When attacking a political movement, you must start at the beginning and then cut the foundation out from under it. So let it be with Modern Conservatism. And with Dr. Russell Kirk and his book THE CONSERVATIVE MIND. The book was the intellectual foundation of Modern Conservatism, praised by Reagan and Goldwater alike. And, like Modern Conservatism itself, it was based on distortions, half-truths, and intentional omissions.

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The Great Seal of the United States by wikicommons/Kamalan and Karel Černík

PART 1: Dissecting Russell Kirk

"Man cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him."--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History.

In April of 2010, I published an article for OpEdNews titled "The Children of Cain." One of the editors retitled it "Conservatives: The Children of Cain," but I changed it back, because I had intended the article both as a warning to my liberal and progressive brethren and as an indictment of those on the political right, who invited the dangers implicit in working from a position of fear and dealing in absolutes. I have since grown to regret my decision.

The following quote is from "The Children of Cain." The words are in the third-to-last paragraph of that article:

"It is the height of human arrogance to believe that there is only one way to accomplish a particular goal, and that your way is that way. It is equally arrogant to attempt to force your viewpoint on everyone else. To paraphrase Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith, 'Only the Dark Side deals in Absolutes.'"

To me, Modern Conservatism is indeed the Dark Side: Selfish, egotistical, avaricious, and unwilling to compromise; dealing in a simplistic world of black and white, yes and no. The revival of American Conservatism--as well as its inevitable degeneration, the going over to the "Dark Side"--began with Dr. Russell Kirk and his elitist version of conservatism. But I will say this: Dr. Kirk would not recognize or approve of what passes for conservatism today.

Russell Kirk wrote a brilliant book in the 1950's, titled The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Elliot, which went through seven revised editions and served as the cornerstone for Barry Goldwater and his conservative ideas for the 1964 election. As David Jenkins stated in his December 2, 2011 article, "Russell Kirk Would Not Recognize These "Conservatives'," Dr. Kirk's book was directly responsible for "giving rise to conservatism's intellectual respectability in post-World War II America."

I first read The Conservative Mind over thirty years ago, a year or so after Ronald Reagan's election as President. I first heard about the book on some Sunday morning talk show. (I think it was conservative commentator James Kilpatrick who mentioned it.) The book is not an easy read: it uses words that had never been in, or had fallen out of, general usage long before Dr. Kirk wrote his magnum opus. Dr. Kirk writes at the college level (think Immanuel Kant, but better organized), not the eighth- or tenth-grade level so many modern authors adopt. It is also a book that, while I strongly disagree with much of it (just as I disagree with many of the ideas of Karl Marx in Das Kapital ), is still worth reading, especially if you want to understand how America got to where it is today.

Dr. Kirk's system of conservatism is a hierarchical, authoritarian system of classes, orders, tradition and prejudices. Based as it is on a system of divine intent of unspecified origin (the Providential Theory of History) and provenance, it is hostile to the very concept of reason.

Russell Kirk's Six Canons of Conservatism

Here are Kirk's 6 canons of conservatism (Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Revised Seventh Edition unless otherwise noted; pp 8-9):

1. "Belief in a transcendent order": that political problems are "religious and moral problems." Further, that a "narrow rationality" cannot itself satisfy human needs.

2. "Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, utilitarian aims of most radical [i.e. "liberal'] systems."

3. "Conviction that civilized society requires order and classes, as against the notion of a 'classless society'," combined with the belief that a destruction of "natural" distinctions between men leads to the rise of oligarchs, as a consequence of the masses' need of leadership. Only "equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law" are recognized by conservatives. Equality of condition, they think, means equality in boredom and servitude.

4. A recognition that "freedom and property are closely linked." This allows the conservative to believe that economic leveling of any sort leads inevitably to the total destruction of liberty by the government. (Dr. Kirk does not mention what he believes happens to liberty when the flow of property and possessions goes the other way, i.e., from the poor to the rich).

