Why is one a member of a political party?
In the United States today, the logical order of progression is first to become a democrat and as the party continues to shift further to the left, one need merely remain a loyal democrat to be a socialist as
defined in the previous blog. The party has shifted radically to the left since the arrival of Barack Obama on the political landscape. One will remember that an American socialist believes that one should advocate redistribution of incomes and programs of welfare policy. Since all contemporary political parties have long embraced these same policies, albeit in more moderate form, socialism as a political program has nothing new to offer. There’s nothing much left for socialists to do than demand ever more governmental entitlements or “freebies,” and to promote ever more radical social policies. They reject cultural norms and fiscal responsibility.
How does one become a democrat?
Many democrats come from democratic families and later cling to their beliefs as a matter of family loyalty. For some it’s almost like the family religion; loyalty requires that you stay the course and remain true to the faith even when the faith changes. Others, however, come to the party when they are in school or in college. Then being a democrat is more a matter of being “credentialed.” Professors with 
an agenda are democrats and they let students know early on that anyone not promoting democrats is uneducated and unsophisticated. Once you are urbane and clued in you don’t have to do much research to keep up with the talking points and the party line. My book on socialism addresses not only the historically extended socialist abhorrence of the corporation, the market, and the bourgeoisie or business class, but also the indoctrination of young recruits with the anti-market mentality. It discusses this issue under the rubrics of “social learning.”
How does democratic indoctrination work?
John Cassidy (2009, How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities) writes of an experiment by Solomon Asch in the early 1950s. Students participated in a “vision test” to compare the lengths of straight lines. The instructor asked each student to identify which two of the lines matched. The sight test was not at all difficult. The lines were drawn so that it was immediately clear which line on the second card matched the one on the first. In each of the groups, however, only one of the students was a genuine volunteer. All the
others had been instructed to give the same wrong answer in the trials, picking a line that was clearly not of the same length as the line on the first card.
This experiment was conducted with more than a hundred volunteers at three different colleges. About one in four of the subjects would maintain their independence and pick the right line every time. The remainder followed the majority in at least one of the trials, selecting the wrong line. “Some subjects gave the wrong answer virtually every time, completely ignoring the evidence of their eyes. In follow-up interviews with Asch, the subjects said they had suspected that the other people in their groups had been acting like sheep, copying the answer of the first responder, but despite these suspicions, they also copied their answers. Others said they quickly came to the conclusion that the majority was right, and then attempted to hide their own shortcomings by merging with the crowd…Asch concluded…“That we have found the tendency to conformity in our society so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern.”