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No, not exactly. The goal of social democracy, a.k.a. the paternalistic welfare state, has been quite clear at every stage.Its originator, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck put the initial goal this way:My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.The idea had become necessary because Kaiser Wilhelm I had tasked him with the goal of unifying all the various German principalities into a united Germany. Bismarck had, like everyone, noted that the ideas of Karl Marx and the social democrats were exceedingly appealing to the people.* And so he simply used his power to implement them in the name of the Kaiser. It worked. Germany took only a few years in the 1860s to unite under the Kaiser’s rule in response to Bismarck’s program.But then Marx angrily denounced the whole episode and those members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany who were leaving the fold to ally with Bismarck.** In his caustic Critique of the Gotha Program of 1875, Marx pointedly proclaimed that the provision of “state aid” under state authority could never produce socialism and a class-free society.*** It would in fact, Marx insisted, be the ruin of socialism.Marx matter-of-factly laid out that in order for state aid to be successful as part of the path to socialism, it would have to be administered by the workers themselves teamed up as a dictatorship of the proletariat—the temporary transition Marx had envisioned to full socialism. Providing aid under state authority could only lead to a permanent dictatorship of a bourgeois elite who would use such schemes to maintain a permanent underclass in order to justify their rule.****It is highly doubtful Bismarck was at all aware of Marx’s objections; indeed, were he, he would have seen them as feature rather than bug. He had concluded years earlier that the socialists had no real power or effective leadership and he could co-opt them as he pleased. Many SPD leaders crossed over to Bismarck. They no doubt understood that state power was an evil per Marx, but decided that at least Bismarck had the ball rolling and rationalized that they could steer it to socialism over the long run. Besides, they now enjoyed prestigious government jobs. Just three years later, Bismarck outlawed all those socialists not in his employ.A unified Germany and a welfare state was electric news around the world all through the 1860s and 70s. Bismarck to this day maintains a reputation as the greatest statesman ever. Politicians in the United States in both parties clamored after social democracy for the power it would bring to their offices. Both Republican Teddy Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson denounced our Constitution right from the White House as “a relic document” that needed to yield to “the new statecraft out of Prussia.” Roosevelt even pursued Prussian-style imperialism while in office!Progressivism was the name given to the movement to bring social democracy to the United States, and the movement took off gangbusters. Here’s a four-color-glossy-brochure take on social democracy out of Germany from Wilson’s time in office typical of what Americans were regularly treated to during the Progressive Era:The state has its finger on the pulse of the worker from the cradle to the grave. His education, his health, and his working efficiency are matters of constant concern. He is carefully protected from accident by laws and regulation governing factories. He is trained in his hand and in his brain to be a good workman and is insured against accident, sickness, and old age. While idle through no fault of his own, work is frequently found for him. When homeless, a lodging is offered so that he will not easily pass into the vagrant class.—Frederic Howe, Socialized Germany, 1915But German workers, overwhelmingly, were German, and there they enjoyed a history of aristocracy to help curtail worker social aspirations. We had a different situation here in the US as increasingly our workers were straight out of Italy or White Russia or Nigeria or Ireland or China, or only a generation or two removed. Not only that, they were free and equal. The problem for social democracy to be addressing then was not how to help them be productive but how to keep them from becoming too productive and so gaining too much social status.There were indeed proselytizers for socialism like Howe in the progressive movement, but most ardent socialists, most often immigrants, were in separate socialist parties. Within the progressive movement, there was little exuberance for the plight of the working man and his family. The real goal, seldom openly stated, was to protect Anglo-Saxon Protestant privilege as well as to impose Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethics on all the rest.At the time, the native stock was four-fifths Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and four-fifths of those, roughly, joined the progressive bandwagon yielding a super-majority. Given that, the goal became to greatly increase majoritarian-rule democracy and democratic interpretation of our Constitution in order to aggregate significantly greater political power over others than our Constitution allows.Back in