5. Originally, Dr. Kirk wrote that conservatism had a deep faith in tradition and prejudice as guarantors of social order, combined with a distrust of mere reason (See Carter, Byrum E. (1954) "The Conservative Mind, by Russell Kirk," Indiana Law Journal : Vol. 29: Iss. 2, Article 11 , pp. 307-14 ).

The Revised Seventh Edition changes this wording to "Faith in prescription and distrust of 'sophisters, calculators, and economists.'" Semantically, there is only a very small difference between the two statements. Prejudice is a preexisting opinion held in disregard of facts that contradict it. Prescription is a law or rule that limits possible actions in response to a situation, regardless of need or the facts of the issue involved. In exercising prejudice, one limits one's own or others' actions as a consequence of accepting one's own, or others', judgment: one "prejudges," or acts on a "preconception," of an individual or situation. With prescription, the law itself limits the actions of oneself or others. In both cases, the operative term is "limits the actions." As we saw with the Jim Crow laws in the century following the Civil War, and as we are seeing again today with the push for voter ID laws and the blatant attempt to undermine labor unions in the United States, legal limitations on the actions available to yourself or others are invariably preceded by the extra-legal form of limiting actions known as prejudice.

6. Dr. Kirk also changed his Sixth Canon between the First and Seventh Revised Editions. The First Edition states, "[r]ecognition that change and reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress. Society must alter, for slow change is the means of its conservation...but Providence is the proper instrument for change, and the test of a statesman is his cognizance of the real tendency of Providential social forces.'" (Carter, op cit., 1954.)

By contrast, the Revised Seventh Edition states, "[r]ecognition that change may not be salutary reform: innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence."

What is Wrong with These Canons? They Seem to Consistently Misfire

I believe that Dr. Kirk's First Canon is itself prejudicial, in assigning both the source of political problems and the source of their solutions. We cannot say with certainty if God exists; or that if God exists, what preference, if any, He might have in terms of religion or religious doctrines, governmental forms, social mores and conventions, or economic system types. To those who are atheists, agnostics, or non-conventionally religious (Wicca, Native American, etc.), Dr. Kirk's solution appears to exclude their interests and underlying belief system. This tendency to narrowness of vision, to a concern for satisfying the needs of only a fraction of the people, rather than of all of the people--even if that fraction is a majority--has been one of the great weaknesses of conservative thought throughout history.

This leads directly to what I believe is the inherent self-contradiction of Kirk's Second Canon. "Variety and mystery" are not to be found in the "traditional"; there you will find only repetition of what has gone before, as reflected in the habits and mores of the dominant group in the society. The "traditional" simply reinforces behavior--both good and bad--as anyone who has ever read a psychology text book will tell you. It is in the unconventional and original that true variety and mystery are to be found, and a failure to take contrary views into account is detrimental to the rights of those who hold them. Dr. Kirk was no doubt speaking out against the awful regimentation and dehumanization that he saw in the Soviet Union under Stalin. But, as is the case with most authoritarians, he transferred his hatred and anger for the misdeeds of Stalin to the "innocent bystanders" who lived on the left in the United States.

"Civilized society" may require orders and classes, as Dr. Kirk states in his Third Canon, but who decides the requirements for those orders and classes? In addition, how easy is it for men and women of superior ability and good moral character to rise through the classes, and what limitations are put on higher classes to prevent their abuse of the lower ones? For myself, the jury is still out on that proposition, and at this moment I believe that, if classes and orders are needed, it is only in the most limited form, perhaps most importantly to institutionalize the differences between a Master, Journeyman, and Apprentice plumber.

To quote Thomas Jefferson (from an 1824 letter to John Cartwright), "And where else will [David Hume,] this degenerate son of science, this traitor to his fellow men, find the origin of just powers, if not in the majority of the society? Will it be in the minority? Or in an individual of that minority?" (The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; volume 16, page 44; 1904. [Words in brackets added for amplification.])

