EDUCATORS’ VISION BASED ON UNREALISTIC UTOPIA

Educators’ Vision Based on Unrealistic Utopia

By Jerry A. Kane

I recently attended a dinner discussion sponsored by the Pennsylvania State Education Association. The title of the discussion was based on the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child.” Excerpts from The Dream Catcher were read at various intervals throughout the evening. The story’s tenor suggests that children’s needs are better enhanced through a community effort. The story purports there is a natural symbiotic relationship between a child and its community.

The notion that a child draws its happiness and well-being from the community, while the community grows stronger through sustaining and nurturing the child, is the underlying principle of socialist societies, and not in societies whose foundation is based upon individual rights and popular sovereignty.

It seems that modern American educators no longer understand the philosophical basis for the American Revolution. The philosophical basis of the modem world was carved out in 1776 and 1789 during the American and French revolutions. Although both revolutions occurred in a little more than a decade of each, other, and each involved the overthrowing of a monarchy, they were worlds apart in their philosophies of understanding government and human nature.

The political ideas of the men who laid the foundation of the U.S. Constitution came indirectly from John Locke. The belief in Lex Rex (Law is King), or as we know it, the idea of “inalienable rights” is the founding principle of American government. The underlying notion of this principle is that man’s rights are endowed by his Creator, not by the state. In other words, man’s inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are given by a Supreme Being, and not by the state, and therefore cannot be taken away.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher who inspired the French Revolution, believed that primitive man “the noble savage” was superior to civilized man, because primitive man was innocent and free from the restraints and authority of civilization. But Rousseau’s idea of individual freedom could only be perfectly reflected in his notion of the “general will” as a part of a social contract. In his (1762) book, The Social Contract he wrote, “[W]hoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.”

Rousseau believed human beings could be molded and shaped by the general will once society’s old ideas and institutions had been eradicated from it. His aspirations were utopian in that he believed in man’s perfectibility. According to Rousseau, man’s potential for moral change is essentially unlimited, and it is up to the naturally virtuous human beings to transform man from what he is to what he could and should be.

Rousseau’s utopian aspirations were adopted by some “naturally virtuous” human beings during the French Revolution. Rousseau’s utopian ideals fueled the tyranny of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, which eventually led to the authoritarian reign of Napoleon.

Conversely, the United States has never been subject to a dictator. Locke’s idea that human nature is neither perfect nor perfectible is expressed in the Constitution’s system of checks and balances, which were included for both the governors and the governed That system has worked because it took into account man’s moral and mental limitations, which were based on a theory of improving the human condition, not perfecting it.

The United States was never intended to be a utopian motherland or “workers’ paradise” ruled by an Aryan superman, or managed by a “new Socialist man.” Our forefather’s envisioned a liberal democracy based on majority rule, individual rights, and limited government. The Founding Fathers did not want to possess a man’s soul or psyche, in fact, they wanted to do the exact opposite. They created a system of government that gave the individual the freedom to pursue his own interests, hold his own opinions, and live his own life.

America’s educators need to rethink what it is -they are doing in their classrooms. Students are without a national identity because they have not been taught what it is that distinguishes America and sets it apart from other nations. ‘They have .also been fragmented into groups, and set adrift in a sea of cultural diversity without a sail or a rudder to steer by. Their belief in national sovereignty has been uprooted and transplanted in a global community.

If America’s educators believe in those principles of national sovereignty and individual liberty as penned in the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist’s Papers, then they must realize that they are obligated by the Constitution to teach those ideals to their students. On the other hand, if America’s educators are utopian socialist engineers working to transform the United States from what it is to what it could and should be, then their hallowed halls and ivory towers have become nothing more than a breeding ground for socialist utopians.

The premise that it “Takes a village to raise a child” is a purely socialist concept. Americans have always understood that the responsibility for raising children belongs to the child’s family, and not to a community or a coalition formed by the Pennsylvania State Education Association. Members of the PSEA surely know that the fabric of American society is weaved around the family unit and parental authority, unless of course their goal is to lay a different social foundation based not on individual rights and parental authority, but on the rights, responsibility, and general will of the community.

