socialism

The broad left has been uniting behind the Democratic Party for the past four decades without having achieved much real progress for its base constituencies.

If a disease can teach wisdom beyond our understanding of how precarious and precious life is, the coronavirus has offered two lessons.
The first is that in a globalised world our lives are so intertwined that the idea of viewing ourselves as islands – whether as individuals, communities, nations, or a uniquely privileged species – should be understood as evidence of false consciousness. In truth, we were always bound together, part of a miraculous web of life on our planet and, beyond it, stardust in an unfathomably large and complex universe.

Macron ordered a strict 15-day lockdown across the entire country, requiring people to stay at home to stop the spread of the virus. He said that police will patrol the streets and issuing fines for people without a written declaration justifying their reasons for being out.

Capitalism gathered together resources, labor, and capital to start an industrial revolution that brought prosperity and elevated standards of living to much of the earth’s inhabitants. Once in motion it generated additional capital that gathered more labor and more resources in a perpetual cycle of increased production that constantly benefitted populations. The achievements did not occur smoothly, they sputtered from periodic recessions that solicited government policies to recharge the system.

As we approach the middle of March 2020 with Super Tuesday behind us, the moderate candidacy of Joe Biden has gained momentum, notching ten victories. The recent spat of moderate candidates dropping out (Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Bloomberg, Steyer) alongside Elizabeth Warren’s decision to stay in for Super Tuesday (and dropping out right after) boosted Biden into the lead in delegate count, but it is unclear going forward whether he will be able to gain ground or maintain his advantage.

‘Super Tuesday’ in the 2020 presidential election season is over and Senator Bernie Sanders’s time as the unlikely frontrunner for the Democratic nomination may have stopped just as quick as it began. Despite an unprecedented smear campaign coordinated by the party leadership and corporate media against him, the self-described “democratic socialist” not only managed to single-handedly de-stigmatize the latter as a dirty word in U.S. politics but at one point seemed like he had improbably overtaken former Vice President Joe Biden as the favorite to be the party nominee.

In this section of our Orthodox Christianity versus Socialism series, we examine the historical nature of the conflict between these two religions – a conflict that is recent, and yet ignored by even some of the people that experienced it directly.

In Part I of this series, we began analyzing the incompatibility between Socialism and Orthodox Christianity. This has become something worthy of study, especially recently in the United States as the rise of Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders has drawn more and more public and voter attention. Statistics show that a great number of “millenials”, those twenty-something young Americans, see no problem with taking the US into a new existence as a socialist state.

In a newsfeed I receive from Ayatollah Khameini, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I saw this interesting post. It would appear that the Ayatollah likes socialism. He presumed, amazingly, to offer some advice to Americans about their capitalist government:

I guess the Grand Ayatollah is… a Bernie Sanders supporter?