MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry: Children Are Collective Responsibility

Folks on the right are pretty shocked at this new "Lean Forward" ad featuring Melissa Harris-Perry at MSNBC.

Here's William Jacobson's post, "MSNBC — All your children are belong to us":

There is something wrong at MSNBC.

Terrifying-->MSNBC Host Melissa Harris-Perry » All Your Kids Belong To Us: youtu.be/N3qtpdSQox0 via @youtube
— Anna Maria Hoffman (@AM_Hoffman) April 6, 2013

Actually, I don't think there's anything wrong at MSNBC.

Remember, this is who they are. This is what they do.

Harris-Perry is perfectly comfortable spouting party propaganda, complete with all its Orwellian lies (that we don't spend enough on education, for example, a fact belied by comparative U.S. public and educational spending among the Western industrial democracies).

But that's okay. I think we're reaching a point in American politics where members of the progressive left are badly overreaching due to a perception of total liberation from the normal constraints of politics. As we saw with Krystal Ball, the left has no problem using 4-year-old children to spread homosexual marriage propaganda. In Ball's case, as least she was using her own child. But with Harris-Perry, the implication is that families are selfishly hoarding their children, denying to the state privately-minded generational capital that should instead be a proper public resource. For if children belong to the collective --- as in communal ownership --- then everyone is legally responsible for their education and well being, and political leaders can forcibly extract even more revenues for financing their education and welfare. This is socialist collectivism at its finest. And it's clearly un-American in the U.S. historical context. This country prizes individualism. Even a public educational system like ours promotes individualism because we see formal schooling as the means of promoting individual self-sufficiency and upward mobility. And schools have always been under the authority of local communities, since that way families can better control political leaders charged with their administration. It has never been true that children were seen as social capital subject to collective responsibility, much less that of a national collective of the sort that Harris-Perry envisions. That's a Marxist notion, or a Maoist one, as other blogs have noted. See Weasel Zippers, "MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry Advocates Maoist “Collective” Child Raising, America’s “Kids Belong to Their Communities”…"

Also at Moonbattery, "MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry: Children Are Communal Property":

To a moonbat, the community = the government. The voice of the community is the voice of the government, which is becoming increasingly synonymous with the establishment media.

Anyone still think it is hyperbole to call these people totalitarian?

Actually, it's not hyperbole at all. Harris-Perry sounds fascist even, in the sense of European interwar fascism of the individual being folded into a superior essence of the all-powerful state. Again, it's bizarre in the American experience, but progressives are really taking their political capital and running with it. The downside for them is that flyover America isn't at all in tune with this kind of collectivist fascist intellectualism. There will be a reckoning around election time. Indeed, I expect that MSNBC might have bitten off more that it's able to chew. We might be hearing more about "Lean Forward" very soon, and not in a good way.

Added: A great discussion, at Patheos, "All Your Children Are Belong to Us…"