Certainly, the establishment of a system of orders and classes, de facto if not de jure, with restrictions on both the ability to rise in the social/political/economic order and a lack of rules and regulations to prevent the abuse of the lower classes by the upper classes, must give rise to the unconscionable rule of an oligarchic elite, against which the lower classes must--simply to survive--eventually revolt. If that revolution is violent, it will ultimately be to the detriment of all concerned. As President Kennedy warned his fellow millionaires in his Inaugural Address, "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."

Related to this is the dependence of one's degree of freedom upon the value of the property one holds, as suggested in Kirk's Fourth Canon. This Canon implicitly limits the highest degree of freedom in a nation to the greatest possessors of wealth. Basing a human being's freedom upon his or her possession of wealth is the worst way I can think of to measure his or her inherent worth. Using that as a measuring stick, Bernie Madoff is a saint, and Mother Theresa was garbage. Worse yet, assigning wealth as the primary determining factor for the basic rights, and concomitant degree of basic liberty, you might enjoy, is, I believe, contrary to American ideals. Wealth demonstrates only your ability to gather material possessions, not the ability to use any of the ancient virtues of justice, prudence, temperance or charity in your dealings with your fellow human beings, especially in matters of governance or in electing representatives or magistrates. Additionally, as we are painfully relearning in the United States today, too great a disparity of wealth is as much, if not more, an enemy of our liberties as the most thorough leveling of economic resources the world has ever seen. It seems once again that Aristotle was right: all things in moderation.

A quick, but related, sidebar here: The real reason why the oligarchs have worked so hard to establish the legal precedent of increasing rights for corporations is quite simple, although it only became self-evident to me this summer when I seriously thought about the Supreme Court's giving credence, in its decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission , to the ludicrous idea that money--especially unlimited money--and free speech are the same thing. When I first looked at the decision in the context of the rise of the oligarchic corporate state, together with the men who made the decision--the five most reactionary current members of the Court--the reason behind it became clear. What is happening now in America, from a purely historical viewpoint, is the establishment for the members of the "ruling class" of a greater degree of protection under the law, in the form of rights and powers, than those of the common people they dominate. This has happened with every aristocracy and oligarchy in history. Corporations are the skeleton upon which this additional protection has been hung to benefit our current oligarchy.

I have already dealt with one of the faults in Dr. Kirk's original Fifth Canon, the one having to do with tradition, in the paragraph discussing his Second Canon of Conservatism. Prejudice (which Kirk changed to prescription in the Seventh Revised Edition of The Conservative Mind [see p. 62]) and distrust of reason are inherent faults in the Providential Theory of History that Kirk espouses in his classic work. We have seen in recent times the disrespect with which today's so-called Conservatives (in reality, Reactionaries of the sort that Dr. Kirk warns us against elsewhere in the work [pp, 472-5, 483-6, 489, 493-4]--not directly, but by strong implication) treat our nation's history. David Barton, who attempts to turn all of the Founding Fathers--the best known of whom, including America's first "dirty old man," Benjamin Franklin, were Deists and religious iconoclasts--into a group of "evangelical Christians," which they were not. Barton is simply the best known, and the most refuted, of an unsavory lot. (See Chris Rodda's book and website, Liars for Jesus:The Religious Right's Alternative Version of American History, for more on Mr. Barton's insane flights of fancy.) Additionally, individuals, like Senator Rand Paul's Social Media Director Jack Hunter, have taken Dr. Kirk's tacit permission to be prejudiced and dismissive of reason as a license for them to be bigoted and borderline treasonous. (See "Rand Paul's Aide: A Dunce on the Confederacy," The Atlantic, July 11, 2013.)

Prejudice--including prejudicial legal prescriptions--is nothing more than an excuse to not think: to not find out the truth of a situation and to treat another human being as a thing, which, as I have written many times before, beginning with my August 5, 2009 OpEdNews article, The Hope for Audacity, is a human being's first step toward an act of evil.

