A Democratic candidate for alderman in Chicago believes that socialism should have “control over every facet of our life.” Ugo Okere, running against 35-year incumbent Patrick O’Connor, told the radical left publication Jacobin that socialism was “about Democratic control” of both politics and people’s personal lives.
“Government is led by the people, not by big corporations, not by multibillionaires, and working people actually have control over who we elect to be our politicians, over how elections work, and over how our government is structured. People have the power.”
Okere went on to say he believes socialism should guide a society’s entire course, not just its political structures.
It’s really a remarkable admission.
Democratic socialism even extends to our relationships and how we treat each other. [It looks] at the world through a socialist-feminist lens, in how we treat people who are black, who are brown, who are femme, who are non-binary, who are gender-nonconforming, and who are working class.
To me, we’ll have achieved democratic socialism not when there is no conflict in the world, but when our societies are not governed based on power, but are governed based on the mutual understanding that everybody deserves a decent and quality life.
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, and perhaps world history would have been altered significantly if people had believed him when he wrote he wanted to invade Poland, destroy France, annex Russia, and kill the Jews.
Should we believe Okere?
This socialist vision of society seeks to overturn the existing order and should not be confused with the mainstream progressive left, Okere explained.
“One part of the Left wants to reform the existing society that we have now. They want to make changes that will make life easier, that will make life not so bad,” he said. “But there’s another side of the Left that wants to radically transform the way the world works — not simply say that we can make some changes here and there and that things will be alright.”
Of course, the “progressive left,” who want to make our lives “easier,” are just as clueless as Okere. They’re just not quite as honest. In truth, the “transformation” that both the progressive left and radical socialists want would destroy America as we know it and bury human progress and freedom perhaps forever.
Okere is backed enthusiastically by the Democratic Socialists of America, whose rise to the centers of power in the Democratic Party is a very worrisome development. It is their agenda that is being adopted by more and more presidential candidates — an agenda that would ruin the economy, impoverish citizens, and destroy liberty.
But at least the world would have been “transformed.” That’s the important thing.
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