Now why did I record this book? Norman Thomas is a socialist, not a progressive - and even, in this little work, he takes the time to swipe at the progressives. So what gives? Let's start with two things we all know and can easily prove in 15 seconds, and let's look at how those things are connected.
First, nobody would dare call Theodore Roosevelt a socialist. But we have to admit, Roosevelt was in fact America's first Progressive President.
Second, by the time we get to the 1960's, progressivism and socialism (and to some extent communism even) had all kind-of-but-not-really merged.
How did this merger take place? How did we get from anti-socialist progressives like TR(and Wilson as well) to the merger that we saw in the 1960's that still exists to today? To that I respond:
What is Industrial Democracy?
I'm really not kidding about that. The phrase "Industrial Democracy" - I believe this is the keystone. So too is social justice, but that phrase is too vague. It is true that Theodore Roosevelt was a SJW, a Social Justice Warrior. We have his audio, I don't even have to work to re-produce it. It's the whole deal too. In this original audio, he plainly states he wants social justice, and in addition, it's a gripe about how bad ultra conservatives are. All you reactionaries, you and I, who would be in opposition to TR's statist machinations. It's exactly the kind of screed you'd expect from a rotten progressive, it's just 120 years old.
But why Industrial Democracy? What is so important about that phrase? It's because this phrase links so many things together. It's the glue that binds. Industrial Democracy is much more specific than the phrase social justice, to begin with.
One of the most visible groups of the 1960's radicalism is the group SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society. Most people don't take their time to research it, but this group didn't just spring from nowhere. It was renamed. Renamed from what? The SLID, or, the Student League for Industrial Democracy. So what was the LID? The League for Industrial Democracy, the main group, is the group that published this very Norman Thomas pamphlet.
The LID was also where another person can be found, who is not as well known as he should've been, that being Stuart Chase. Chase is important because he was an advisor to Franklin Roosevelt, and FDR is known to have borrowed the phrase "New Deal" from Chase. Perhaps you've heard of that. And I'm only scratching the surface here of how influential this group the LID was. But let's not get too far confusing the group for the phrase. The phrase is the real nugget, the phrase is everything.
There are other reasons also why I chose this book. For one, I'm actively looking for things that would make good audiobooks that also might catch some conservative eyes and increase the conservative mindshare in regards to free open source audiobooks, and Norman Thomas's name will forever be immortalized in Reagan's "A Time for Choosing". So that's good. There's what I mentioned at the outset. Thomas takes a swipe at the progressives. It's good to highlight every now and then the differences between the two(socialism/progresssivism) and this pamphlet does just that.
Finally, there's also the fact that at the time I began recording Thomas's pamphlet, I needed a small work instead of a full sized book with several hundred pages. So that was good for me personally. At just the time when I needed it, I now have the free hand I needed to get started on my next major audiobook and really give it a good focus. Every other audiobook I'm currently working on, they're all closing and becoming ready for use at around this same time. Just what I needed. My next solo is going to be so much fun and it explains just about everything I've wrote about for the last decade.