Avoiding the use of your reason is likewise an excuse to be less than human yourself, and to give yourself permission to treat others as equally subhuman, which by my definition is doubly evil. We cannot permit ourselves to become anything less than the best human being we possibly can be. As I wrote in my January 3, 2013 OpEdNews article "Human State," humans are the animals that choose, and choice always has moral implications. We are the only ones who have a conscience (unless there is a study of lesser primates or cetaceans of which I am unaware) to bother us when we do wrong. Our only tools when choosing between right and wrong are our reason and experience.

The First Century B.C.E. Jewish teacher, Rabbi ben Hilliel, was once asked by a student if he could explain the essence of the Torah (the first Five Books of the Christian Old Testament) while standing on one foot. The old Rabbi stood up on one foot and said, "That which you would not have done to yourself, do not do to others. This is the essence of the Torah. All of the rest is commentary: now read the commentary." The old Rabbi had used his reason, as well as his years of experience, to distill the essence of the Five Books of Moses--the Heart of Judaism--into a single sentence. It has come down to us--in slightly altered form--over the centuries as the Golden Rule. Everything else is, in fact, commentary. This, the use of both reason and experience to arrive at a simple truth, is a mode of understanding that Dr. Kirk seems to have either forgotten or overlooked, if he ever knew it at all.

Any attempt to keep a nation's Constitution, laws, systems and customs static in a constantly changing world not only does not serve the best interests of the nation or its people, but is in fact harmful to that nation in both the short- and the long-term. Dr. Kirk realizes and accounts for this fact in his book. (See Kirk, op cit., p. 9, among other places in the Seventh Revised Edition.) Regrettably, the reactionaries of America's so-called "Tea Party" have either forgotten, or have never understood this simple fact.

Finally, we have Dr. Kirk's innate distrust of change and innovation in society. He favors instead an ambiguous "reform," which is at the heart of his Sixth Canon. This should not surprise us. Dr. Kirk, at the end of The Conservative Mind (pp. 476-90), makes the argument that the "radical" left (liberals and others he disagrees with on the left) has offered nothing new to the public since 1950. With this view, Dr. Kirk blithely ignores the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone Beauvoir, Erich Fromm, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John Rawls, Reverend William Coffin Sloane, Riane Eisler, and the rest of the major protagonists in the Civil Rights, Women's Rights, and Gay Rights movements in America, as well as the anti-nuclear, anti-war, and other Human Rights movements around the world.

It should be noted that, in the First Edition of his book, Dr. Kirk had recourse to a divine Providence, which may or may not exist, to make his Sixth Canon work. (I too believe God exists, but I also believe, as Aesop said two millennia ago, He/She helps those who work hardest to help themselves.) The Revised Seventh Edition takes a step back from its dependence on Divine Providence, but with his dismissive attitude and tone toward "radical," i.e. liberal, thought since 1950, we should not be surprised by Dr. Kirk's fear of change and innovation.

Beware of Well-written Propaganda

You, gentle reader, must always remember while you are reading The Conservative Mind --or any other opinion piece including my own--that while Dr. Kirk was a superb political scientist, and an able historian, he was also a propagandist for the cause of conservatism, his form of conservatism. He was not above ignoring facts, and misconstruing or misdirecting both the actions and philosophies of individuals, in order to arrive at his desired conclusion.

One of Kirk's most important pieces of misdirection is to state that all of the conservative ideals of Great Britain and America are good, and all of the "radical" ideas are bad. In fact, Kirk will give credit for the actions, as well as for many ideas, of those on the left, to conservatives, and vice-versa, to shore up his arguments. For example, he attributes to Thomas Jefferson, not to George Washington and John Adams, responsibility for the line in the Treaty with Tripoli which asserts that America is not a "Christian nation" (Kirk, op cit., p. 458). This type of writing sets a bad precedent for the conservatives that followed him.

As I stated earlier, Kirk is very much a hierarchical, authoritarian conservative. If he had been alive at the time of the American Revolution, I believe he would have sided with King George III, not with Washington, Franklin, Jefferson and Adams. I might be wrong, but given his six canons above, I believe I am correct.

