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In 2001, on September 11, Americas sense of security was shattered. It has not yet fully recovered.

In 2008, with the economic recession, Americas sense of economic stability was shattered. It has not yet fully recovered.

And in 2016, with the presidential election, Americas sense of political normalcy was shattered. It may be a long time before the country recovers.

This short century has witnessed the United States fall from the heights of its post-Cold War supremacy from an indispensable nation with unquestioned faith in its invulnerability, inevitable progress and ultimate primacy to one teetering on the edge.

Distrust and dissatisfaction with the government have reached near-record highs. Faith in a broad swath of critical institutions from business to media to religion has declined to near-record lows. Political polarization has spiked to levels not seen in generations; indeed, by some measurements, it now surpassestraditional social cleavages like race and religion. Political violence has become not just a specter but a reality.

If this sounds stark or alarmist, thats because it is. The challenges we face cannot be met with pablum about American exceptionalism. They cannot be hidden by our many advantages our talented people, our innovative private sector, our supreme military or our enviable geography. Nor can they be hidden behind the very real if imperfect progress we have made on a whole host of critical issues, including race and gender.

The stark reality is that despite all the progress weve made and all the assets weve accumulated, the social contract is no longer working. It can no longer provide for a baseline of stability and progress for society. The future of the American dream is at stake. The viability of democracy is beingcalled into question. We are going to have to rethink what were doing. And we are not the only ones.

We are in the midst of a global crisis in democracy and governance. In 2016, political upheaval rocked democracies on both sides of the Atlantic the Brexit vote, the failure of government-sponsored referendums in Italy and Colombia, the strengthening of far-right and separatist movements across Europe and the election of President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, democracy is in retreat around the world. According to Freedom House, 2016 was the11th consecutive year that freedom declined worldwide. Political rights and the rule of law diminished in 67 countries last year; only about half that many countries registered a net improvement.

The advent of the digital age is bringing about a historical transformation as momentous as that which accompanied the Industrial Revolution. In the 21st century, technology and globalization are challenging our institutions of government, which were designed to operate on a national scale or in cooperation with a few allies. For much of the 20th century, these institutions were capable of maintaining stability and delivering progress.

But, today, the old order is ineffective at managing the networked age and its challenges. An onslaught of crises the financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the Euro crisis, the emerging market crunch, the rise of global terror networks, state-sponsored election hacking are all evidence that state responses to technological, generational, economic and political upheaval are falling short.

And the disruptions we now confront will only grow more severe. Take the challenge of job loss due to technology or outsourcing. In America and around the world, millions of jobs have beenlostto technology in the last few decades. Advances in robotics may soon threaten not only manufacturing jobs but also service ones as well even in low wage countries like China. This will put downward pressure on wages, exacerbating income inequality as capital and talent particularly at the highest echelons receive ever-greater returns. The global middle class and those aspiring to join its ranks may stagnate or recede.

These challenges threaten the American dream and its global counterparts. At home and abroad, the ability to live a dignified life seems increasingly under threat. Communities are fragmenting as diverging explanations for how to cope with change exacerbate pre-existing societal cleavages. This is a recipe for disaster. In countries as varied as Thailand, Brazil, Turkey, Israel and Spain, there have been large-scale protest movements driven in part by inequality. But these movements have shown little ability to resolve their underlying grievances. In severe cases, such as parts of the Arab world, Africa and Ukraine, societies are dividing to the point of state fragmentation and civil war.

These vast challenges require new thinking and more than that, they require action. Around the world, democracies must prove the viability and desirability of their system to their own populations who are looking for a better path forward. The tasks are clear: to restore credibility and integrity to the democratic process, to rebuild vibrancy and truth into the public square, to enable governments to effectively operate with all the tools and capabilities of the 21st century and, above all else, to rebuild the social contract to meet the needs of citizens.

The road ahead will be long, but it must begin now with the type of hard work that has always determined the future of democracy: conversation, engagement, service and sacrifice for the greater good.

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Democracy's Retreat Around The World Requires Immediate Action - HuffPost

CNN will host a special documentary, "The Russian Connection: Inside the Attack on Democracy," reported by CNN chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto on Tuesday night.

