What exactly is a "statist". I heard Mark Levine use that word, and now I see it being parrotted here, but I'm not sure what it means. Someone who thinks there should be a government?
I thought I gave a fairly succinct description in my post above.
(A statist) want(s) (emphasize) centralized power of the state and de-emphasized autonomy of the individual.
It is from Mark Levin, but not a parrot of what he says. I find it a better definition of what I observe than some of the tags I was trying to stick on it before like marxist or socialist. That's because, it doesn't really matter what the economics of the statist are, it is more important that they emphasize centralized control to the detriment of individual liberty.
Both Republicans and Democrats can be statists. I would argue that both Bushs were statists. It is a matter of degree, speed and focus, just how a particular flavor of statist deprives the individual of their liberty. The Republican flavor does it at a generally slower speed and slightly different focus and the Democrat flavor does it a faster speed and another focus.
That's what it means to me anyway. I can only speak for myself. But, I think the focus of the "Statist" appellation is to denote a control befreft of any economic meaning. So, you could be a fascist statist or a communist statist or a socialist statist.
I started thinking about how Republicans/Libertarians phylosophies are survival of the fittest/social darwinism.
So I looked it up, and it mentioned that the term and theory came to be back during the Guilded Age when the original robber baron's were doing just about the same thing that the GOP from 2000-2006 did. And back then we had to ultimately break up Standard Oil. Same guys started the federal reserve. Some say they are the ones who own/control our country/politicians.
They raised inflation so that people who once talked about thousands were suddenly talking in millions. And today we talk billions like we used to talk about millions.
And today, if you haven't noticed, the Robber Baron's are back, and they did the same thing to us now that they did back then, that also led to the first Great Depression.
For the novel, see The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
"The Breakers", a gilded-age Victorian mansion in Newport, Rhode Island.In American history, the Gilded Age refers to substantial growth in population in the United States and extravagant displays of wealth and excess of America's upper-class during the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction era, in the late 19th century (1865-1901). The wealth polarization derived primarily from industrial and population expansion. The businessmen of the Second Industrial Revolution created industrial towns and cities in the Northeast with new factories, and contributed to the creation of an ethnically diverse industrial working class which produced the wealth owned by rising super-rich industrialists and financiers such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Flagler, and J.P. Morgan. Their critics called them "robber barons", referring to their use of overpowering and sometimes unethical financial manipulations. There was a small, growing labor union movement, led in part by Samuel Gompers, who created the American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded in 1886. It featured very close contests between the Republicans and Democrats, with occasional third parties. Nearly all the eligible men were political partisans and voter turnout often exceeded 90% in some states.
This period also witnessed the creation of a modern industrial economy. A national transportation and communication network was created, the corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed business operations. By the beginning of the twentieth century, per capita income and industrial production in the United States exceeded that of any other country except Britain. Long hours and hazardous working conditions led many workers to attempt to form labor unions despite strong opposition from industrialists and the courts.
Is history repeating itself?
The social democrats are supposed to come back and say something smart 
