down government-driven re-shaping and control of the economy for political ends is an inherently leftist approach.

Williamson is just better than I am at saying it.

Trump Is a Socialist

When I write “socialist,” I do not use the word the way most right-leaning commentators use it, meaning: “bad.” If you want to get a feel for exactly how insipid and repetitious the contemporary online right is, do a search for “cackling socialist”—you don’t even need to include “Kamala Harris.” You’ll be hip-deep in stupid in two clicks. The thing about socialism is, it stays socialism—whether you like socialism or dislike it. It is a word that means something, and what it means isn’t every dumb thing you don’t like...​

​

Socialism doesn’t mean high taxes or an expensive welfare state.... Japan has an extensive social-welfare apparatus, and it is far from socialist. Singapore is super-capitalist, and it offers my favorite kind of welfare: direct money payments to poor people. Even the big-spending Scandinavians have long abandoned the experiments in socialism that wrecked their economies... Socialism means a centrally planned economy, one that is dominated by state action irrespective of whether it is dominated by formal state enterprises.​

​

V.I. Lenin described his ideal society as one managed as though it were “one big factory.” The Leninist view, it is worth keeping in mind, was profoundly influenced by some of the big ideas and most influential and prestigious thinkers of late 19th-century and early 20th-century capitalism, especially the mania for “scientific management” associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor... Donald Trump does not know the first thing about how a factory operates, of course, and neither do most of the private-equity dorks and middling media figures with which he has stocked his administration, a veritable museum of minor Fox News figures. But he has been inside Macy’s, and even had a product-licensing deal with the department store once upon a time—ghastly shirts and ties with a predictable Gordon Gekko meets Liberace aesthetic. ​

​

And so Trump’s version of quasi-monarchical Leninism is no surprise. It’s not one big factory: It’s one big Macy’s, with him leading the parade.... Donald Trump’s vision of the economy is classic socialism. And if you want to say that what it really is is classic nationalism, fair enough: As Jonah Goldberg observes, at the level of practical economics nationalism and socialism are the same thing: nationalized industries are socialized industries, socialized industries are nationalized industries, nationalized medicine is socialized medicine, etc. Bernie Sanders thinks and speaks as a nationalist, as do left-wing writers at places such as Dissent magazine—see J.W. Mason’s “A Cautious Case for Economic Nationalism.” Barack Obama’s economic views were explicitly nationalist. Trump’s view of a man at a desk moving pieces of the economy around like rooks and pawns on a chessboard is what socialism is all about—though the old tyrants in Moscow at least had the humility to assume that a committee of experts would be necessary to manage the economy according to “scientific” principles or at least the guile to pretend that they believed it, whereas Trump apparently has swallowed his own silly god-man horsepucky, being, as he is, an ass of exceptional asininity. ​

​

It’s as though somebody rewrote The Road to Serfdom as a third-tier Monty Python skit...​

 

[The Populist Right]

Shouldn't be all that surprising. The GOP's economic policies have never been overly popular. I think it's comical that Democrats are still afraid of being called "socialist" when MAGA is talking about sticking it to the Wall Street elites.

I wish the Democrats messaging wouldn't be that the status quo is great but that billionaires are the reason your life sucks and not trans people, immigrants, or trade deficits.

 

[ataraxia]

Shouldn't be all that surprising. The GOP's economic policies have never been overly popular. I think it's comical that Democrats are still afraid of being called "socialist" when MAGA is talking about sticking it to the Wall Street elites.

I wish the Democrats messaging wouldn't be that the status quo is great but that billionaires are the reason your life sucks and not trans people, immigrants, or trade deficits.

The GOP plutocracy got to where it is because it was able to exploit the MAGA base’s racism, bigotry, and anti-science attitudes to advance their own interests. Nixon was the first to recognize this with his southern strategy.

 

[Feynman Lives!]

And so Trump’s version of quasi-monarchical Leninism is no surprise. It’s not one big factory: It’s one big Macy’s, with him leading the parade.... Donald Trump’s vision of the economy is classic socialism. And if you want to say that what it really is is classic nationalism, fair enough: ​

Trump's vision is Socialist AND Nationalist. It's National Socialism. What was once known as Nazism (minus the gas chambers). This is further supported by the fact that he is an authoritarian who seeks to take over powers that correspond to the Judicial and the Legislative branches of government.

 

[iliveonramen]

He's not a socialist. It's patrimonialism.