NOTE:  This commentary appeared in Mainline Newspapers in 1998.

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The Fault of Underlings

By Jerry A. Kane

 

We can now add the son of the late William F. Buckley (WFB), Christopher Buckley, to the growing list of Me-too Republicans who have denounced John McCain and disparaged Sarah Palin. Buckley, political satirist and novelist, opted to forgo the back page of National Review and make his mark through cyberspace, releasing his column “Sorry Dad, I’m Voting for Obama” on the Daily Beast (how delightfully apropos). 

 

It was only back in February that the conservative bon vivant was “taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative.” In a “highly favorable Op-Ed” in The New York Times, Buckley writes, “the sum of Mr. McCain seems (to me, anyway) far greater than the parts…. And who among ‘us’ … would not sleep soundly knowing that the war hero was on the job calculating how to dispatch more Islamic fanatics to their rendezvous with 72 virgins.” Alas! “But that was—sigh—then.” Frailty, thy name is Buckley! 

 

Buckley’s Jeffords-moment of clarity, from “God, this guy should be president someday” to “graffiti on a marble bust” tragedy, came during his “genuinely saddening” realization that the McCain campaign had changed the noble McCain:  he became “inauthentic,” “irascible, and snarly”; his promises became “unrealistic”; his attack ads became “mean-spirited and pointless”; and his “positions changed” and “lacked coherence.” Conversely, the glib, urbane son of a stalwart conservative praised Obama as the “rara avis [rare person] … politician who writes his own books.” Buckley readily admits that Obama is a “lefty” (possible baseball jargon) but his prescience exceeds labels, given that he can see Obama’s potential as a “great leader,” the one who is “what the historical moment seems to be calling for.”

 

Despite that “Obama’s record is far more left than McCain’s is far right,” and that Obama has been “the most partisan in the Senate, McCain one of the most bipartisan,” or that an Obama presidency would mean open borders, “higher taxes, larger government, more entitlements, more of a UN-centered foreign policy, dialogue with an Iran, less coal, oil, and nuclear energy production at home,” and more living Constitution activists on the Supreme Court, the self-proclaimed “conservative/libertarian/whatever” offers little more than “airy-fairy” rhetoric to justify his “leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon.” 

 

Buckley’s defense is mere pretext. His the-noble-McCain-has-changed argument lacks substance and is anything but persuasive. Yet his reason for “pulling the Democratic lever in November” is “bleeding obvious”; namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that.”  Methinks a balmy zephyr has left behind a “foul whiff of aristocratic disdain.”

 

Herein lies the bloody truth behind the snide and sneering comments from the silver spoon-fed member of the life-of-the-mind crowd. To this Abbey School sophisticate, Palin is just another ordinary, stupid, upstart commoner, lacking the charm and social refinements of a “first-class” “Harvard man.” Palin belongs to the class of “discontented … rabble” as expressed by Henry F. Potter, the cantankerous, snobby old businessman character from It’s a Wonderful Life. Yet, Buckley would do well to remember that the rabble he’s talking about does most of the working and paying and living and dying in this country. WFB knew that about Reagan conservatives and understood that they were human beings, not “kooks.” As far as I’m concerned, “pup” was a man of high ideals who died a much richer and wiser man than his son will ever be.

 

Buckley said he tried to soften the blow of his Obama endorsement by not publishing it in the National Review, but location wasn’t the problem for the irate readers who e-mailed the magazine with threats of cancellations; therefore, Buckley offered his resignation, and it was readily accepted.  Now that all is said and done, Buckley seems a bit thunderstruck with both the outrage and its subsequent consequences. After all, didn’t WFB endorse a few Democrats in the past, and was he not “quite tolerant of the surprising point of view” not wanting NR writers to be “in intellectual lockstep”? In what has to be a Dixie-Chick moment, the baffled Buckley said, “It’s an odd situation, when the founder’s son has suddenly become the turd in the punch bowl.”

