The Pilgrims were the original leftists

Anyone who's read an honest history of the Pilgrims knows that when they got to America they were essentially a socialist Religious community seeking to build a heaven on earth. They failed and despite finding enormous food caches left by the smallpox and influenza ravaged Indians they almost starved until they granted permanent property rights to each family. As such, the first Thanksgiving can be read as the Pilgrims giving thanks to God for delivering them from the 17th century equivalent of Left Liberal  rule.

As Paul Rahe writes:

We have much to learn from the history of the Plymouth Plantation. For, in their first year in the New World, the Pilgrims conducted an experiment in social engineering akin to what is now contemplated; and, after an abortive attempt at cultivating the land in common, their leaders reflected on the results in a manner that Americans today should find instructive.

William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, reports that, at that time, he and his advisers considered “how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.” And “after much debate of things,” he then adds, they chose to abandon communal property, deciding that “they should set corn every man for his own particular” and assign “to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end.”

The results, he tells us, were gratifying in the extreme, “for it made all hands very industrious” and “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Even “the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”

Moreover, he observes, “the experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years . . . amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times . . . that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.” In practice, America’s first socialist experiment “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”

In practice, “the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.”

But the original heritage of the Seperatists explains a few other things about left liberals:

1. Why a grim eat your peas puritanical streak runs through everything they do
2. Why they look upon their politics as a "mission" and a "calling" rather than a practical set of tasks
3. Why they continually behave as if they are building a shining city on a hill or ushering the new heaven and earth. "Hope" "Change" "FundamentallyTransform" "A new politics of meaning" "Ask not blah blah bla...." and so on and so forth in messianic ad infinitum.
4. Why they consider their ideological adversaries not to be mistaken but to be evil.
5. And finally: Why any institution dominated by them quickly drives heterodox thinkers out to the modern day equivalent of Rhode Island.

More at the link.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/11/americas-first-socialist-republic-3.php