With tariffs Trump has the power to unilaterally place tariffs and remove or change tariffs. Heads of state, CEO's, billionaires all crawl to him asking for tariff relief and then Trump makes exceptions. A lot of time, he's getting something out of these people. He makes announcements and flip flops and people loyal to him benefit from the huge market swings by getting the news first. He talks about gutting government, but Elon and others have benefited from various deals.

It's a huge a grift and Trump uses American power to profit. He's not running in 2028 and he doesn't care what his party or America. He doesn't' have this master plan for changing American society, or, you know, it would actually seem like this stuff was planned.

He throws out tried and true rightwing red meat. Immigration, DEI, trans, everything that gets him votes while he gets to play king and make his family and friends an insane amount of money. Rich people know what's up. The minute Trump took over they knew what they needed to do. They started sucking up to him and giving him millions like Amazon giving Trump's wife a 30 million dollar deal for her biography. Or donating to his inaugural fund. Or buying his meme coin. Or staying at his properties...etc etc etc.

 

[SkyChief]

. . . I wish the Democrats messaging wouldn't be that the status quo is great but that billionaires are the reason your life sucks and not trans people, immigrants, or trade deficits.

Dems are neck-deep in a messaging crisis right now. Dems are becoming irrelevant. soon the Democratic Party will be regarded as a "fringe" party like the Green Party and the Libertarian Party.

Donald Trump is a Socialist

No he's NOT. This is textbook TDS nonsense.

In Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (1840; What Is Property?), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon asserted, “Property is theft!”

"The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property." - Karl Marx

"The goal of socialism is communism" - Vladimir Lenin

Trump is the opposite of socialist - he wants property and wealth to be controlled by individuals - NOT the State. A socialist believes that property and wealth should be controlled by the State, and NOT individuals.

“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” the president said. “America was founded on liberty and independence -- not government coercion, domination and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will NEVER be a socialist country.” - Trump

 

[RIP U.S. Democracy]

I think it's comical that Democrats are still afraid of being called "socialist" when MAGA is talking about sticking it to the Wall Street elites.

True statement. The Democratic Party completely sucks at politics, but Trump and the Republican Party is a moral black hole, utterly reprehensible.

 

[Questerr]

Dems are neck-deep in a messaging crisis right now. Dems are becoming irrelevant. soon the Democratic Party will be regarded as a "fringe" party like the Green Party and the Libertarian Party.



No he's NOT. This is textbook TDS nonsense.

In Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (1840; What Is Property?), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon asserted, “Property is theft!”

"The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property." - Karl Marx

"The goal of socialism is communism" - Vladimir Lenin

Trump is the opposite of socialist - he wants property and wealth to be controlled by individuals - NOT the State. A socialist believes that property and wealth should be controlled by the State, and NOT individuals.

“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” the president said. “America was founded on liberty and independence -- not government coercion, domination and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will NEVER be a socialist country.” - Trump

Unless that property is bought from another country.

 

[cpwill]

Trump is the opposite of socialist - he wants property and wealth to be controlled by individuals - NOT the State.

Oh that's great to hear. So he's gonna stop trying to have the State exert increased control over the wealth and property of individuals who are trading across national borders then?

A socialist believes that property and wealth should be controlled by the State, and NOT individuals.

True! Instead of saying that it is their role to let individuals control their own wealth and property and make trades that they see as beneficial, and letting the market set prices, Socialists tend to view it more like:

We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it. They don’t have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries. … What I’m doing is I will, at a certain point in the not too distant future, I will set a fair price of tariffs for different countries. These are countries—some of them have made hundreds of billions of dollars, and some of them have made just a lot of money. Very few of them have made nothing because the United States was being ripped off by every, almost every country in the world, in the entire world. So I will set a price, and when I set the price, and I will set it fairly according to the statistics, and according to everything else.

...I am this giant store. It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.​

 

[Bullseye]

A point I've been repeatedly making: this kind of top-down government-driven re-shaping and control of the economy for political ends is an inherently leftist approach.

Williamson is just better than I am at saying it.

