Wily winning: A manual of mutating political philosophy – October 20, 2008
By Joseph Randolph
web posted October 20, 2008
Dear M.
Yes, I think our beloved socialism is making inroads by leaps and bounds within our country in these days of seismic swings and downturns of the financial sectors, particularly the stock market. Remember what I said earlier, we get our best traction when the ground is shaking and it hardly gets better than an excruciating financial earthquake that portends a meltdown. The Master told us last century that it was inevitable. Those who had little faith some years ago when the ugly capitalism pronounced itself the winner of the world are suffering a rebuke today they could never imagine then. The faithful stood unmoved but tenured and ready. The faithful, moreover, never wavered and are seeing their long-awaited reality come to fruition. Workers of the world unite, you have everything to gain and so many to punish.
Our opponent's camp is in disarray, much to our and your advantage. Furthermore, the state of this financial peril is world-wide, and our European brethren are looking very favorably upon using this occasion for the backwater America to come into the socialist mainstream with them at long last. Our prior dissenting voice against the inhuman free market economy is now in the ascendency in our land, and we shall thus be able in time, in collusion with our European brethren, to position ourselves from a perch of unassailability. No beatific vision could be as beautiful as this.
Our incumbent opposition is in a well nigh impossible position from which to save any of their ideology. Better, they seem perfectly prepared to abandon much of it. This financial trembling is happening on their watch and as we observe them, they seem oddly accommodating toward laying the new platform of socialism on top of the capitalist rot on their freefall way out of office. This is a puzzle of course; but enemies are not always to be understood, though they are always your enemy. I can only possibly explain such a move as naïve shock that the failure of their darling market economics leaves them speechless. Once again, sometimes one would wish for an opponent with a little more fight so that we do not die of boredom. It is as if they simply and silently hand us the victory baton for our turn.
The opponent's national candidate seems afraid to pin any tails on the responsible donkey for this crisis. Indeed, the mystery is that he seems to know the culprits, in fact he has mentioned a name or two when called upon to do so after a supporter demands it of him, but he remains evermore the "gentlemen" for us to defeat. If I were in charge of his candidacy I would tell him there is no victory of any kind in defeat; he seems to think there is some kind of honor in losing. The fool has apparently thought throughout his lackluster campaign that if he is kind to his opponents that they shall respond with kindness. His mistake here is to have underestimated his opponents—us. Thus, he continuously talks about being "bipartisan," and apparently means it, with no realization that this position when made to work for us is only a temporary accommodation before the amassing and holding of all power. We therefore welcome such talk by this opponent, in fact encourage it, and all the while know from our experience with our opponents, that they do not like us regard this "bipartisan" nonsense as a simple subterfuge of expedience as we do.
This candidate, too, seems to have little knowledge of economics—this may account for our opposition being virtually silent on the socialism advancing more and more every hour. More compromising to his politics, however, is that he seems to think that he can match the amount of money we are prepared to reroute from one taxpayer to another nonpayer to relieve this financial crisis. As I have said to you repeatedly, when our opponent starts to mimic our message or our actions, you can bet that in his mind he thinks he is losing, so he starts to ape his opponent: to play piggyback. In this situation, however, the truth of the matter may be even better than that for us. In other words, he may be even more ignorant than we could imagine. That is, this candidate may be so clueless as to only clumsily notice any kind of difference between a free-market economy and our aspiring socialism. Of course you have economists that align themselves with our opponents that notice the welcoming mat for socialism in this meltdown, but they cannot get their national candidate to demarcate any real difference between his solution and ours as it concerns staving off further financial turmoil. On the other hand, he may know the difference, but in his defeating sense of bipartisanship refrain from drawing any attention to it. So he is either ignorant or naively bipartisan, or both. Either one or both work to our advantage.
If this opposition candidate is not too much of a worry for us anymore, the economists I just spoke of present a bit of obstacle.Thus we have our academic minions and press out in mass to undermine their assessment of blame for this crisis from the hardened free marketers. These free market economists have now picked up the fact that non-credit worthy mortgages were too much for their darling free market to digest, so after a while it throws them up and out, precipitating in particular a quandary for the banking industry or others who ended up holding such mortgages. Thus, the devotees of the free market contend that the government pressure which urged and cajoled and intimated lenders into backing such mortgages, enables us to set our sights on those in government responsible for this pressure their vaunted market could not bear.
All the free marketers clamor for freedom as if it were divine; none ask if the ordinary citizen should have a freedom from fear, as that right was articulated by one of our most articulate spokesmen decades ago. Voters left with a house they cannot pay for are in the grip of fear right now: their home reposed or on the docket for repossession. We have a golden political opportunity to counter the apologists for an inhumane market that jerks people from their bed and their kitchen table to throw them on the street. The market apologists deify and respect every spike and drip of the market more than the people the market throws on the street. Time for that market to go, and people to move back into their houses. Thank goodness that even our opponents are closer to us than these rank free-marketers. As I told you in the very beginning, we are on the verge of having one political point of view in this country, and these economists spoken of here excepted, the attempts of most all the current politicians to address the financial trauma of late confirms this. Time to bury Adam Smith for good. We are on the edge of a possible socialist millennium. 
Joseph Randolph is a writer and academic who lives in Wisconsin.