You NEED to understand the minds of socialists. Most dimocraps are socialists and don't even know it.
Of course, most dimocraps are irreconcilably stupid....
https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/index.htm
9. Six Strains of Socialism-From-Above
We have seen that there are several different strains or currents running through Socialism-From-Above. They are usually intertwined, but let us separate out some of the more important aspects for a closer look.
1. Philanthropism. Socialism (or freedom, or what-have-you) is to be handed down, in order to Do the People Good, by the rich and powerful out of the kindness of their hearts. As the Communist Manifesto put it, with the early utopians like Robert Owen in mind, Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them. In gratitude, the downtrodden poor must above all avoid getting rambunctious, and no nonsense about class struggle or self- emancipation. This aspect may be considered a special case of
2.
Elitism.
We have mentioned several cases of this conviction that socialism is the business of a new ruling minority, non-capitalist in nature and therefore guaranteed pure, imposing its own domination either temporarily (for a mere historical era) or even permanently. In either case, this new ruling class is likely to see its goal as an Educational Dictatorship over the masses to Do Them Good, of course the dictatorship being exercised by an elite party which suppresses all control from below, or by benevolent despots or Savior-Leaders of some kind, or by Shaws Supermen, by eugenic manipulators, by Proudhons anarchist managers or Saint-Simons technocrats or their more modern equivalents with up-to-date terms and new verbal screens which can be hailed as fresh social theory as against nineteenth-century Marxism.
On the other hand, the revolutionary-democratic advocates of Socialism-from-Below have also always been a minority, but the chasm between the elitist approach and the vanguard approach is crucial, as we have seen in the case of Debs. For him as for Marx and Luxemburg, the function of the revolutionary vanguard is to impel the mass-majority to fit themselves to take power in their own name, through their own struggles. The point is not to deny the critical importance of minorities, but to establish a different relationship between the advanced minority and the more backward mass.
