I am pretty far left, and I have no desire for the government to take care of me.

I am in favor of the government stepping in to help those in need so they can educate themselves, get trained or transition into self sufficiency and be a productive part of our society.

Government isn't the enemy. Unfortunately, the larger the society, the larger the population and lad area, the larger the government needs to be to keep order and for general safety. When you have very little government, you end up with a country like Somalia, with very little order and no real safety. My experience is that most persons who advocate for a small government, actually want all the benefits they now enjoy that result from having a large government, but either they don't want to pay for it (via taxes), or they are just too ignorant to realize how the government makes their society more livable and a better place to live, or a combination of the two.

@snytiger6 We are a long ways from being like Somalia. The Democrat party is trending strongly toward socialism/communism which has never worked and has caused the death of millions. Just look at California. People are fleeing that state. The democrats radical green agenda and disastrous foreign policy is downright scary!

@Trajan61 Actually, communism does work on a micro scale. It is how people first existed in tribal communities. However, it starts to break down when a village population starts to exceed around 200 persons, because larger populations introduces anonymity, where people can start to get away with acting in self interest instead of community interests. However, the more people there are in a community the less likely communism will work well. It is notable that there are still some tribal cultures where communism still exists and works well for them.

As for democrats heading towards socialism and communism, I'd say you'd have to define those terms as in today's societies they are often misused, or used as a generalized catch all to categorize virtually everything not liked by a group or individual. There are many kinds of socialism along a very long continuum and they vary a great deal.

Democrats, such as myself, and pretty much every democrat I know, do not want a Marxist based kind of socialism, although when people criticize socialism, that is what they are thinking of. However, what I, and many other democrats want is a system like what they have in Northern European countries, which is popularly called "Democratic Socialism", even though it is basically a very regulated form of capitalism.

If you ever actually read the writings of Karl Marx, he pretty much correctly identified the excesses of capitalism, and that those excesses generally harmed society as a whole. However, Marx was impatient, and did not know all that much about human nature. Thus, his propposed solution was terrible and could never work.

A revolution changes leadership, but people will generally do things in the same way they know and hve always done them. To change a society and/or an economic system, to reign in the excesses of capitalism, change has to be done slowly and gradually if you expect it to stick. Because people will always go back to the familiar unless small changes make improvements to their lives.

So, from the end of WWII, many Northern European countries gradually made changes to create better societies and better places to live their lives. Today, those countries are rated as having the happiest people on the planet.

Using ideas of fairness, many of which were taken from or born out of the idea of socialism, to regulate the excesses of capitalism has worked, is working and working very well.

Humans are complicated, and it requires complicated solutions to make large societies work well to benefit the most people. Just because Karl Marx's solution was totally wrong, does not mean he did nto correctly identify the problem(s) correctly, as I believe he actually did. If he got everything wrong, we wouldn't still be referring to him over 100 years later, so I believe he correctly identified the problem(s) with the excesses of captialism, even if his proposed solution was totally fucked up.

That civilization is less than 10,000 years old, while humans have existed for more than 200,000 years, means we likely have some animal instincts that recognize back when humans lived in small villages and communism (cooperation) at that time was our best strategy for survival. So, I can understand why the overly idealistic picture Marx tries to paint for his ideal society may seem appealing, but it will never work well in a large community or society, because for the first 190,000 years of human existence we didn't live in villages of more than 200 people and larger populations meant shortages of rood and resources, so as populations grow, we instinctually become more self interested as a means for our own survival. We evolved to deal with and live in small populations, and the innate instincts we developed for that are still active and working. That is a part of our human nature.

Yeah, it seems almost all of my post, although they appear to post normally, disappear by the next time I log in.