Sciutto, a veteran of the Obama State Department who came to CNN in 2014, "recounts and tracks the story of Russian hacks targeting the 2016 presidential election from the very beginning to the investigations still underway today and to new fears of Russian attacks on upcoming U.S. elections," according to the network announcement.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Hillary ClintonHillary Rodham ClintonPro-Trump group pulls ads targeting GOP senator on ObamaCare repeal Stone to testify before House Intel Committee next month Overnight Cybersecurity: New ransomware attack spreads globally | US pharma giant hit | House intel panel interviews Podesta | US, Kenya deepen cyber partnership MORE campaign chairman John Podesta, former national security adviser Tom Donilonand former CIA Moscow Station Chief Steven Hall are among those interviewed for the documentary.

CNN bills the special as "the first comprehensive telling on television of Russia's attack on the 2016 race, with jarring lessons for American leaders and the public about more attacks to come."

The network has covered Russia's meddling in the 2016 heavily since Trump's victory in November.

After working at ABC News as a senior foreign correspondent, Sciutto served as chief of staff and senior advisor to the U.S. ambassador to China, Gary Locke from 2011 to 2013.

"The Russian Connection: Inside the Attack on Democracy" will air Tuesday night at 10:00 p.m. ET.

It airs one day after CNN reported thatthree of its staffers resigned after the network retracted a story tying a top President Trump ally to a Russian investment bank.

A Buzzfeed report earlier Monday said CNN is alsoimplementing strict new rules for the network's stories regarding Russia.

CNNMoney executive editor Rich Barbieri sent out an email Saturday regarding the network's new rules after CNN a day earlier retracted the story.

"No one should publish any content involving Russia without coming to me and Jason [Farkas]," said the email, obtained by BuzzFeed News.

"This applies to social, video, editorial, and MoneyStream. No exceptions," the email added. "I will lay out a workflow Monday."

--This report was updated at 11:16 a.m.

Read the original here:
CNN to air 'The Russian Connection: Inside the Attack on Democracy' Tuesday night - The Hill

JUNE 27, 2017

BINI ADAMCZAKS Communism for Kids isnt just for kids. The book is meant for readers of all ages, but its style is deliberately nave. Adamczak addresses everyone as children in order to awaken their childlike sense of imagination and ability to dream. She reminds them that the world has not always been this way, and need not stay as it is. Adopting the language of make-believe, Adamczak introduces the problem posed by capitalism so those still young at heart might arrive at a solution. [G]enuine fairy tales, the Marxist critic Siegfried Kracauer maintained during the Weimar years, are not stories about miracles but rather announcements of the miraculous advent of justice.

Part of the confusion about the books intended readership is due to the English version of its title, which was chosen by MIT for promotional purposes. First published back in 2004 as Kommunismus, the book was split into halves of around 35 pages each. While the first half unfolds in a fairly standard manner with chapters dedicated to work, capitalist crises, the market, and primitive accumulation the second half proceeds by trial and error. Having established the issues at stake, Adamczak guides readers through a series of attempts to answer Chernyshevskys and Lenins perennial question, What is to be done? Kommunismus, Adamczaks debut, proved a surprise success. Unrast Verlag reissued it 10 years later, along with a 30-page epilogue added by the author. Adamczak uses this afterword, more essayistic in tone than the original text, to sketch a few subtler theoretical points.

Communism for Kids is a translation of the updated 2014 rerelease. Jacob Blumenfeld and Sophie Lewis have rendered a great service by making it accessible to Anglophone audiences. Reception of the book thus far, however, has been frantic, to say the least. Elizabeth Harrington of The Washington Free Beacon accuses The MIT Press of trying to corrupt the youth with a new book that teaches children the tenets of Karl Marx with fairy tales. Breitbarts Colin Madine, meanwhile, laments that [Marxists] havent yet figured out that their ideology leads to nothing but ruin. But theres hope. If Glenn Beck inadvertently gave The Coming Insurrection the best [] review it will ever receive a decade ago, then perhaps Alex Joness insane rant about Satanism, British intelligence, and commie indoctrination will do the same for this book. Liberal outlets are hardly better, with Ron Capshaw sarcastically commenting in The Daily Beast that [a] Berlin-based author and MIT have published a kids book making the case for Communism using fairy tales minus all the mass murder, of course.

One wonders if any of these reviewers actually read Communism for Kids before passing judgment, or even bothered to thumb through it. If they had, they would know that Adamczak rejects calls to leap over the barrier between generations by seeking immediate, untainted access to Karl Marxs original manuscripts. She doesnt flinch before the troublesome image of the past, not simply disavowing the failed revolutions of the last two centuries, no matter the stigma, but forcefully criticizing those who coyly refuse to take responsibility for the legacy of Stalinism and its victims [] Gestern Morgen, her 2007 study of Soviet history, deals precisely with this theme. Moreover, she refuses to romanticize precapitalist forms of life: People suffered a lot before [capitalism], too, although for different reasons.

