Hillary Clinton
In reply to the discussion: This deserves to be seen, not hidden [View all]LisaM
(27,803 posts)He reminds me of the old members of the Communist Party in America who clung to the belief for a long time that the Soviet Union was not a repressive system, despite glaring evidence to the contrary - people like Pete Seeger and Jessica Mitford. I don't even dispute that their hearts were in the right place but ultimately the Communist Party betrayed its followers.
And we've seen these takeovers fail over and over - the regimes are autocratic and the citizens don't have the freedom we enjoy. I remember a very moving piece about Katarina Witt that was on a year or two ago - she said that the system gave her the means to train as a skater (and she appreciated that and they gave her a good life when she was young) but that when she wanted to retire and go professional after the Olympics, they told her she could not do that if she didn't win a gold medal. Knowing that, and then watching her performance at those Olympics when I saw that special, and the absolute relief on her face when she got the gold medal was extremely moving. If she hadn't won, they would have forced her out of skating and she would have just been another East German housewife, maybe she would have been allowed to coach, but they weren't going to let her skate professionally in ice shows.
Of course there are some good takeaways from the Scandinavian systems, but the U.S. is not a small 1000-year old country and it's not the kind of thing that can reasonably be instituted here after one election. Change in this country tends to be more incremental and that's okay, too.