Posted on 12/03/2025 9:49:40 AM PST by MtnClimber
An unattributable aphorism says, “You can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.” Most Americans of just a decade ago would think it no more than a witty phrase. It couldn’t happen here, right? We wish we could be sure of that today, but we can’t.
New York City elected a self-identified Democratic Socialist who denies he’s a communist but whose policy platform is dead red, his playbook tracking with Karl Marx’s nasty polemic.
Portlanders elected Katie Wilson to be their mayor. Her wish list reads as if it could have been written by Eugene V. Debs, the socialist who ran five times for president but, mercifully, never received a single electoral vote.
Minneapolis almost elected a Somali socialist from the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party as mayor, but instead voted in incumbent Jacob Frey – who inspires no confidence among the defenders of liberty and capitalism.
As disturbing as these events are, more concerning are the results of a poll that show 51% of likely voters from 18 to 39 want a democratic socialist to win the 2028 presidential election. The Rasmussen Reports survey, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, found that only 36% in that age group aren’t wishing for a democratic socialist to win in 2028, while 17% simply don’t know.
How did this happen? More than half, 54%, of those who want a socialist president, “said their parents or guardians were favorable toward democratic socialism to the best of their recollection when they were growing up.”
Sounds like the offspring of the many – far too many – university professors who no longer teach academics but see their role as proselytizers twisting young minds toward hard-left dogma.
If not their parents, they were influenced by what they were fed in academia: 52% of the under-40 voters said that while “attending school, most of their teachers and professors were favorable toward democratic socialism, including 22% who say their teachers were very favorable toward it.”
This is alarming. Socialism is nasty and unsuitable to humanity for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it attracts the worst among us, the sort who thrill in having control over others, to be its leaders.
“They are precisely the kind of people who elevate power over persuasion, force over cooperation,” says economist Lawrence Reed. “Government, possessing by definition a legal and political monopoly of the use of force, attracts them just as surely as dung draws flies.”
Reed wrote that almost 20 years ago. But he could have been writing about Democrats today and the blue state voters who “have a penchant for voting for the worst that their party has to offer.“
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali who grew up under that country’s socialist boot before she fled to the Netherlands, saw firsthand how socialism fails to “see individual human beings as having inherent dignity.” Based on this concept, socialism divides “society into two clashing, competing classes: the group that was economically oppressive (the capitalists) and the group that was economically oppressed (the workers).”
“In this worldview, individualism as a concept became not merely meaningless but suspect,” she says.
A Pew Research poll from 2019 indicates that positions on socialism have shifted in just a few years. That survey found that 55% of Americans had a negative view of socialism, and their reasons were on the mark. They opposed socialism, they said, because it undermines the work ethic and increases dependence on government, and they noted its unbroken line of historical failures.
The 42% who had a positive view of socialism said they held that opinion because it “creates a fairer, more generous system.” But nowhere has socialism created a fairer system, and there’s zero generosity in forcibly taking from some to give to others.
It’s discouraging that so many Americans fall for the fables of Karl Marx that the likes of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani preach. (This short list of cranks confirms the assertion that the worst always end up at the top in socialist systems.)
Socialism in any form is tyrannical, requiring submission to the state. It crushes souls (see North Korea, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and East Germany, for starters). It makes a few, its “leaders,” fabulously wealthy, while holding the masses in poverty. Its promises are cruel lies intended to deceive.
We hope we never reach the point where those of us who don’t want to be part of the commune that is ordered about by kakistocrats have to shoot our way out of socialism. That would be tragic, but less so than living with a hammer over our heads and a sickle at our throats.
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They think Sweden is socialist. Sweden is a private enterprise country (home to companies like Volvo, SKF, and Electrolux) that has a social welfare system paid by the people of Sweden through their taxes. They don’t get “free” healthcare.
1. Marxist ownership of the means of production. A system that has never produced prosperity anywhere.
2. Share the wealth - which promises to get billionaires to pay for food, health care, shelter. Rich people either stop producing, move, or get lawyers and accountants to shelter their wealth. In the end, there is no 'free health care', everyone just get crappy health care paid for by everyone in the form of higher taxes on everything.
3. Green socialism, which just wants everyone to live in mud huts in some vain attempt to save the planet.
4. Anti law and order. No jails, no borders. Not really sure if this is technically socialism. They claim that crime happens because people are hungry, but if you see the size of the typical Walmart shoplifter, you know that's not true.
5. Anti-Americanism. Again, not sure how this is socialism, but the idea is if traditional (conservative) Americans like something, they need to oppose it. Motherhood, the flag, eating meat, guns, internal combustion engines. you get the idea.
The people pushing socialism read the room and use whatever 'brand' of socialism might be receptive in a given audience. They can then use that to build some coalition to take power. At least that's my take.
Portland?
Forget it. He's on a roll.
Then Penochete.
They are marxists.
Marxism is different from what I would call Utopian Socalism
Marxism is a satanic religon.
Send them on a summer vacation in Cuba will cure that.
I do not believe most people who want a socialist system will ever "find out" and they are not going to learn anything from the repeated failures of those systems.
It is a dangerous forbearance to allow them to ever get into power. And it is really hard to remove them once they get into power.
Socialism promises unlimited "free stuff" that "somebody else" pays for. It has a very strong appeal.
Agreed.
👍
Free free free does have a certain appeal.
As does “we care about you” — no matter how false
Why wait!!?? Go to Cuba!! Sheeeesh!
Liberals?
I constantly hear so-called conservatives used the ridiculous term “progressives” instead of communists.
Giving them the same free stuff that we're already giving to blacks and illegals.
You know, free food (SNAP, WIC), free spending money (EBT), free housing (Section 8), free healthcare (Medicaid), free college (scholarships for the "historically disadvantaged"), and on and on.
Can't really blame them for asking.
They don't need to travel anywhere to see socialism.
They can see it just fine here.
They can see socialism with the endless gibs we give to the underclass (see my post above this one) as well as the wealthy elite who remain rich providing these gibs to them.
In America, we have socialism for the rich and the poor. It's the middle class who have to fund all of it.
Yep. And this is why young whites are turning to people like Mamdani.
The arrangement always used to be that the white middle class will foot the bill for the gibs that the underclass receive. Food stamps, Medicaid, Section 8, whatever. And in return, we had decent jobs with decent salaries and benefits to live in nice, safe neighborhoods with good schools to send our kids to.
Well, the deal has been broken. The jobs are gone, either shipped overseas or filled by imported H-1Bs. Housing is astronomical. The schools are filled with a bunch of kids who don't look like your kids or even speak the same language your kids speak.
Young whites are seeing the same TikTok videos of Shaniqua and her EBT haul and thinking, "I'd like to eat steak too!" They're seeing Juanita pop out litters of babies on Medicaid while they're still paying down the hospital bill from the single child they budgeted for. They see illegals getting scholarships to $58k/year colleges and it never ends.
They'd like some free stuff as well now that there's no more arrangement for middle class comforts.
The Dems get a one-party state and the 1% get a permanent army of reserve labor who have to rent everything they possess and own nothing. Basically turn the US into a huge company town.
Unsuccessful people always want someone to give them something.
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