Kirk's Is Not Conservatism's Only Modern Template

I would also note that Dr. Kirk's are not the only rules for Conservatism presented since World War II. Read Peter Viereck's statement of the essential principles of conservatism (from his 1949 paper Conservatism Revisited 6), and note the differences between his principles of conservatism and those of Dr. Kirk. Vierick writes that "The conservative principles par excellence are proportion and measure; self-expression through self-restraint; preservation through reform; humanism and classical balance; a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux; and a fruitful obsession for unbroken historic continuity. These principles together create freedom, a freedom built not on the quicksand of adolescent defiance but on the bedrock of ethics and law." Dr. Kirk's Canons are far more authoritarian and self-limiting than Viereck's principles.

However, to give him his due, Dr. Kirk was anything but laudatory in The Conservative Mind about the type of conservatism that we see America--especially the majority of our wealthiest 0.1%--embracing today. David Jenkins in his article on Russell Kirk points out that Kirk was not happy with the sort of conservatism espoused by Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover prior to the Great Depression [Amplification in brackets]:

"In his seminal book The Conservative Mind, From Burke to Eliot," Jenkins writes, "Kirk pointedly described how the nation deviated from true conservatism in the 1920s. He wrote:

""The United States had come a long way from the piety of Adams and the simplicity of Jefferson. The principle of real leadership ignored, the immortal objects of society forgotten, practical conservatism [has] degenerated into mere laudation of "private enterprise,' economic policy almost wholly surrendered to special interests--such a nation was inviting the catastrophes which compel society to re-examine first principles.'" [Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Elliot, Seventh Revised Edition, p. 455.]

These words are no less applicable to the situation we have today.

A Different View of the Future

Dr. Kirk would have been opposed to the following idea, written by Brooklyn College and CUNY Economics Professor Corey Robin, for The Nation magazine in June, 2010, and reprinted by AlterNet.org:

"Since the nineteenth century, it has been the task of the left to hold up to liberal civilization a mirror of its highest values and to say, 'You do not look like this.' You claim to believe in the rights of man, but it is only the rights of property you uphold. You claim to stand for freedom, but it is only the freedom of the strong to dominate the weak. If you wish to live up to your principles, you must give way to their demiurge. Allow the dispossessed to assume power, and the ideal will be made real, the metaphor will be made material."--Corey Robin, "Like Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand Peddled Garbage as Truth--Why Did America Buy It?"

Robin's vision of "liberal civilization" seems a tad bit Utopian on its face, but FDR and his successors, up until the Reagan Administration, demonstrated that it was based on a foundation of truth. The United States created the largest, best educated, most all-inclusive middle-class in its history, driven by President Roosevelt's New Deal, including his G.I. Bill. Just as Aristotle had stated in his Politics (Book IV, Chapter 11), this thirty-five-year period of middle-class dominance saw an economic equalization without intentionally stripping the rich of all of their wealth; a social revolution that ended a century of apartheid in the United States; and technological innovations that included the end (at least in the First World nations) of many of the world's killer diseases--including polio and smallpox--that had killed and crippled millions over the centuries. Embodying promise for the rest of mankind, this golden era also put humanity on the moon, and saw the start of the age of the personal computer. Only greed, violence, and a lack of vision prevented that age of wonders from continuing not only technologically, but economically and socially as well.

Professor Robin wrote another article for his blog earlier this year (March 20, 2013), "Edmund Burke on the Free Market," which demonstrates to me how often Dr. Kirk "cherry-picked" his facts in order to make the facts fit his premise. The following observations by Dr. Kirk's hero, Edmund Burke, show him to be far more practical, and of much greater depth and liberality of thought, than Dr. Kirk would care to admit:

"The value of money must be judged, like every thing else, from its rate at market. To force that market, or any market, is of all things the most dangerous."

"Let Government protect and encourage industry, secure property, repress violence, and discountenance fraud, it is all that they have to do. In other respects, the less they meddle in these affairs the better."

"Of all things, an indiscreet tampering with the trade of provisions is the most dangerous."