 

Buckley refuses to accept that along with the wealth, social contacts, and membership into the privileged class, he has also inherited the personal responsibility that goes along with sporting the last name, Buckley. At such a crucial moment in our nation, when the mainstream media (MSM) churn out blatant propaganda for the Democratic Party in general and for Obama in particular, and the Republican Party tries desperately to keep the Democrats from gaining super majorities in Congress and absolute power over the Republic, all that seems to matter to the self-absorbed Buckley is that he has been slighted, and the world should know it. 

 

Buckley’s pretentious manner and feckless thinking calls to mind the late Louis Nye, whose best-remembered character, Sonny Drysdale, is the spoiled, sissified, ne’er-do-well son of the Drysdales from the 1960s sicom the Beverly Hillbillies. Sonny D. is a smug, arrogant, overbearing, blue-blooded mama’s boy, who treats those whom he considers his intellectual and social inferiors with haughty disdain, and never tires of basking in the rays of his imagined self-importance.

 

Unfortunately, Buckley is not the lone elitist political talking-head, pundit, or commentator who belittles Sarah Palin in the minds of voters in saying that she’s out of her league, unfit to assume the presidency, and a huge mistake.  The Beltway smart-set, who literally cannot separate good from evil, right from wrong, or better from worse, include George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, David Gergen, Ed Rollins, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and Kathleen Parker. During an interview David Brooks compared Palin’s anti-intellectualism to President Bush’s and said that the Governor “represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party.” Brooks went on to describe John McCain and Barack Obama as “the two best candidates we’ve had in a long time.” 

 

On the one hand, this group of elitist snobs knows that Palin is the campaign’s tough, sassy, anti-elite, maverick who stands outside the Beltway establishment poised to attack the New York–Washington media elite, the liberal elite, and the Anglo-American elite who don’t believe in getting their hands dirty with work; yet, these prominent Republican “conservatives” continue to use such reproachful rhetoric in attacking their own party’s ticket while it is engaged in a political battle for the presidency, the Congress, and its very existence. 

 

On the other hand, they persist in their agreement with the head of the Democratic Party’s ticket, heaping praise upon the man who, when trying to explain Pennsylvania’s blue-collar working class culture to San Francisco’s upper class culture, said, “each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” 

 

Again, the answer is as bloody obvious as the “leadership class” they constitute.  They are the members of an Eastern establishment elite class who think that everyone outside their circle of desirable social contacts is stupid and should defer to their judgment because they are the entitled, privileged class whose breeding and wealth have determined they deserve to run things.

 

Buckley’s judgment for supporting Obama may be problematic, but it’s consistent with his self-perception. Parker, Brooks, Will and the rest of the New York/DC Beltway elite have far more cultural connections to Barack Obama than they do to Sarah Palin or blue-collar America whom they ridicule for being intellectually and socially inferior.

 

Should the Republicans lose in November, the fault will not lie so much with McCain/Palin or even with the Republican elite, as it will with “ourselves, that we are underlings.” 

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The Obama/Hitler Matrix

By Jerry A. Kane

 

Mr. Anderson, you disappoint me.  On your blog commentary, “Obama is Hitler? Hold on a Second,” you denounce comments comparing Obama to Hitler as substandard, unintelligent, and irresponsible. You further slander the commentators by equating their comments with the left’s mindless ad hominem attacks against the right.

 

Your commentary misapplies Godwin’s Law, “As an Internet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”  Mike Godwin’s rule does not apply to appropriate Nazi and Hitler comparisons; it applies only to the overuse of invalid ones, for they rob the valid comparisons of their impact. Before you evoked Godwin’s Law, you should have applied the Duck Test, “whereby one can infer the nature of an unknown based upon its outwardly visible traits… even if it is not wearing a label that explicitly states its identity.”