And yet the criticism persists. The likely crux of the matter, as far as the general public is concerned, is the very word communism, which still conjures up grim memories of totalitarian regimes. Adamczak insists several times in the course of her text (four, to be exact) that communism names the society that gets rid of all the evils people suffer under capitalism. And indeed, for many contemporary Marxists, the word recalls evocative passages from Marx and Engelss early writings: communism as the riddle of history solved, the real movement abolishing the existing state of affairs, and so on. At the same time, communism represents a discrete political model, which distinguishes itself from socialism, anarchism, and other modes of nominally anticapitalist politics. It has been used in this latter sense for going on a hundred years, since the renaming of the Bolshevik party in Russia and the foundation of the Comintern in 1919. Many regard the subsequent years as decisive; to them, the word is all but irredeemable. Mark Fisher, the late author of Capitalist Realism, may have been right that it is forever tied to the nightmares of the 20th century.

In that light, Adamczaks attempt to rescue the precepts of communism is admirably fearless. And the central precept she considers is the role of commodity fetishism, or reification, in capitalist society. Its called capitalism, Adamczak writes,

because capital rules. This isnt the same as saying that capitalists rule, or that the capitalist class rules. In capitalism, there are certainly people who have more power than others, but there isnt a queen who sits on a throne high above society commands everybody. So if people no longer rule over society, who does?

Adamczak admits that [t]he answer may sound a little strange. Things do. Indeed, it is a strange, abstract sort of rule. Of course we dont mean this literally, since things cant do anything, least of all rule people. After all, theyre just things. And not all things have this power; only special things do. Or to put it better, only a special form of things do. This special form Adamczak alludes to is none other than the commodity-form discussed by Marx in the first chapter of Capital (i.e., goods produced for exchange).

Adamczak also touches on Marxs characteristic procedure of inversion. [Commodities are] just the things that people create to make life easier, to serve them, she explains. Strangely, over time, people forget that they made those things, and soon enough, people begin to serve the things! Or, as Marx puts it, the rule of the capitalist over the worker is the rule of things over man, of dead labor over the living, of the product over the producer. Ventriloquizing through a couple of nameless protagonists, Adamczak drives this point home in a subsequent chapter: You know what? Its all these things! We make them in order to serve us, but [] we end up serving them [] Its these dumb thingamajigs, this damned thinga- thinga- thingification [Verdinglichung]. This thingification is, of course, better known to Anglophone Marxists as reification, from the Latin res. Elegant and engaging as Adamczaks explanation is, her most brilliant analogy really throws the occult properties of capitalism into relief:

To play the [Ouija] game, a group of people sits in a circle around a board with a glass in the middle. All the letters of the alphabet are written on the board. Everyone puts a hand or finger on the glass, and because everybody is unconsciously trembling a tiny bit, the glass begins to move, as if pushed by an invisible hand, slowly, from one letter to the next. The people dont realize that they moved the glass themselves, because their individual trembling could never have moved it alone. Instead, they think it was a spirit channeling some kind of message through them.

The Ouija board illustrates pretty well how life works under capitalism. As a matter of fact, the people playing the game are pushing the magically moving glass all by themselves, although not one of them could do it alone. The glass moves only because people act together rather than separately. But they dont even notice they are cooperating. Their own cooperation happens secretly, behind their backs, so to speak. If those people instead consciously came together to think collectively about what they actually wanted to write, then the outcome would probably be very different. At least, there wouldnt be any uncertainty about who wrote the text, thats for sure. With the way things stand now, though, the text seems to be written by an invisible hand.

Later, Adamczak returns to this analogy, after her characters have conducted a sequence of communist experiments. Society, Adamczak says,

[is] just like the Ouija board. Theres no magic without the glass [dead labor or constant capital], but theres even less magic without us [living labor or variable capital]. The glass didnt move because of an invisible hand but rather because we cooperated together [] We made everything ourselves [] All these things are as much a part of us as we are a part of them. That means we can change them whenever we want.

Historically, human beings have participated in a process much bigger than any one of them could alter or truly apprehend. Men make their own history, Marx once observed, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

Engels expanded on this motif in 1881: With the seizure of the means of production by society, he claimed, the extraneous objective forces which have hitherto governed history pass under the [subjective] control of men themselves. Only from that time will men, more and more consciously, make their own history. This dovetails neatly with Adamczaks image of the Ouija players deciding together what to write, rather than just letting the message be written for them. From that day forth, they will write history as they deem fit. Communism for Kids thus borrows a page from the Communist Manifesto: In bourgeois [capitalist] society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.