"Laws prescribing, or magistrates exercising, a very stiff, and often inapplicable rule, or a blind and rash discretion, never can provide the just proportions between earning and salary on the one hand, and nutriment on the other: whereas interest, habit, and the tacit convention, that arise from a thousand nameless circumstances, produces a tact that regulates without difficulty, what laws and magistrates cannot regulate at all."

"The balance between consumption and production makes price. The market settles, and alone can settle, that price. Market is the meeting and conference of the consumer and producer, when they mutually discover each other's wants. Nobody, I believe, has observed with any reflection what market is, without being astonished at the truth, the correctness, the celerity, the general equity, with which the balance of wants is settled. They who wish the destruction of that balance, and would fain by arbitrary regulation decree, that defective production should not be compensated by encreased price, directly lay their axe to the root of production itself." [Author's Note: So dies "supply-side"economics.]

The last three of these statements are from Burke's Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, which he wrote in response to a scheme adopted by the magistrates of Berkshire in 1795 to supplement the earnings of farm laborers with government payments so that they could earn a living wage. The supplement would depend upon a variety of factors: the price of corn, the size of the laborer's family, the cost of bread. Readers of Karl Polanyi will recognize this plan as the Speenhamland system.

Dr. Kirk's bias in favor of an aristocracy of wealth, and against the rule by a large, well-educated, informed, and responsibly active middle-class, blinds him to the possibilities inherent in such a system. But Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy saw the possibilities.

A Natural Aristocracy of the Middle-Class

"There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.... There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class.... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendency."--Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. [The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; vol. 13, p. 396, 1904.]

In creating the circumstances for a substantial (in every sense of that word) middle class in America from the ashes of the Great Depression and the fires of the Second World War, President Franklin Roosevelt attained, albeit in a different form, the materialistic end of Thomas Jefferson's dream for the nation Jefferson had helped found. It was left to President John F. Kennedy, in his Inaugural Speech, to challenge this new and still expanding middle class--which was beginning to include African-and Hispanic-Americans, together with other minorities--to become the all-inclusive moral/spiritual aristocracy that would complete Jefferson's dream. (See my friend Professor Thomas Farrell's July 5, 2011 OpEdNews article "Americans Should Study ARISTOTLE'S NICOMACHEAN ETHICS (Book Review)" for a more thorough discussion of this subject.)

The wealthiest Americans, the oligarchs who considered themselves to be the traditional "aristocracy" of the United States of America (which has, for the most part, long forgotten the duties an aristocracy traditionally owes to their nation), heard JFK's challenge to America: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" as a threat to their ascendancy, and knew that if he went any further, they had to end it. JFK managed to avoid or overcome the traps the oligarchs laid for him to undermine his power in the first two years of his Presidency. When, following the stroke suffered by his father, Joseph Kennedy Sr., and the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK began to use his position as President to directly oppose the wishes of the oligarchs, I believe they had him killed.

The descendants--both blood and spiritual--of the men who I believe were ultimately responsible for President Kennedy's murder have come within a hair's-breadth of turning our constitutionally limited, democratically elected, representative republic into a fully-fledged oligarchy, where the rich can hide behind the additional legal protections of their corporate shield and oppress the rest of us with impunity. We cannot permit this to happen. Understanding their thought process is only possible by reading books like Dr. Kirk's.

Conclusion: Read at Your Own Risk

Dr. Kirk's book is definitely a "read at your own risk," for he is extremely persuasive, a master of the subtle invective (calling Thomas Jefferson an "Epicurean," for example). He will also forget to mention important facts to avoid undermining his argument, either rationally or emotionally. (Such an omission, for instance, is this statement by Edmund Burke in his 1756 monograph, A Vindication of Natural Society: "The whole business of the poor is to administer to the idleness of the rich.") Omitting such a self-damaging view may serve to humanize Dr. Kirk, but the conservatism he describes and espouses is not one that spells a bright future for us. It is one where the majority sits back and lets the elite rule. I can think of few things more dangerous for our future.

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'