CHAPTER SEVEN Socialism: An Unrequited Love Affair
Socialism is making a comeback.
Nearly three decades after our nation celebrated the fall of the Soviet Union—the world’s epicenter of totalitarianism—the Democratic Party has taken a big leap toward the Soviets’ discredited ideology. In the 2016 presidential election, the only Democratic challenger to Hillary Clinton was the self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders. After spending decades in Congress as a cranky oddball, Sanders suddenly found himself the object of a bizarre cult of personality, drawing enormous crowds to hear him tout socialism as the cure for America’s capitalist ills. If Bernie mania seems to have subsided in today’s Democratic primaries, it’s largely because he no longer stands out the way he used to—virtually the entire slate of Democratic contenders has embraced socialist “solutions” to healthcare, taxes, and many other issues.
A February 2019 Fox News poll found that registered voters overall still have a negative view of socialism and positive view of capitalism. Fifty-nine percent view socialism unfavorably and 25 percent view it favorably, while 57 percent view capitalism favorably and 28 percent unfavorably.1 A Rasmussen poll showed similar results. “Sixty percent of all voters believe that socialism represents a threat to America’s founding ideals of freedom, equality and self-governance,” writes Scott Rasmussen. “Eighty percent of GOP voters see socialism as a threat to America’s founding ideals. So do 57 percent of independent voters. But a narrow majority of Democrats (55 percent) disagree.”2
Yet other polls show that a new generation of Americans is romantically embracing socialism with a fascination bordering on idolatry. According to a 2015 YouGov poll, 43 percent of Americans between eighteen and twenty-nine years of age had a favorable opinion of socialism and preferred it to capitalism. In 2016, a Pew poll found that an astonishing 69 percent of those under age thirty would be willing to vote for a socialist to be president of the United States.3
Even more recently, a Gallup poll revealed that less than half of young Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine—45 percent—have a positive view of capitalism, representing a twelve-point decline in just two years, while some 51 percent have positive views of socialism.4 It’s as if a wave of stupid has washed ashore. Likewise, a SurveyMonkey online poll of 2,777 American adults in January 2019 showed that 61 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four have a positive reaction to the word “socialism,” compared to 58 percent for “capitalism.” All older age groups prefer capitalism and the gap increases with age, with only 27 percent of those over sixty-five having a positive view of socialism and 69 percent favoring capitalism.5
The news is not all bad, however. As recently as 2014, only 16 percent of millennials could define socialism, so there is hope to fill these mush-dulled minds with the truth.6 Moreover, a 2019 poll of students aged 13–22 conducted by Young America’s Foundation and Echelon found that 35 percent of respondents viewed socialism positively, but 27 percent of these students were unsure what socialism meant, while 10 percent thought it meant “free stuff.”7 The Rasmussen poll results show that young people aren’t the only ones confused about socialism. A majority (54 percent) of those who have a favorable opinion of socialism prefer that government have less control of the economy. “The bottom line,” notes Rasmussen, “is that growing support for the term ‘socialism’ does not translate into growing support for traditional socialist policies.”8
Another significant development, however, is that membership in the Democratic Socialists of America has ballooned from just seven thousand members in 2016 to over fifty-five thousand today. There are dozens of Democratic Socialist officeholders throughout local, state, and federal governments, most notably media sensation Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.9
How can we expect young people to understand the horrors of socialism with the overwhelming liberal bias of college professors? A recent study by the National Association of Scholars showed that some 40 percent of colleges in the United States have no Republican professors. “The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic,” writes Mitchell Langbert. “Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans.”10 In the remaining 61 percent of these schools, with a few important exceptions, the ratio is still “absurdly skewed against Republican affiliation and in favor of Democratic affiliation. Thus, 78.2 percent of the academic departments in my sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference.”11 In the sampling of 8,699 tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors from fifty-one of the sixty-six top ranked liberal arts colleges, according to a U.S. News 2017 report, some 60 percent of the professors are registered either Republican or Democrat. Of those, the ratio of Democrat to Republican is 10.4 to 1, but if you exclude two military colleges, West Point and Annapolis, it jumps to 12.7 to 1.12
Langbert notes that political homogeneity is problematic because it biases research and teaching and reduces academic credibility. He cites a recent book concluding, for example, that left-wing bias leads psychologists to study the character and evolution of individuals on the right rather than those on the left. Further, sociologists prefer not to work with “fundamentalists, evangelicals, National Rifle Association members, and Republicans.” And here’s the money quote: “Even though more Americans are conservative than liberal, academic psychologists’ biases cause them to believe that conservatism is deviant.”
