Diane Hendricks Quotes
If we just go back to the basics... I do not want to give up our republic and become a socialistic ideological nation. That's not who we are.
Hendricks, Diane. Interview by Bill Glauber. "Billionaire Diane Hendricks plays big role in Scott Walker's recall defense." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Gannett, 19 May 2012.
After the Truman defeat of Republican candidate Thomas Dewey in 1948, Republicans were searching for ways to overcome the poor image that they had with many Americans, and one of the then preeminent advertising companies was assigned the task of analyzing the 1948 failure and making recommendations. This quotation comes from that report. This recommendation defined the Republican approach for the next decades.
Socialism in its then pure form had the state owning and controlling all the major assets of the nation. In this sense it was contradictory to individual freedom and hence democracy. However, in the years after Tocqueville’s quotation and the industrial revolution, socialism has gradually moved away from state ownership and operations of all institutions and resources. Democracy has tended to adopt a more regulatory view to control the excesses of unbridled capitalism. The range of democratic nations by the 21st century encompassed differences but some were described as “social democracies” and had some state ownership but were basically capitalistic economies. Even the self-described Communist nations had become heavily capitalistic albeit with less political freedom. At the same time, even the United States—the epitome of 21st century capitalism, owned and controlled a few of the resources and means of production and tended to regulate the others—a substantial difference from the American democracy which Tocqueville studied.
The Red Scare had already reached most conservatives and Truman and most others had not yet been affected by the fear of Communism that so many people had through the 1970s.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston. Ironically he was regarded as a socialist by most people. His view of socialism however was what evolved as European Democratic Socialism and not the “dictatorship or the proletariat” type of Communist Socialism.
Diane Marie Hendricks (née Smith; born 1947) is an American billionaire businesswoman and film producer from Wisconsin. She is the widow of the late businessman Ken Hendricks.
