Posted on 03/14/2020 10:40:38 AM PDT by The Houston Courant
A CNN host once asked the great psychologist Martin Seligman to describe in one word the state of his profession. He replied, “Good.” Underwhelmed, the host allowed him two words. His answer? “Not good.”
American socialists must know the feeling.
Here’s their “good”: An affirmed socialist could get the Democrats’ nod for president this year. Should he fail, another might succeed before long. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) boast a swelling class of officeholders, 43 having been elected in the 2018 midterms alone. DSA membership totals about 60,000 ignoramuses, up from a reported 25,000 two years ago.
What’s “not good?” Since the Cold War ended, socialists have been stuck in “no true Scotsman” mode. Distaste for America’s economic model hasn’t helped them find their own real-world prototype. Soviet communism of course collapsed after killing at least 62 million civilians. Extant socialist governments in Cuba and Venezuela don’t cut it either; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and other American leftists who once encouraged those regimes now grudgingly distance themselves.
Many progressives laud the Scandinavian countries, but those nations’ statesmen have chastened their admirers for calling them “socialist,” and the facts discredit the label. The center-right Heritage Foundation’s 2019 Index of Economic Freedom ranks Iceland’s economy as freer than America’s. Denmark and Sweden rank nearly as free and, if we include the Baltic states, so do Finland and Estonia. The lowest ranked Scandinavian country on the index is Norway, which Heritage describes as “mostly free.”
And so the collectivists’ vision for America—at least as Sanders articulates it—feels imprecise. We don’t hear where socialism has been tried to good, or even passable, effect.
Who can sort this out? Not Sanders’s House colleague, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), surely America’s second-best known socialist. She’s unready for much simpler concepts, e.g. baby chickens aren’t nuggets, paint doesn’t taste good, and you usually can’t surf in a river. Her orations and social-media screeds can’t help us.
Fortunately, Nathan J. Robinson last year published a bucketful of word-vomit called Why You Should Be a Socialist. Robinson is editor of Current Affairs. You think you’ve heard of this magazine, but you haven’t: It isn’t Yuval Levin’s sapient National Affairs or Julius Krein’s innovational American Affairs. It pontificates on why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) deserves to lose her primary because she’s too conservative, how the Obama administration persecuted millions of immigrants, and why wild animals are a “massive global proletariat.”
Unlike Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, however, Robinson has real academic prestige—a Yale law degree and a prospective Harvard doctorate—and can’t be dismissed as an unfair caricature; he’s as sharp as latter-day Marxists come. What workers’ kingdoms does his new book offer as lodestars?
He cites the Zapatista-controlled lands in Chiapas, Mexico, as an “instructive model” of “authentic libertarian socialism.” He doesn’t elaborate, and anyone familiar with that territory knows why. These highland communities, comprising just over 300,000 inhabitants, endure as much poverty now as they did when the rebels took over in 1994, according to the liberal National Catholic Reporter (NCR). The London Guardian reported in 2018 that poverty remains pervasive and virtually no residents acquire post-secondary education. Sociologist Ernesto Castañeda of American University has said the Zapatistas haven’t met their central aim of strengthening indigenous people’s rights.
The famously tight-lipped Zapatistas rarely bother to dispute these portrayals. They also adhere to a nativism that would make Richard Spencer blush. NCR reported however that “Chiapas is seeing its own people leave in droves” and quoted UC-San Diego anthropologist John Haviland as observing that emigration has occurred entirely subsequent to the Zapatista takeover.
Another Robinson-approved utopia is Bolivia, which underwent 14 years of socialist governance under President Evo Morales, who resigned last autumn after a disputed election. A noteworthy detail about Bolivia’s standard of living: It sucks. It has a 35-percent poverty rate—three times the U.S. rate.
Leftists like Robinson invariably observe the rate was 59 percent before Morales took office. They’re less pleased—and thus neglect—to note that Bolivia’s economy has expanded in tandem with natural-gas production, which more than doubled since 2004. Don’t expect Sanders, who favors both banning hydraulic fracturing and ceasing fossil-fuel exports, to mention this on the campaign trail.
Robinson also doesn’t bring up Bolivia’s top income-tax rate (13 percent) or corporate-tax rate (25 percent). Even after President Trump’s tax cuts, the U.S. top income-tax rate is still 24 points higher than Bolivia’s; America’s corporate rate is now four points lower than Bolivia’s but exceeded it by 10 points before the 2017 tax reform. For longer than two decades, notwithstanding changes made to the top tax rates by the last three U.S. presidents, the Heritage index has consistently rated Bolivia’s tax burden as lighter than America’s. Bolivia, while generally an economic wreck, might indeed teach us something—though not what Robinson had hoped.
Socialists need a new cynosure, but today’s options look as bad as yesterday’s.
In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity. […]Comparing tax rates is not really an even argument, since all moves of socialist states are a means to an end, one of those being “(a) heavy progressive or graduated income tax” per the second plank of communism.
It is impossible, of course, to carry out all these measures at once. But one will always bring others in its wake. Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country’s productive forces. …
— The Principles of Communism
Worldwide, the home of communist thinking and the epicenter of the communist movement is the American left. China is basically fascist. In Russia the communists have the status that the David Duke KKK mentality does here. Eastern Europe has rejected it. North Korea is more of a wacked out socialist personality cult mixed with a strange religion.
The US left, the Democrat party is the home of doctrinaire socialism and communism in the world.
Here in the highly Socialist USA, kids often spend 13 years in Socialist K-12 public schools.
Then they often borrow money from the Socialist federal Department of Education to go to college, often in Socialist public colleges.
US governments spend as much tax money per capital on health care as Socialist countries in Europe.
The largest hospital in my Republican-run Florida county is Socialist.
I pay hospital property tax every year, just like George W. Bush, Jr. does in Dallas County, Texas.
And all the private hospitals in my Florida county are suing the county to get in on the county hospital gravy train.
I don't disagree...Rat leadership is comprised of true believers and opportunists who recognize how easily jealousy and stupidity can be manipulated. Even though many of the followers of this philosophy's denial of human nature will eventually come to their senses, it may not be until we experience a nationwide dose of NYC, Detroit, San Francisco, LA etc...
Unpleasant food for thought, although a properly calibrated global heat map will no doubt support such view.
Amazingly, we seem as a nation to recognize the issue but at the same time are both unwilling and unable to deal effectively with our growth of socialism. We may now even be in the position of a quiet slow-motion collapse.
IMO, it is inescapable that over the generations we have allowed our education system to be misdirected and compromised.
I could not agree more...Fabian Socialism in the US is now reaping a rich harvest from emotionalism, stupidity, and above all--jealousy. The educational system, organized labor etc. have been largely destructively compromised. I am now quite sure that the path this nation is on will not be altered unless and until there is a sufficient dose of misery delivered, such as one sees in Greece, Detroit etc.. Of course, that does not mean that Conservatives should give up the good fight to lessen the impacts.
Fascist and communists are the same. The state owns and controls the means if production
There is no difference between Hitler and Stalin
Really so is it a county owned and run or a nonprofit
You gave zero understanding of how unprofitable hospitals are
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.