 

For those who would believe rather than think, truth is not an easy pill to swallow. All I’m offering is the truth, Larrey, nothing more. It’s important to acknowledge the difference between the left’s dream world and the real world. The claims that Hitler and the Nazis were capitalist reactionaries and that capitalism and Nazism were ideologically aligned are outlandish and preposterous.  In his book, Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg destroys these myths and explains how Stalinist propaganda advanced the doctrine of “social fascism” to discredit and delegitimize those who opposed Stalinism for being in league with the fascist far right.

 

It is obvious that Hitler and the members of the National Socialist Worker’s Party or Nazi Party were socialists; albeit, national socialists, but socialists none the less.  Hitler opposed the communists for power’s sake, not for statist ideology.  The Nazi/Communist conflict was a left verses left battle to determine which totalitarian system would rule, and the Nazis won and took charge of the German left.  When it comes to advancing the unlimited power of the state over the individual and society’s means of production, Nazis and communists are soul mates; their genus is the same. 

 

Totalitarian governments are antithetical to liberal democracies that promote individual liberties, private property rights, and free enterprise systems.  Totalitarian governments and their leaders are outgrowths of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism, the hideous progeny of socialism.  For this reason, the label Fascist or Nazi is applicable only to radical leftist, statist, and collectivist ideologues; the label does not apply to ideologues on the right who promote patriotism, personal freedom, individual liberty, and limited government.

 

Your, “can’t we all just get along,” plea is a bit late after eight years of incessant Bush-bashing and name-calling.  Almost every day since the November 4 election, leftist sycophants and mainstream media propagandists have gushed pathetically over Obama, comparing him to former presidents John F. Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and even to Jesus Christ. Yet, you and Reason Online’s Michael Moynihan have your hinnies in a huff over some comments and commentaries that draw attention to ominous parallels between Obama’s rise to political prominence and Hitler’s. 

 

For nearly eight years, Bush has been synthesized into the most diabolical, devious, dastardly, idiotic, incompetent, illiterate figure ever to go to and fro on the earth and walk up and down upon it.  Progressives and the mainstream media have marked Bush the most hated man in the history of the world.  “I wonder how Hitler’s supporters felt when he was the most hated man.  Did they realize they were supporting a monster?  Were they proud to be contributing to his power? … George is not the first ugly, planetary monster to be created.…[W]e should be studying the destroyed industries, the fraudulently justified actions and causes, the ecological disasters and the lies … that enabled Bush and his malignant predecessors to attain power.”  

 

Now that you have bathed in the stream of progressive consciousness, it’s time to dismount those high horses and examine the rhetoric that you and Moynihan have condemned as “bad taste” and “hysterics on the right” respectively.  Understand that I’m trying to free your mind, Larrey.  But I can only show you the door.  You’re the one that has to walk through it. 

 

The cult of personality and hysteria for a charismatic orator are frightening parallels between Obama and Hitler.  Like Hitler, Obama too is a phenomenal political figure, extraordinary in American politics.  No American politician has made such an impression on Americans.  He receives excessive admiration, adoration, and exaltation from his admirers and worshipers reminiscent of hero worship but with a messianic twist. 

 

In addressing a group of young people in his congregation, Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, said that Obama’s ability to interest them in politics was a sign of messianic proportions. “You are the instruments that God is going to use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth.  And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about.  That’s a sign.  When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.” 

 

Farrakhan is not alone in proclaiming Obama’s messianic eloquence.  Ezra Klein, associate editor at The American Prospect, writes, “Obama’s finest speeches … elevate.  They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped … and … made you aware of its presence and your role in it.  He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.  The other great leaders … guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is … able to call us … to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we … seem capable of … sharing in its meaning and transcendence.” 

 

Hitler’s oratory did not just inspire the masses, it elevated them.  He was not a politician; he was a demigod, a magical figure of majestic wisdom who would save Germany.  The Nazis staged public meetings and party rallies to create a supernatural and religious atmosphere, with Hitler’s entrance more befitting a god than a man.  Through propaganda, he projected himself as the Messiah of Germany and cultivated an attitude of infallibility, so the people worshiped him and surrendered their wills to him.  An American from Chicago who had visited Germany at the time of Hitler’s ascendance to power observed, “This is not a revolution, it’s a revival.  They think Hitler is God.  Believe it or not, a German woman sat next to me at the Passion Play and when they hoisted Jesus on the Cross, she said, ‘There he is. That is our Fuehrer, our Hitler.’”

