Or so says the New York Times.

Do American progressives truly believe in America? If you ask them, they are offended. “How dare you insinuate that I’m not an American, that I’m not patriotic”, comes the response, “Of course I love this country!” Call one a socialist, and you will no doubt get a lengthy dissertation on how they support freedom and free enterprise. Yeah, the left in America makes a lot of noise that sounds like “democracy”.

America – “big fan”, they say. “I believe”, they say.

Well, they aren’t, and they don’t.

As the linked article notes, there is a growing number of people calling themselves socialists (who are actually Marxists) who are quite comfortable in drinking their own Kommie Kool-Aid.

Their true heritage is rooted in a fusion of 18th century European autocracy and the collectivist ideals of Karl Marx. Their definition of “freedom” is that which the government allows you to have once it corrects your behavior via legislation and/or bureaucratic fiat in a quest to fulfill their social engineering goals. Free enterprise? Capitalism? Well, they want just enough capitalism to pay for their Marxist policies, no more than that – can’t have too much of that economic freedom running around, can we? People might get the idea that they were free to do what they want – can’t have that.

Sure, they will argue that their statements aren’t Marxist and perhaps they believe themselves – but theirs is a conviction based on ignorance of history. Their beliefs are firmly rooted in Marx’s Communist Manifesto and proof is on the pages of every newspaper. “Spread the wealth”, “the rich don’t pay their fair share”, “evil corporations” and “government has to take care of the poor, the elderly and the children” are common idioms. Challenge the idea that government should confiscate wealth and we get “the Tea Party wants the elderly to starve” and conservative Republicans are “terrorists”.

Here’s Marx, in his own words from the Communist Manifesto, on a range of subjects with contemporary relevance:

On the vaunted middle class:

“You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.”

On the family:

“Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”

On education:

“But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social. The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”

On national borders and immigration:

“The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.”

So Marx wanted to abolish the middle class, individual rights, private property, the family, change education to state indoctrination and eliminate national identity and borders.

Sound familiar?

Sounds like Democratic “socialism” to me.