“In Edward Bellamy’s widely read socialist fantasy novel Looking Backward, 2000–1887, a Rip Van Winkle character goes to sleep in the year 1887 and awakens in the year 2000 to discover a changed world. His twentyfirst century companions explain to him how the utopia that astonishes him emerged in the 1930s from the hell of the 1880s. “That utopia involved the promise of security ‘from cradle to grave’—the first use of the that phrase we have come across—as well as detailed government planning, including compulsory national service by all persons over an extended period.”[1] Bellamy’s fiction became much of the world’s reality in twentieth-century socialism. Bellamy believed that “human nature is naturally good and people are ‘godlike in aspirations . . . with divinest impulses of tenderness and self-sacrifice.’ Therefore, once external conditions are made acceptable, the Ten Commandments become ‘well-nigh obsolete,’ bringing us a ‘second birth of the human race.’”[2] Bellamy managed to mix the perversions of socialism, secularism, and New Age philosophy into one impossible world.”[3]

[1] Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 93.
[2] Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Washington, DC: Regnery/Gateway, [1983] 1989), 190.

[3] http://americanvision.org/1451/return-of-american-fascism/ Gary DeMar, The Return of American Fascism, Mar 3, 2009.