Dick Morris Quotes
Now a great debate has been born. The thesis is Democratic Socialism. The antithesis is free-market capitalism. The Obama Democrats have posed the challenge. It is now up to the Republicans to pick it up and fight along these lines.
Morris, Dick, and Eileen McGann. Catastrophe: How Obama, Congress, and the Special Interests Are Transforming a Slump into a Crash. HarperCollins, 2009.
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. He favored and argued for a middle ground of a capitalistic socialism or a socialized capitalism, which is what most democracies became.
Richard Samuel Morris is an American political author and commentator who previously worked as a pollster, political campaign consultant, and general political consultant.