To combat this academic imbalance, more than 2,500 professors, administrators, and graduate students established Heterodox Academy, “committed to enhancing the quality and impact of research—and improving education—by promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning.”13 That a group of concerned academics believes it’s necessary to form such an organization speaks volumes about political bias in higher education and the illiberal mind-set and intolerance of our universities. The result of this intolerance, notes Langbert, “is that objective science becomes problematic, and where research is problematic, teaching is more so.”14 Langbert concludes with a sobering observation: any attempt to reform colleges embedded with political homogeneity by changing their cultures is “a very tall order. The solution to viewpoint homogeneity may lie in establishing new colleges from the ground up, rather than in reforming existing ones.”15 Much easier said than done.
Historical and economic literacy are among the casualties of liberal indoctrination in our public schools and universities. Hillsdale College professor Burton Folsom explains that while America was founded on the idea of protecting individual liberties through limited government, many prominent American history textbook writers are strongly biased against America’s free-market tradition and believe that proactive government is the key to liberating America from predatory capitalists. The leftist influence on these textbooks has been dramatic through the years, typified by Marxist historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which sold more than two million copies. Zinn freely admitted his bias as well as his political goal, saying, “I wanted my writing and my teaching of history to be part of a social struggle.”
Similarly, Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons demonized early American entrepreneurs such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller. Driven by Josephson’s Marxist agenda, the book contained numerous errors. By his own admission, he reveled in the alleged breakdown of American business success and optimism, and he praised the Soviets’ centralized system. Josephson influenced other Marxist historians such as Columbia University professor Richard Hofstadter, who at one point was an active member of the Communist Party.16
Though most historians are progressives rather than full-blown Marxists, notes Folsom, they nevertheless often buy into the early Marxist historians’ portrayal of America’s entrepreneurs as robber barons and the idea that the great American capitalists
succeeded through corruption rather than by offering customers a good product at the lowest price. For example, the authors of the most popular American history book, The American Pageant, contend that America owes its great wealth to capitalist exploitation—“grasping railroads” and “ringmasters of rapacity.” Certain organizations attempt to counter this bias by providing critiques of the textbook, but it’s not clear how much impact they are making.
There can be no doubt that younger generations are being indoctrinated into socialism. To counteract this disinformation, conservatives must not only attack the appalling history and horrendous results of socialism but categorically defend the superior outcomes as well as the noble principles of free-market capitalism.
SOCIALISM: THE LONGTIME AMBITION OF THE AMERICAN LEFT
The American left has long had a love affair with socialism and its dictators and harbored a deep distrust of free markets. In the 1930s, America’s radical leftists gave up hope that our capitalist system could be defeated through incremental advances of socialism and turned to militant Marxism. Their discontent, explains Marxist writer George Novack, was traceable to the Great Depression. “Many came to Communism as victims of the world crisis, cast out of jobs or faced with dim career prospects,” writes Novack. “Capitalism was no longer working for them or fundamentally workable; Soviet Communism seemed the only realistic replacement.”17
During the early years of the Cold War, the left excused the purge trials and the arrest, torture, and imprisonment of dissidents as harsh but necessary measures to protect socialist systems from “fascist” takeovers. Later, many former Stalin sympathizers came to believe Stalin had corrupted Marx’s and Lenin’s ideas. Their disillusionment is expressed in a 1940 book review by leftist writer Malcolm Crowley. “The question… that concerns… us is not the evolution of communism up to Lenin, but its devolution in the writings and acts of his successors,” writes Crowley. “How was it that the almost selfless revolutionaries of Lenin’s day were transformed into (or executed and replaced by) the present Soviet and Comintern officials, the timid and inefficient bureaucrats, the ferocious pedants, the finaglers, the fanatics and the party hacks?… Where did the original weakness lie—in Lenin, in Marx himself, or in the applications of Marx’s and Lenin’s theories by people who lacked their singleness of purpose and their genius?”18
Novack claims Marxism could have become a viable political force in America “if the major political forces on the Left had really propagated and practiced” Marx’s and Lenin’s ideas. Writing in the sixties, Novack urges “the oncoming generation of radicals” to understand the consequences of departing from these true teachings as they prepared to revitalize the Marxist movement in America.19 In sum, there was nothing wrong with Marxism; it was just hijacked by people insufficiently dedicated to the cause.
In the sixties, leftists were apologists for the North Vietnamese Communists and their Soviet and Chinese benefactors. They rushed to defend Castro’s Cuba, blaming the torture and firing squads on America’s imperialistic opposition to the “people’s revolution.” After Castro was firmly in power, the left rationalized his continued tyranny as necessary to protect the revolution from the CIA.20 Fast-forwarding to the modern era, American leftists remain infatuated with Castro and his “worker’s paradise.” They overlook his suppression of religious liberty and the press, his brutality, and his murders of thousands of Cubans.21 Upon Castro’s death President Obama praised “the countless ways in which [he] altered the course of individual lives, families and of the Cuban nation.”22 Leftists also supported the Communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the murderous, Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.
