That blog title might make an interesting book title.
It describes the trajectory of the Democratic party over the past 170 years. Before the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the party of slavery. It remained the party of the South for the hundred years after the Civil War.
Today, having had a vetoproof and filibuster proof Congress and openly socialist president, the Democratic party passed a socialist medical plan resembling that of every socialist government on the planet and several environmental and financial bills designed to increase control of the economy.
If you are a Lefty you do not like my proposed trajectory for the Democratic party. You will deny that the legislation was socialist, you will deny that states under Democratic control promote union government workers programs and you will deny that legislation such as the stimulus are part of the socialist ideology. Since Keynes himself never denied his socialist position.... You are simply misleading yourself.
Now the part that Lefties will dislike most. My explanation of why the Democratic Party has moved from slavery to socialism.
The idea that humans are in a hierarchical natural world is fundamental to both positions. The Democrats defending slavery always argued that the natural position of blacks was subordinate to whites. The function of whites was to protect, in a paternal, way the interests of the blacks, the slaves.
That is precisely the current Democratic party view. Most people are too ignorant or too poor or too selfish to understand the need to buy health insurance. Most people cannot make political choices for themselves and so unions must help and protect them. Most people are not able to make occupational or educational decisions for themselves, the government must subsidize behavior to induce the correct outcomes. The same is true for all financial behavior. Most people cannot make reasonable decisions about mortgages, about credit cards, about interest rates, about investments and so they must be protected.
Current paternalism is easy to define as socialist and it is just as easy to define as the core principles of the Democratic Party today and 170 years ago.