Germany, however, the seeds were being sown for the death of social democracy. There was an increasingly rancid stench coming from social democratic Germany for the more ardent supporters of socialism around Europe. When the social democrats stayed loyal to Kaiser Wilhelm II throughout the Great War and then flatly stated their intention to retain capitalism, two other forms of right socialism took off with a vengeance.Marx’s socialism had been of the left, anti-authoritarian variety, but social democracy, fascism and state communism owed much more to Bismarck and his impregnation of socialism with monarchism and state power. All three were top-down, authoritarian forms of governing, each feeling the other two forms were not socialism at all. Marx was long dead, but he would not have considered any of the three socialist.Not too many years later, it was a crime to be a social democrat in Germany, and not too many years after that, another Great War started with each of the three right socialisms vying to eliminate the other two. Both Herr Hitler and Signore Mussolini were impressed by and copied widely from Woodrow Wilson. Il Duce was particularly fond of Wilson’s assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt, and singled out his takeover of American shipbuilding during the war as proof that the Fascist concept of dirigisme would work to help Italy swiftly rearm.While the goal of social democrats in Germany was to avoid being arrested and put into a National Socialist re-education camp, progressives in the United States were dealing with a reckoning of their own. Between the many ugly excesses of Wilson and the backfire of Prohibition, the progressive movement’s numbers were cut in half. The progressive label had become so toxic that when Roosevelt ran for president in ’32, he billed himself as a liberal.During the Progressive Era, liberalism was flat as a pancake. The liberal label had been tarnished way back in 1872 when Horace Greeley ran against U. S. Grant’s reelection on the Liberal Republican ticket. From McKinley through Wilson no more than single digits of those polled opposed such patently illiberal progressive programs as miscegenation laws or forced sterilization of mental and criminal “inferiors.”Wilson’s wretched excesses had prompted the birth of the American Civil Liberties Union in the hopes of preventing any repeat by future presidents. Liberalism was reviving, mostly among recent immigrants who arrived and wondered, “Where are the vaunted American freedoms?” Freedom was not a goal of progressives; rather, they worked hard to promote democracy as their goal. That would be majoritarian-rule democracy to make certain that their popular majority could be used to keep all others, particularly the “deplorables,” in their place.Roosevelt was not liberal in the least, but the label beat running under the by-then toxic brand of “progressive.” His goal during his administration was to push the United States, gently, subtly, toward full-blown statist social democracy. And so in ’37 when he finally got a majority-progressive Supreme Court, he again started promoting the liberal label. Why? He wanted to push the highly statist notion of positive rights (the kind you get from government, such as right to an education, freedom from hunger and so on). He thought the liberal label would help color them as in the American rather than Prussian tradition.Popular as FDR had been, after the war ended, progressivism was quite unpopular. We’d fought to end socialism, and progressivism had not always hid its claims to being socialist. First Soviet communism and then Chinese communism took on belligerent postures, and we found ourselves in a Cold War with them. The Democratic Party marginalized its progressives, a few old New Deal holdovers like Lyndon Johnson apart, and the GOP banished its John Birchers and other ardent anti-communists for their illiberal positions.For almost an entire generation, Congress was liberal. John Kennedy became the only true liberal ever elected from the Democratic Party (Grover Cleveland, the only other with a claim was not racially liberal in the least). Civil rights moved to the forefront of Congress’s agenda, if largely reluctantly. The general feeling in the political class was that the only way the communists could hurt us was by pointing out our dreadful treatment of blacks and others. We’d best do something to take that valid charge away from them.That left the northern and western wings of the Democratic Party allied with the Republicans on behalf of civil liberties, with the Conservative Democrats of the South the odd-faction out. The Conservative Democrats had been so seamlessly allied with progressives (often in both parties) through progressivism 1.0 and 2.0 that many, like LBJ considered themselves progressive as well as Conservative (capital C because they considered themselves a party and ideology within a party).John Kennedy had picked Johnson—there was little love lost between the two—in order to insure winning the South. Johnson was both Conservative Democrat and New Deal progressive. With Kennedy’s assassination, a progressive moved into the Oval Office. Still, he pushed Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill to passage.LBJ, a consummate politician