Trump Is a Socialist

When I write “socialist,” I do not use the word the way most right-leaning commentators use it, meaning: “bad.” If you want to get a feel for exactly how insipid and repetitious the contemporary online right is, do a search for “cackling socialist”—you don’t even need to include “Kamala Harris.” You’ll be hip-deep in stupid in two clicks. The thing about socialism is, it stays socialism—whether you like socialism or dislike it. It is a word that means something, and what it means isn’t every dumb thing you don’t like...​

​

Socialism doesn’t mean high taxes or an expensive welfare state.... Japan has an extensive social-welfare apparatus, and it is far from socialist. Singapore is super-capitalist, and it offers my favorite kind of welfare: direct money payments to poor people. Even the big-spending Scandinavians have long abandoned the experiments in socialism that wrecked their economies... Socialism means a centrally planned economy, one that is dominated by state action irrespective of whether it is dominated by formal state enterprises.​

​

V.I. Lenin described his ideal society as one managed as though it were “one big factory.” The Leninist view, it is worth keeping in mind, was profoundly influenced by some of the big ideas and most influential and prestigious thinkers of late 19th-century and early 20th-century capitalism, especially the mania for “scientific management” associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor... Donald Trump does not know the first thing about how a factory operates, of course, and neither do most of the private-equity dorks and middling media figures with which he has stocked his administration, a veritable museum of minor Fox News figures. But he has been inside Macy’s, and even had a product-licensing deal with the department store once upon a time—ghastly shirts and ties with a predictable Gordon Gekko meets Liberace aesthetic. ​

​

And so Trump’s version of quasi-monarchical Leninism is no surprise. It’s not one big factory: It’s one big Macy’s, with him leading the parade.... Donald Trump’s vision of the economy is classic socialism. And if you want to say that what it really is is classic nationalism, fair enough: As Jonah Goldberg observes, at the level of practical economics nationalism and socialism are the same thing: nationalized industries are socialized industries, socialized industries are nationalized industries, nationalized medicine is socialized medicine, etc. Bernie Sanders thinks and speaks as a nationalist, as do left-wing writers at places such as Dissent magazine—see J.W. Mason’s “A Cautious Case for Economic Nationalism.” Barack Obama’s economic views were explicitly nationalist. Trump’s view of a man at a desk moving pieces of the economy around like rooks and pawns on a chessboard is what socialism is all about—though the old tyrants in Moscow at least had the humility to assume that a committee of experts would be necessary to manage the economy according to “scientific” principles or at least the guile to pretend that they believed it, whereas Trump apparently has swallowed his own silly god-man horsepucky, being, as he is, an ass of exceptional asininity. ​

​

It’s as though somebody rewrote The Road to Serfdom as a third-tier Monty Python skit...​

Length of your post inhibits any detailed response.

 

[TobyOne]

Trump is a Statist but he's not a socialist. The fact that he isn't is why leftists freak out about him because he had the wrong color light saber.

 

[Phys251]

Trump is a Statist but he's not a socialist. The fact that he isn't is why leftists freak out about him because he had the wrong color light saber.

Strange way to condone an authoritarian.

 

[btthegreat]

I think people should stop trying to assign Trump any political ideology. He does not have one or want one because political ideologies can constrain choices that are inconsistent with his self -interest and desire for power.

 

[markdc]

A point I've been repeatedly making: this kind of top-down government-driven re-shaping and control of the economy for political ends is an inherently leftist approach.

Williamson is just better than I am at saying it.

Trump Is a Socialist

​

IMO, Trump is NOT a Socialist; he is a Rightwing Authoritarian Crony Capitalist Plutocrat whose party increasingly favors Centralized power.

If you want to see what a GENUINE Socialist looks like, look no further than Bernie Sanders, AOC, and others on the Far-Left faction of the Democrat Party. Those people are Socialists, it not outright Communists.
De-Centralization with more power to the States and less to the Federal Government (especially the chief executive) is the way to go, folks!
Federalism First!

Mark

 

[poweRob]

A point I've been repeatedly making: this kind of top-down government-driven re-shaping and control of the economy for political ends is an inherently leftist approach.

Williamson is just better than I am at saying it.

I can see how you get that argument. He's definitely using socialist tools but he's not doing socialist work with them. Tariffs are a socialist tool to combat unfettered free trade but he's using it he says to create free trade... So he says.

IMO he's using it to enrich himself and his crony buddies. Meanwhile he's trying to dismantle socialist safety nets as fast as he can which is the opposite of socialism. It appears he's a greedy capitalist who uses any and all tools he can to forward his personal wealth.

 

[Mr Person]

Socialism is government ownership of the means of production. Central planning goes hand in hand with it, but does not define it.