Today, progressives defend Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. When asked directly during a CNN town hall on February 25, 2019, Bernie Sanders refused to even call Maduro a dictator despite his regime’s arrest and killing of protestors, torture of political opponents, and countless other human rights abuses. This was no surprise. Sanders has boasted of his vacations in the Soviet Union, described its public transportation system as “absolutely beautiful,” and glowingly praised its Communist youth program. Like his fellow travelers, Sanders also admired Cuba, declaring that Castro “solved some very important problems” and insisting Cuba was “more successful than almost any other developing country in providing healthcare for its people.” In 1985 he delivered a speech for the socialist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who had murdered thousands of their fellow citizens for dissenting from the party line.23
Though progressives often openly support foreign socialist regimes, they know a majority of Americans still disfavor socialism. That’s why most leftists, until very recently, have been reluctant to embrace socialism at home, though their sympathies have been no secret to the discerning. To remain politically viable, they’ve had to conceal their ultimate political aims. Even today, after many Democrats have come out of the closet to proclaim their romance with socialism, some are still playing semantic games, insisting their fetish for big government does not make them socialists.
So what exactly is socialism? Webster’s defines the term as:
1. any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.
2a. system of society or group living in which there is no private property.
2b. a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.
3. a state of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done.24
Today there is a growing wing of the Democratic Party, led by AOC and her cohorts, that openly pledges allegiance to socialism. Most progressives, however, deny they support full government ownership of the production and distribution of goods. But can anyone dispute that most favor the centralization of power in Washington with an ever-expanding and intrusive federal government, higher and more progressive taxes, more government regulations issued by an army of unaccountable bureaucrats, delegation of government authority to administrative law judges whose decisions are subject to limited judicial review, increased domestic spending and entitlements, and federal control of healthcare?
Why quibble over the precise definition when everyone knows the left has an insatiable appetite for big government? Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, probably a better authority than Webster’s on the subject, observes that the definition of socialism evolved over time from the nationalization of the means of production and the central economic planning that accompanied it to the extensive redistribution of incomes through taxation and the institutions of the welfare state. The end result, he argues, is largely the same, but it comes about differently under the modern sense of the term.25
Some progressives may be content with a hybrid system, allowing limited market activities alongside confiscatory tax rates, onerous regulations, an expansive welfare state, and ever-expanding healthcare and retirement entitlements. These statist programs are destructive to the economy and individual liberties, and they are also stepping stones for socialist purists. Hayek’s mentor, Ludwig von Mises, argues that socialists used the welfare state, the progressive income tax, and extensive regulation of business as tools to deconstruct the existing capitalist system.26 Barack Obama, for example, advocated an incremental approach to a single-payer healthcare system, surmising that the public wasn’t yet ready for fully socialized medicine. Even if incrementalism were not the progressives’ goal, partially socialist systems tend to naturally become more socialist. This happens both organically and as a function of progressives’ quest to assume greater control over people’s lives. Once the government sinks its claws into something, it only tightens its clutches as dependency begets more dependency.
GOVERNMENT MOTORS
A sterling example of the left’s crusade for government control of business is President Obama’s as
sumption of control over General Motors and Chrysler during the global financial crisis. Although the bailouts began under President Bush, it was Obama who unflinchingly commandeered the firms and presided over the infusion of most of the $80.7 billion of federal funds injected into those companies. (Having already cut costs, Ford didn’t need a bailout, but it sought and received large government loans anyway to avoid being destroyed by its subsidized competitors.) The Treasury Department didn’t just loan money to GM and Chrysler but bought stock ownership in them, nationalizing them just as it had Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the American International Group.27
The government invested (through loans and stock purchases) $51 billion into GM and later sold its shares for $39.7 billion, losing $11.3 billion. The government invested $17.2 billion in GM subsidiary GMAC and sold its shares for $19.6 billion, for a $2.4 billion profit. The government loaned Chrysler $12.5 billion and sold its shares for $11.2 billion, losing $1.3 billion. The total loss to American taxpayers was $10.2 billion.28
The stated purpose of the bailout was to save jobs, but in the end GM’s production and employment were drastically reduced. As Toyota and Honda opened and expanded their U.S. plants, they provided more jobs for American auto workers. Some experts argue that but for the bailout Ford, Toyota, and Honda would have further increased their market shares and employed even more American workers.29
In late 2018, GM decided to shutter four U.S. plants and lay off 14,700 employees. It’s hard not to conclude that this was due, in large part, to the government’s takeover of the company. One of the main problems with the bailout was the government imposing its top-down will on manufacturing decisions. An elite group of government officials can’t wholly manipulate consumer demand and mystically divine what consumers want and need, but the Obama administration’s bailout came with that rope attached. Most notably, government planners encouraged “Government Motors” to invest in the unprofitable electric car market, one of Obama’s major political priorities.30
Guilty by Reason of Insanity Page 18