in the mold of his idol, FDR, knew that his party would no longer be able to obtain a large majority of black votes with empty promises of civil service jobs and similar—the black freedom movement had grown strong and demanding. At the same time, Conservative Democrats would exact vengeance on the party, he knew, for forcing an end to segregation. Johnson decided to make a virtue of necessity and push not only the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but also his own War on Poverty initiative.He promoted the latter to key southern politicians by angling for their votes with the claim, “I’ll have these niggers voting Democrat for two-hundred years.” It should be pretty clear that one does not hold an entire race of people in thrall to a political party for ten generations by making them well off. No other Democrats I’m aware of have tipped their mitts likewise, but the minister of education in Venezuela recently candidly admitted the aim of the Chavez and Maduro governments had not been “to take the people out of poverty so they become middle class and then turn into escuálidos” (a derogatory term to denote opposition members).At the time, poverty was already on a steep downward trajectory:Is that the biggest program failure ever? No, actually absolute poverty did continue to follow the red dotted line. A key point of the initiative was to change the definition of poverty to a relative one based on a formula that would permit benefits to be provided to between eleven and fifteen percent of voters year-in, year-out. The legacy of LBJ is playing Democrat-favoring politics with taxpayer dollars.But the question concerns whether social democracy is out to destroy the nuclear family to enable making all of us dependent on government. Personally, I say the post-WWII rise in travel and familiarity with different parts of the country together with the imperative of modern corporations to relocate talent around the country as necessary has had a bigger impact both on nuclear families and community ties.State benefit programs have not so much destroyed intact families as prevented them. Single-parent households have tripled since the War on Poverty was implemented to roughly one-third of all households with children. That is a social fail of colossal dimensions, and, while progressive publications lay the cause off as “mysterious,” I don’t think it is mysterious at all.The Democratic Party has become the party of government, of people who work for and with the government and people who get checks of one kind or another from the government. They are the party of thisand the goal is thus to keep a majority of voters liking what they get from the state under the realization that Democrats are the ones manning the spigot. The goal of social democrats these days can be summarized as money and power for themselves and for their party by keeping enough Americans dependent on checks from the government that they can count on getting reelected.As Michael Faraday, a lapsed third-generation social democrat put it:The victim narrative of the Left is very infectious. You are always the victim and you are always owed something. The wealthy are always evil, while you are always good and wholesome.That hasn’t been working too well for them lately. Perhaps people have been catching on.To sum it all up, I believe that Thomas Jefferson got it right that all forms of government apart from the one we are constitutionally guaranteed have a single overarching goal:The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.* Social democracy was the name given to a supposedly non-revolutionary form of communism, a ruse to get around anti-sedition laws. All communist organizations in Europe in the mid-1800s went by the label social democrats.** Marx was typically scathing in his denunciation of apostasy in the ranks of his followers. For instance when he learned Ferdinand Lassalle was exchanging ideas with Bismarck, he wrote Engels:The Jewish Nigger Lassalle ... fortunately departs at the end of this week ... It is now absolutely clear to me that, as both the shape of his head and his hair texture shows – he descends from the Negros who joined Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the paternal side hybridized with a nigger). Now this combination of Germanness and Jewishness with a primarily Negro substance creates a strange product. The pushiness of the fellow is also nigger-like.*** The term welfare in the specific sense of state aid did not arise until the 1930s and in the US, no doubt a deliberate ruse to dovetail it with the general welfare clause of our Constitution which had been held to that point by the Supreme Court not to confer any substantive powers to Congress.**** In his early years, Marx had been keenly aware of pauperism, the entrenching of poverty that had resulted from the effort of the English Poor Laws to relieve poverty. Much of the discussion within early socialism was of the fact that poverty served the needs of the state and its political elite and that all state remedies were likely instead to increase the problem. No early socialists were saying, hey, how about a paternalistic welfare state as the solution? Rather, they were on the left side of the argument… let’s get rid of the state.