An old joke goes like this: Q. What did socialists use before candles? A. Electricity.
I’m sure the people of Venezuela aren’t laughing. But as the people of this once-prosperous country scrounge for food in trash bags and go without electricity and running water, some in our own country seriously sing the praises of socialism. Allegedly well-educated individuals remain on the socialism bandwagon even as Venezuela circles the drain.
What accounts for this phenomenon? Why is socialism so popular with young people? Why did they rally to Bernie Sanders in 2016?
Why do they lionize Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party’s shiny new thing? AOC, as the press has dubbed her, graduated cum laude from Boston University with a degree in economics and international relations. I taught for a while at Boston University in the 1990s and got to know the late John Silber, BU’s president, who turned the school into an excellent institution. He must be spinning in his grave.
How could someone graduate from a well-respected university and be as ignorant of basic economics as this woman?
To answer this question, it is useful to look to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who in the early 20th century stressed the importance of “cultural hegemony” as the means of establishing the conditions for a Marxist revolution. Gramsci is the intellectual godfather of Rudi Dutschke, the German new leftist who in the 1960s coined the slogan, “the long march through the institutions.”
Herbert Marcuse endorsed Dutschke’s approach, describing it as “working against the established institutions while working within them” and, at the same time, “preserving one’s own [revolutionary] consciousness.” Such “Cultural Marxists” as Marcuse recognized that the American working class intuitively rejected Marxist ideas. Communism had always been imposed by force.
So Marcuse and his ilk exploited American intellectuals to achieve Dutschke’s “long march” through the academy, as well as popular culture.
As George Orwell observed, “there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” Thus did the overly intellectualized and emotionally juvenile approach to the world, the pernicious and reactionary philosophy of Critical Theory, take root in American institutions, where it continues to infect the minds of the young.
When AOC invokes the utopian promise of “social justice,” equality for all and the end of poverty, we are thus hearing Gramsci, Dutschke and Marcuse. Of course, the reality of socialism is different from the promise. The utopian illusion conceals the corpses of untold millions who have died in the attempt to found the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
Many defenders of socialism attempt to obfuscate the issue by calling welfare states such as Denmark or Sweden “socialist.” But speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School in the fall of 2015, the Danish prime minister, Lars Rasmussen, rejected that claim.
“Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy,” he said. “Denmark is a market economy. ... [T]he Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens,” but it is “a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.” And Sweden has been backing away from its welfare state for several decades.
Socialism, in truth, is based on a flawed view of reality and human nature. That is why it is destined to fail wherever it is tried, as it has from the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela. But the illusion persists.
As the economist Thomas Sowell has observed: “Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.”
Unfortunately, AOC has never read anything by Sowell. Instead, her education was shaped by the dead hand of Antonio Gramsci.
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