I’m about Roger’s age, maybe a year or two older, and I share his opinions on the impurities of the socialist ideas of the Democrats…and others like them. I know these people because I lived among them, and I passed through their (latest) defining era as an adult.

The sappy sentimentality and sanctimony in collectivist thinking is a long way from a fully-formed socialism. Henry Wallace, for instance, was a socialist; he had the goods, he knew what he wanted,he discounted the effects his system would have on individual liberty.

He had organized ideas about how to arrange the economic systems to meet his ends, and for better or worse, he saw a place for himself in it. The difference is, when William Koenstler expressed his wish to work on a Cuban collective farm, he was just being a asshole; Wallace would have meant it.

A clown like, say, Tom Hayden, who would claim to be a socialist, is a tyrant wanting to adjust the imbalances of his fantasy world by punishing those who have more than their neighbors. Hayden’s an accountant with a claw hammer. He doesn’t want to distribute justice, he wants to inflict it. You can say the same for almost any petty bureaucrat or NYC toff with a vacation home in the Northeast, especially in CT, MA and VT.

And maybe Hayden is the best example of the remaining “socialists” in this country. They’re more than a little pissed at a particular class of American in the first place, and since the gibbet is out of style, other methods of punishment are necessary. And this self-righteousness will always find a way to conceal itself under the camoflauge of humanitarianism and concern for others. But they’re always concerned about someone other than you, and that’s not socialism.