 

Hitler believed that he was the “Chosen One,” a second Christ destined to lead Germany to glory and institute a new social order for the world.  He was convinced of his own infallibility and greatness.  As Howard K. Smith wrote, “I was convinced that of all the millions on whom the Hitler Myth had fastened itself, the most carried away was Adolph Hitler, himself.”  

 

Even though John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton were outstanding public speakers and possessed charismatic personalities, they were never raised to the level of Messiah, nor could they make audience members swoon to the degree Obama does.  He seems to exude the confidence of an anointed one and the certainty of a true believer regarding his own greatness.  When asked by a television interviewer if he ever had any doubts about his foreign policy experience, Obama replied, “Never.”  

 

Wife Michelle says the real Barack Obama plans to redesign America and to help Americans fix their broken souls.  In a campaign speech at UCLA, Ms. Obama told the students that they live in a divided nation whose people are isolated by fear.  She went on to say that she was there to let them know that she is married to “one of the most brilliant men you will meet in our lifetime,” and the only presidential candidate “who has a chance at healing this nation” for he understands the need to fix broken souls so that Americans can compromise and sacrifice for one another.  Michelle obviously believes in her husband’s personal greatness and envisions him a revolutionary ready to save both America and the planet.  “We have a chance, not just to make history, but we can change the world.”  

 

Look around, Larrey, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters, so inured, so hopelessly dependent on New Deal/Great Society socialism that they will fight to protect it, and that makes them the enemy of liberty loving Americans.  If you are not one of us, you are one of them. 

 

The commentators are not saying Obama is Hitler, but they are suggesting that a dictator can rise in America and bring about a totalitarian state.  And for that reason, when the leader of the free-world possesses a charismatic personality, comes from a socialist background, holds to a progressive worldview, rises to prominence, not for accomplishment, but for grandiose speeches the likes of which have never been heard before in America, is hailed as the nation’s savior by the masses, is admired by leaders throughout the world, and is elevated to the role of Messiah by worshipful followers from every class, race, and gender, it is both reasonable and necessary to wave red flags and sound alarms.  

 

After all, an obvious distinction exists between those who cry wolf but have never seen a wolf or have any idea what one even looks like, and those who cry wolf who have seen a wolf and know exactly what one looks like.  I have tried to show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes, Larrey, but it’s up to you to either stay in Wonderland or to start following white rabbits all over again.  

 

  

 

 

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What Lurks over the Horizon?

What Lurks over the Horizon?
By Jerry A. Kane

America stands poised at the edge of a precipice; her next step could send her plummeting headlong to an untimely death. Yet, to even suggest such a possibility opens the door to charges of alarmism or hyperbolic fear-mongering. The chattering classes preach that a dictatorship can’t happen here; America will survive even with one-party rule and a radical socialist in the White House. The radio talk-show host, whose persistent pipes of “Let not your heart be troubled,” has done little to allay my fears for what is likely to happen to my country if the Democrats gain a super majority in Congress and Barack Obama wins the presidency.

It seems that conservative and libertarian pundits and commentators have not connected the dots to see the picture that I see, for they would be sounding the alarm and warning Americans of the radicalism that is about to bring down their nation. Then again, perhaps some have captured the image through their rose-colored glasses but are so attached to their celebrity status that they dare not point it out for fear of being ostracized and labeled a “kook” by their more “sensible” colleagues.

Call me a kook and detest me, but name-calling and rejection will not stop this watchman from warning our fence-sitting Americans of what lurks over the horizon. Facts are stubborn things; they are not opinions subject to debate, and for that reason, two plus two always equal four, not five, contrary to the slogans in Stalin’s Soviet Union or the announcements from the Party of Big Brother in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, who works in the media and creates the Party’s deceptive propaganda, doesn’t know for sure if two plus two equal five, as the Party claims, “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?”

