Follow-up Questions 2

Guest hosting on Hardball, former Senate staffer Lawrence O'Donnell asks Pennsylvanian Katy Abram about her "political awakening" and consistency of logic:

Socialism didn't exist as anything but Utopian political theory as the Constitution was framed. And although Marx & Friedrich Engels used the terms "socialism" and "communism" interchangeably, as put into practice by Lenin, what emerged in the Soviet Union wasn't exactly what they had in mind. And for that matter, modern American style capitalism isn't theoretically pure, either.

What emerges over time is a "social contract" about who does what, and how, to make a country work... And of the thirty industrialized nations in the world, only the United States has not included universal health care in our contract provisions.

As he observed a then 50 year old America, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the United States occupies a special niche among developed nations in terms of its national credo, historical evolution, political and religious institutions and unique origins... Later this type of thought evolved into what's known as "American Exceptionalism."

Perhaps we should reconsider whether it's always a good thing to stand so alone, and use our "indoor voices" as we remember the phrase "united we stand, divided we fall," and decide where that stand should be.