In the middle of the book, Adamczak presents six trials to demonstrate how certain past attempts to achieve this goal had fallen short. Adamczak explores state-administered redistributionist schemes, self-management, and technocratic utopianism, which views automation as a cure-all. These and other strategies of reducing labor-time a prerequisite of communism, expressed by Marxs son-in-law Paul Lafargue as the right to be lazy just end up reproducing the same old patterns of capitalist labor. No, no, no, goes the refrain. This isnt communism. Her characters move on to the next trial.

Adamczak suddenly breaks this off with a quote from Horace, which Marx had used in the first preface to Capital: De te fabula narratur! [This tale is about you!] An angry crowd bursts through the bottom of the page. Stop telling our story! they yell at her. We decide what happens next. Because this is our story now, and were making history ourselves. Here Adamczak encourages readers to finish her story, since it belongs to them. El Lissitzky began his own 1922 Soviet childrens parable About Two Squares, in which a pair of intergalactic rectilinear shapes fly down from outer space to sweep away the ancien rgime, with the injunction: Dont read this book. Take paper. Fold rods. Color in blocks of wood. Build! A black square symbolizing pre-Revolutionary avant-garde art (namely, Kazimir Malevich) provides the destructive impulse, while a red square symbolizing communism supplies the constructive impulse, but the story closes on an open-ended note. Lissitzkys elliptic last line (So it ends, further on ) is meant to spill off his pages onto the pages of history. This coda could just as well be appended to Adamczaks book.

My one quibble with Communism for Kids concerns the section on communist desire [kommunistischen Begehren]. Over the last 20 years or so, this phrase or rather, its Italian equivalent, desiderio comunista has sporadically appeared in books by Antonio Negri and interviews with tienne Balibar. Jacques Broda has written articles on dsir communiste for major French newspapers, while Jodi Dean has given the most comprehensive account in any language. But the notion that radical social transformation can only take place when motivated by desire for revolution, or that desire itself is somehow revolutionary, derives from philosophers and psychoanalysts such as Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari, and Jean-Paul Doll. Despite what some revolutionaries think about [it], desire is revolutionary in its essence, argued Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. [It] does not want revolution, [but] it is revolutionary in its own right [] Revolutionaries often forget, or do not like to recognize, that one wants and makes revolution out of desire, not duty. Adamczak accepts this premise, stating, If communist criticism aspires to move beyond its habit of bitter negation, then it needs to add a blueprint of desire to its toolbox of analytic scalpels and rhetorical dynamite. It needs to generate desire communist desire.

The crucial reference for Adamczak is Deleuzes colleague, Michel Foucault. She quotes him as saying that the role of intellectuals today must be to restore the same level of desirability for the image of revolution that existed in the 19th century. Foucault wavered on this, though, unsure if revolution was really so desirable after all (citing Horkheimers doubts). He told Bernard-Henri Lvy that something quite different is at stake in Stalinism [than the viability of revolution]. You know very well [] that the very desirability of the revolution is the problem today. Asked whether revolution was something he desired, Foucault refused to commit himself. Regardless of Foucaults wavering, traditional Marxism frames revolution not in terms of desire, but of objective class interests and universal needs. Revolution is a historical necessity, and Marxism is the consciousness of this necessity. Communism is more than just the riddle of history solved; it also knows this to be the case. By advancing desire as a cause of revolution, Deleuze, Guattari, and their followers put the cart before the horse. Whether a desire [Begierde] becomes fixed or not, Marx pointed out, depends on whether material circumstances [] permit the normal satisfaction of this desire and, on the other hand, the development of a totality of desires. Only successful revolution will lead to conditions that allow for the full development of all our potentialities.

Revolution will not result from merely wanting it more, and the idea that it will is usually a sign of desperation. Daniel Bensad, the French Trotskyist, recalled in his Memoirs:

[I]n a climate of renunciation, denial, and repentance, revolution tends to be reduced to a matter of desire [] Vaguely post-1968, and falsely juvenile, this emotional desire for revolution gave off the bitter fragrance of flowers scattered on a tomb. Mere desire is all that remains when the initial lan and fervor are exhausted: a wishfulness without will, a greed without appetite, an erotic caprice or a phantom of freedom a subjectivity enslaved to an impractical sense of the possible.