 

[Ikari]

A point I've been repeatedly making: this kind of top-down government-driven re-shaping and control of the economy for political ends is an inherently leftist approach.

Williamson is just better than I am at saying it.

Trump Is a Socialist

When I write “socialist,” I do not use the word the way most right-leaning commentators use it, meaning: “bad.” If you want to get a feel for exactly how insipid and repetitious the contemporary online right is, do a search for “cackling socialist”—you don’t even need to include “Kamala Harris.” You’ll be hip-deep in stupid in two clicks. The thing about socialism is, it stays socialism—whether you like socialism or dislike it. It is a word that means something, and what it means isn’t every dumb thing you don’t like...​

​

Socialism doesn’t mean high taxes or an expensive welfare state.... Japan has an extensive social-welfare apparatus, and it is far from socialist. Singapore is super-capitalist, and it offers my favorite kind of welfare: direct money payments to poor people. Even the big-spending Scandinavians have long abandoned the experiments in socialism that wrecked their economies... Socialism means a centrally planned economy, one that is dominated by state action irrespective of whether it is dominated by formal state enterprises.​

​

V.I. Lenin described his ideal society as one managed as though it were “one big factory.” The Leninist view, it is worth keeping in mind, was profoundly influenced by some of the big ideas and most influential and prestigious thinkers of late 19th-century and early 20th-century capitalism, especially the mania for “scientific management” associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor... Donald Trump does not know the first thing about how a factory operates, of course, and neither do most of the private-equity dorks and middling media figures with which he has stocked his administration, a veritable museum of minor Fox News figures. But he has been inside Macy’s, and even had a product-licensing deal with the department store once upon a time—ghastly shirts and ties with a predictable Gordon Gekko meets Liberace aesthetic. ​

​

And so Trump’s version of quasi-monarchical Leninism is no surprise. It’s not one big factory: It’s one big Macy’s, with him leading the parade.... Donald Trump’s vision of the economy is classic socialism. And if you want to say that what it really is is classic nationalism, fair enough: As Jonah Goldberg observes, at the level of practical economics nationalism and socialism are the same thing: nationalized industries are socialized industries, socialized industries are nationalized industries, nationalized medicine is socialized medicine, etc. Bernie Sanders thinks and speaks as a nationalist, as do left-wing writers at places such as Dissent magazine—see J.W. Mason’s “A Cautious Case for Economic Nationalism.” Barack Obama’s economic views were explicitly nationalist. Trump’s view of a man at a desk moving pieces of the economy around like rooks and pawns on a chessboard is what socialism is all about—though the old tyrants in Moscow at least had the humility to assume that a committee of experts would be necessary to manage the economy according to “scientific” principles or at least the guile to pretend that they believed it, whereas Trump apparently has swallowed his own silly god-man horsepucky, being, as he is, an ass of exceptional asininity. ​

​

It’s as though somebody rewrote The Road to Serfdom as a third-tier Monty Python skit...​

He's a Maoist commie, the Road to Serfdom is exactly his goal.

 

[Uncensored2008]

The Trump Administration has reached a deal with China, ending the trade standoff.

"The US and China have agreed on a deal to help resolve the trade war raging between the world’s two largest economies, top Trump administration officials announced Sunday.

Details of the deal, struck during negotiations in Switzerland over the weekend, were not revealed, but officials teased that more information will be shared on Monday.

“The U.S. has a massive $1.2 trillion trade deficit, so the President declared a national emergency,” US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Sunday. “We’re confident that the deal we struck with our Chinese partners will help us work toward resolving that national emergency.”

President Trump has imposed tariffs of up to 145% on goods from China, with China slapping retaliatory tariffs on American exports."

So Much Winning: We Have a New Trade Deal With China

townhall.com

 

[Uncensored2008]

The board left will be going through the stages of grief over this, starting with denial.

 

[Airyaman]

You should read the rules for Breaking News.

 

[Uncensored2008]

You should read the rules for Breaking News.

What rule do you claim I broke? Be specific?

 

[Airyaman]

What rule do you claim I broke? Be specific?

Read the rules you'd find out for yourself.

 

[TamleeB]

You should read the rules for Breaking News.

Apparently you don’t like the breaking news.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Read the rules you'd find out for yourself.

I just reread them.

You're just trying to derail information that goes against the party narrative.

 

[Airyaman]

Apparently you don’t like the breaking news.

I posted a thread about the supposed deal hours ago.