Here we stand a divided country on the brink of entering a nightmare world, unprecedented in American politics, with an undecided electorate who are unsure for whom they will vote in this election. They see Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum, six of one, half-dozen of the other, without a dime’s difference between them. Like Winston Smith, they don’t know if two plus two equal four or two and two make five.

Unlike Smith, our undecideds don’t live in an Orwellian society under a totalitarian government, at least not yet, so why don’t they know a radical socialist when they see one? Perhaps they can’t distinguish a radical socialist from a moderate conservative because they have absorbed so much conflicting information from the media making it impossible to sort out.

Conservative pundits and commentators have made a critical error in judgment by depicting Obama as the most liberal member of the Senate. Obama is anything but liberal; he is a radical socialist ideologue whose worldview and personality traits align him more with the revolutionary demagogues Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez than they do George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. This is why Castro writes in a column that Obama is “the most progressive candidate for the U.S. presidency.”

Add the word progressive to the word Democrat and you get activists demanding a socialist agenda; i.e., massive income redistribution from corporations and the wealthy to low income workers and the poor; massive reductions in military spending; an increase in social welfare spending; universal healthcare; living wage laws; the right of all workers to organize into labor unions and to engage in strikes and collective bargaining; the abolition of significant portions of the Patriot Act; the legalization of gay marriage; strict campaign finance reform laws; a complete pullout from the war in Iraq; a crackdown on free trade and corporate welfare; and the Freedom of Choice Act, which would cancel every state, federal, and local regulation on abortion, abolish all state restrictions on government funding for abortions, and if Obama is elected, use income taxes to fund abortions.

In other words, you get the issues and causes championed by both the House Progressive Caucus (HPC), which is now the single largest partisan caucus in the United States House of Representatives, and the country’s most radical socialist presidential candidate. HPC, a group made up of the most radical social democrats in Congress, is involved in symbiotic relationship with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is the largest socialist organization in the United States.is the principal affiliate of the Socialist International, which claims to be the successor to Karl Marx’s “First International,” founded in London in 1864.

During his commencement address at Harvard, Solzhenitsyn said, “socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.” Eric Hoffer correctly analyzed that socialist movements attract the misfits who are dissatisfied with themselves and their lives, who blame their own condition on outside forces, and think that a change in the world around them will suddenly transform their identities and magically cure their problems. The people caught up in socialist movements are searching for meaning in their lives; therefore, they often hate the present and passionately seek a perfect tomorrow.

Hoffer understood that America had a vigorous and healthy society because of the quality of its common people. Until recently, most Americans have been comfortable in their own skin and satisfied with their own lives, which explains why they have not been mesmerized by socialist movements such as Nazism, fascism, and communism. But now, far too many Americans are mesmerized by Obama’s words and image, not for what he’s accomplished, but for what they hope he will become.

Never before has a politician had such a captivating effect on so many Americans. Such a grandiose claim “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” by the charismatic leader of change about himself and the ruling clique of radical socialists in Congress is reason enough to give pause. Mark Levin says his greatest concern is whether the majority of voters will prove “susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue.”

It’s regrettable when any nation’s people surrender their hearts and minds over to a despot; but when the electorate of the freest people in the greatest nation on earth do it, “[t]his prospect frightens me much more than bombs.” What happened in Germany with Hitler, happened again in Cuba with Castro, and can happen here in the United States with Obama. It was the ordinary people who carried out the leader’s heinous crimes and murders believing in the glorious tomorrow promised them. “Of all tyrannies,” writes C.S. Lewis, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”

The Germans had enormous war debts and a terrible economy, so they believed the charismatic leader who personified hope and went on to elect the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazis) that promised change. The Cubans also supported a young, charismatic leader who promised change, and they openly embraced his idea without asking what kind of change or knowing the price they would have to pay. The upshot for our undecided electorate to ponder is that freedom is not free and “is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

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