Adamczaks book demands that desire itself become desirable, when what is really required is an understanding of necessity. Luckily, Communism for Kids offers abundant insight into this necessity. For the moment, Adamczak is relatively unknown outside Germany. Communism for Kids will change this. Readers of the world, rejoice!

Ross Wolfe is a writer, historian, and architecture critic living in New York.

See the rest here:
This Tale Is About You!: On Bini Adamczak's Communism for Kids - lareviewofbooks

When Cristian Diaconescu and Nicolete Lordanescu started working on what would become the atmospheric puzzle-platformerBlack the Fallthey weren't trying to make a commercial video game, but an art project that usedgames as the medium. The two creators shared the goal of somehow using interactive media to communicatetheir feelings aboutthe not-so-distant past of their homeland, Romania.

From the end of World War II the former Axis state of Romania was occupied by the Soviet Union, who steadily established communist rule in the country. By 1947 the Romanian King was forced to abdicate, and the Romanian People's Republic was formed. Until 1989 Romania was gripped by communist totalitarianism, and it is only in recent times that the people of Romania have been able to experience freedom from an incredibly oppressive regime.

Diaconescu and Lordanescu's original art project was verywell-received, inspiringthe duo to consider a full-sized project. After gathering some like-minded developers and running a successful Kickstarter campaign, the newly formed Sand Sailor Studios began work on the full-fat version ofBlack the Fall. Fans of Playdead and particularly the wonderful Inside will instantly see the similarities in approach, but this is coming from a very different place.

"For my generation, we were the last to catch communism in the later stages," says Diaconescu, speaking to me from Sand Sailors' Bucharest-based studios. "We were kind of young when it crumbled, but we were old enough to understand and to feel the idiosyncrasies of it in Romania. The project was supposed to be something neo-expressionist using the medium of video games, talking about not only communism as it was in Romania, but also our memories of communism."

Of the 9-strong team at Sand Sailor Studios, almost all designers, artists and programmers are old enough to remember the country's communist regime in full swing, and eventhe younger members have plenty offamily stories. "We were kids back then. It was tough, life was tough. There were shortages of food, and a lack of music and TV," Diaconescu remembers."Looking back it's a mixture of melancholy and also frustration. We understand now that these shortages placed us in a difficult position, and the effects are still there today, especially when compared to the west."

The creators' memories of the time meanBlack the Fallcan't help but be something deeply personal, though it's also not a straight presentation of 'Romania under communist rule.' The game's atmosphere maycome from the real world, but it's set in a dystopian future.

"The game itself does not have any written text or spoken language, but the background and the actions of the protagonist are filled with our memories about how you are supposed to conform, and not speak your mind,"says Diaconescu.

"As kids we weren't even allowed to speak to our friends about what we had in the house... we were all living in fear. Some of the neighbours might want to rat you out to the police you can see that scattered all over the background of the game. We have a very powerful background narrative that speaks about the oppression, about the fear of being open to one another.

"But of course the game is not historically accurate. It's mainly about the people who made it, everyone on the team had something that they put in at one point."

Sand Sailor Studios have woventhis narrative throughevery aspect of the game, including importantmechanics. Early on in the game you'll be handed a 'designator', a device that allows you to control both machines and NPCs. On the face of it this seems like a handy puzzle-solving tool that helps you progress, but the whole concept of 'control' in this landscape has an eerie resonance.

"Even those who had just a little power were very manipulative," says Diaconescu. "I remember the grocery stores particularly we didn't have privately owned grocery stores, they were all owned by the state, so whoever had access to bread, meats and vegetables also had power. They used to ask people for 'favours'... they were like small kings of the neighbourhood. We wanted to add that into the game. Basically, the way to survive back then, as I remember it, was to have enough influence over the others, so if something went wrong, you could do what you had to do to escape. It was a very dehumanising experience.

"I think that was the basic rule of surviving. You either went corrupt and worked for the government, spying on your neighbours and your coworkers, or you tried to outsmart them by playing nice, by dodging enquiries, by bribing officials. Our character is not a superhero. It is a metaphor for what you had to do back then to survive."

When you're creating a game like this, so deeply entwined in personal experience and political history, surely you can't help but draw comparisons to modern-day life. I ask Diaconescu if he could see any of his game's themes returning in the current global climate.

"It's a funny question because we were talking the other day about the new changes that were taking place in Europe, and the rise of autocratic leaders, such Erdoan in Turkey, and of course Trump in the US. It kind of resembles what happened in the past before communism came to power in Romania.

