Dinesh DSouza - United States of Socialism: Whos Behind It. Why Its Evil. How to Stop It

Here grows the cure of all, this fruit divine

Fair to the eye, inviting to the taste,

Of virtue to make wise; what hinders, then

To reach, and feed at once body and mind?

JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST

A specter is haunting Americathe specter of socialism. Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, we encounter a mlange of strange socialist charactersAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sandersand a whole political party that seems magnetically drawn toward the socialist camp. This development by itself is surpassingly strange, because socialism is arguably the most discredited idea in history.

True, many big ideas, and their corresponding ways of organizing society, have ended up on the ash heap of history. Monarchy, for instance, is gone, surviving today only in cosmeticwhich is to say, constitutionalform. Feudalism exists in some form in backward countries, but for us in the West it can only be seen in historys rearview mirror.

Even so, monarchy and feudalism have never been fully discredited. From the beginning of time, there have been good kings and bad kings. At some point in historydating to around the time of the American Revolutionmost people in the West decided that they didnt want to live under kings, not even under good kings. They wanted to govern themselves, through some form of representative government. And so monarchy was transcended without ever being completely refuted. Similarly, the feudal system was basically transcended by the capitalist system, as Marx himself recognized. Feudalism couldnt compete with capitalism, so feudalism was defeated without being discredited on its own terms. Feudal societies, like monarchies, worked for many centuries before their eventual demise.

None of this can be said about socialism. It is an utterly discredited system of ideas, like slavery, and it was discredited in a much shorter period. Slavery lasted for centurieseven millenniabefore it was recognized as a thoroughly wicked and tyrannical regime of human exploitation. Socialism, which dates back to 1917, when Lenin founded the worlds first socialist state, has had a much shorter shelf life. It too collapsed across the world because the people who lived under it considered it to be a form of slavery.

We see the connection between socialism and slavery in all the important works on socialism. Friedrich Hayeks critique of socialism is appropriately titled The Road to Serfdom. George Orwell depicted the tyrannical dimension of socialism in his two immortal novels, Animal Farm and 1984. Using the techniques of both fiction and nonfiction, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in a series of worksThe Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovichdepicted Soviet socialism as a vast network of slave camps stretching from Europe to the farthest reaches of Asia.

Slavery in its classic form has been abolished worldwide, although enslavement in other formssex trafficking for instancecontinues as a gruesome relic of this barbaric practice. Even so, no serious person today could advocate the return of slavery. How ridiculous it would be to hear someone say, The failures of slavery were all failures of implementation. This time were really gonna make it work! Yet here we have socialism in America attempting a comeback, and on precisely those terms: this time were gonna get it right. Serious people advocate it; there is a sustained cultural push to apotheosize it; a major political party is pushing aggressively toward it. How is this possible? Apparently socialism means never having to say youre sorry.

Socialism has made everyday existence a living hell nearly everywhere it has been tried, all over the world. Lets not forget that within about a century since Marx wrote, and less than half a century since the Bolshevik Revolution, some 60 percent of the worlds people were living under governments that embraced some form of socialism. At one time, Joshua Muravchik writes, it was the most popular political idea ever invented, arguably the most popular idea of any kind about how life should be lived or society organized.

The biggest socialist experiment was the Soviet bloc, an orbit of countries including the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and East Germany. Prior to the Soviet occupation of its eastern region, Germany imposed its own distinct version of socialism, National Socialism or Nazism, from 1933 to 1945. In Asia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, North Korea and China experimented with socialism. In South America, the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Venezuela tried it. Most of Africa went socialist in the aftermath of colonialism: Angola, Ghana, Tanzania, Benin, Mali, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe. I count here 25 experiments in socialism, all ending in unmitigated disaster.

The worst forms of socialism proved not only totalitarian but also murderous to an unprecedented degree. In the Soviet Union alone, socialist regimes killed some 20 million of their own citizens and enslaved tens of millions of others. The Chinese socialists, in the period known as Maos Cultural Revolution, killed another 2025 million. The Nazis murdered in comparable numbers, including Jews and gypsies and other occupied peoples, Poles, Russians, Eastern Europeans and others. Orwells description of the future from 1984 seems appropriate to apply to socialism here: A boot stamping on a human face.

Socialists today disavow this historical record, insisting that these were authoritarian forms of socialism that they have no intention of copying. While socialism may have been the economic program of Communism and early fascism, modern socialists seek to dispense with the tyranny and merely keep the economic program. Ill examine the legitimacy of this selective borrowing later, but here its worth stressing that socialism wasnt merely a political failure; it was also an economic failure.

Orwell somehow missed this. Interestingly, neither of his two novels offers an economic critique of socialism. There is no economic problem in Animal Farm; the only problem is that the pigs seize power. In 1984, the ruling party creates poverty and scarcity to keep people in line. Great as he is, Orwell confines himself to a political critique; he exposes the totalitarian tendency of socialism. But he never shows how socialism creates this totalitarianism, and he leaves open the possibility of a more benign socialism that avoids it.

In the real world, the political collapse of socialism was brought about by its economic failure. This was certainly true in the Soviet Union, where Gorbachevs rescue effortsglasnost and perestroikafailed spectacularly, first bringing down the Soviet empire, then the Communist ruling party, and finally the socialist system itself. China too abandoned socialism due to its economic shortcomings. And look how poorly socialism is faring in Zimbabwe, Cuba and Venezuela today. So how can one adopt socialist ideas once again without considering the economic track record of socialist regimes?