What ‘Socialist’ Policies Will Do To America if Barack Obama has a Second Term

 By Ron Radosh

Writing in the New York Times last Sunday, the paper’s Paris bureau chief Steven Erlanger asked the question: “What’s a Socialist?” The question was undoubtedly raised because of the recent electoral victory in France of Francois Hollande, the country’s first socialist chief since 1988. His party also garnered a “whopping majority in Parliament.” Erlanger continued: “What does it mean to be a Socialist these days, anyway?”

A good question indeed, since so many conservatives have tried to make a case that Barack Obama is a socialist. Erlanger does not write anything to directly answer that question, but cites a conversation he had with the most well-known Parisian intellectual, writer Bernard-Henri Levy, whom he quotes as saying the following:

‘There are no more socialists — if they were honest they would change the name of the party,” he told me.  Socialism “evokes the nightmare of the Soviet Union, whose leaders named themselves socialists.” Today, he maintains, European socialists are essentially like American Democrats — there has been no ideological left in France that matters since the effective demise of the Communist Party, which was “the true ‘exception francaise.’” (emphasis added)

<<READ MORE>>