"Communism didn't start at once and democracy cannot die at once, it takes a period of time. But we kind of see the signs again and it's rather disturbing; especially for Romania. The game can feel very real, like its happening today, but it's also very important to remember that it is a dystopian vision."

The trailer for Black the Fall has receivedsome attention and, interestingly enough, Sand Sailor tell me they see trends in the comments section depending on where in the world viewers are watching from. Apparently Eastern Europeans have become very pro-western in their views, but Russians comment in a more anti-capitalist fashion. There's also pro-socialist opinion coming in fromsome parts of the US and Western Europe, and a wave of pro-communist support in South America.

"One thing that I can say is that Eastern Europeans, when they see the images of the game if they are old enough, they are instantly transported back to their childhood and that's amazing," says Diaconescu. But in the makeup of the game's potential audience, there was one last twist of the knife.

Younger Eastern European players, thoseunder 30 years old, don't have thesame reaction. Diaconescu says theysee Black the Fall as justa dystopian sci-fi game, rather than a reflection of their region's recent past. Perhaps that'sthe most inadvertently chilling thing about the game how quickly the world moves on, and how soon we forget. Then again, that's why humans create things like Black the Fall. This is both videogame and cultural document, an effort to make an entertainment that resonates and in some senses educates about its inspiration. It's a way of trying to make sense of the world even if that particular time and place is never coming back.

View post:
Black the Fall and Eastern Europe's Communist Past | Kotaku UK - Kotaku UK (blog)

Bernard Goldberg Creators.com Published: June 28, 2017 12:00 AM CDT Updated: June 28, 2017 12:00 AM CDT

The thing about old socialist politicians, like Bernie Sanders, 75 and Britain's Jeremy Corbyn, 68, is that they have youth on their side.

Across the pond, the youth vote allowed Corbyn to do a lot better than the so-called experts thought he'd do in the recent general election. Here in America, we all know how the millennials went gaga for Bernie. He got more millennial votes in the primaries than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined.

I recently made a reservation for dinner at a restaurant in a very liberal city in North Carolina using only my first name, Bernie and the young hostess told me she was hoping it was Sanders who was coming in for dinner.

The fact is, a lot of millennials like socialism. A 2016 poll conducted by Harvard University showed that a majority of voters between 18 and 29 51 percent rejected capitalism while a third said they supported socialism.

And a 2011 Pew poll of millennials revealed there was more support for socialism than capitalism. Forty-nine percent had positive views of socialism while only 46 percent had positive views of capitalism.

How could this be? Doesn't everybody know by now that socialism doesn't work? Haven't they heard the famous Margaret Thatcher line, "The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"?

If they did hear it, they haven't taken it seriously. In a New York Times op-ed, "Why Young Voters Love Old Socialists," Sarah Leonard, a 29-year old editor at the far-left Nation magazine explains: "(W)ithin this generation, things like single-payer health care, public education and free college and making the rich pay are just common sense."

Of course they are. Until you run out of other people's money.

Let's acknowledge the obvious: Getting free stuff is fun mainly because ... it's free! So it shouldn't be a shock that young voters fell head over heals for a (democratic) socialist like Sanders who promised them a "free" college education paid for by those miserable rich people who have too much money anyway.

And just imagine if the Democrats somehow manage to come up with a young, progressive version of the old socialist from Vermont next time around. Republicans and more importantly, America could be in serious trouble.

But here's where millennials get off easy: No one is calling them out for what a lot of them are which is greedy.

Here's how Thomas Sowell, the great thinker from California, put it: "I have never understood why it is 'greed' to want to keep the money you've earned, but not greed to want to take somebody else's money."

So what we have is a greedy generation that feels entitled to all sorts of things, including other people's money. If this is the future, give me the past.

George Bernard Shaw had it right a long time ago when he said: "A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."

Who knew that Paul was 25 and voted for Bernie?

Memo to millennials: You won't be young forever. And when you get older and have jobs and pay taxes, who do you think is going to pay for all those "free" goodies you once demanded when you were young and forgive me not-too-smart? The bill for all that "free" stuff with interest is going to come due at some point. And by then the next generation of millennials is also going to want "free" stuff. You'll be paying for that, too.

One more piece of wisdom from Sowell, wisdom that young voters in the embrace of socialism might want to consider: "If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else."

Having second thoughts yet, millenials, about the virtues of socialism?

CREATORS.COM

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Bernard Goldberg: Young voters for old socialists | News OK - NewsOK.com