Only three decades out from sorting through the rubble of the Berlin Wall, socialism appears to have become all the rage among the Democratic Party base.
Far from permanently discrediting the dream, the collapse of communist systems around the world appears to have had a liberating effect upon the hard left, not so much destroying faith in their God as lifting the millstone that was socialism in dismal practice from around their necks.
First, though, the left has to engage in a necessarily disingenuous campaign to rehabilitate socialism by selectively interpreting its history and redefining its content to make it more palatable for an otherwise skeptical American electorate.
At the heart of that campaign is an effort to distinguish their preferred form of socialism (the cuddly version supposedly practiced in Sweden and Finland) from that brutal, bloody kind once practiced in the Soviet Union and East Germany.
The search for "socialism with a human face," and its discovery, however mistakenly, in Scandinavia thus reduces the ideology to little more than a standard leftist wish list--expansion of the welfare state (free college); universal health care (Medicare for all); more regulated labor markets ($15 minimum wage); higher taxes on the wealthy (through 70 or even 90 percent marginal tax rates); and the subordination of economic growth to environmental imperatives (Green New Deal).
In short, the new socialism amounts to little more than an acceleration of public-policy trends toward an expanded welfare state that have been visible in all multiparty democracies for the past century or so. It is less an alternative ideology than simply a broad-based campaign on behalf of inherently subjective concepts like fairness, equality, and that most banal and nebulous of terms, social justice.
It is a belief system that seeks to advance by a form of bait-and-switch whereby all that is wonderful is said to be socialism and all that is distressing is laid at the feet of capitalism. It deliberately taps envy and resentment rather than logic and reason and attempts to exploit the increasing historical ignorance of the polis.
Interestingly enough, by redefining socialism as merely an extension of welfare state redistributionism, and grounding it in hazy feelings and mushy content, the new socialists have inadvertently altered its original purpose, which was to take us to the end of history by replacing capitalism and private ownership of the means of production with public ownership, whether by increments (the Fabians and social democrats) or revolutionary action (the Marxist-Leninists).
By essentially equating socialism with just hyper-welfare-state politics, the new socialists have firmly yoked it to the very system the original socialists despised and sought to destroy, given that all of the wealth the welfare state redistributes must first come from the wealth generating engine of capitalism.
Rather than replace capitalism, the new socialism depends upon capitalism to continue to generate the wealth which socialists then expropriate.
Wherein can also be found two potential limiting principles to the new leftward drive under the socialist banner, with the first being the inherent inefficiencies of socialist economics.
While establishment of the welfare state might have originally been propelled by moral, humanitarian considerations, no serious observer can deny that the more government taxes, spends, and regulates, the less economic growth, job creation, and technological innovation results.
Capitalism is necessary to fund the welfare state, but at some point the welfare state, if allowed to grow too large, undermines capitalism.
The inevitable result of the public crowding out the private can be found in precisely those places which were purposely dedicated to that outcome, the centrally planned economic disasters of the Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Castro's Cuba.
A second limit to socialism redefined as hyper welfare state is the inability of those overseeing it to pay the continually escalating costs. As overly fettered capitalism sputters and produces less growth, it also produces less wealth and thus tax revenue with which to sustain an ever-expanding array of welfare-state entitlements, a process which will inevitably result in what Victor Davis Hanson has called state "cannibalism"--as people flee exorbitant taxation, those remaining behind will have to be bled even more.
Anyone with even a smidgen more economic literacy than Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can see the contradiction between their spending proposals and a national debt that now exceeds $21 trillion.
The Democratic embrace of socialism was initially somewhat welcome, even bracing, promising to introduce some much-needed and belated honesty to our political discourse.
But those hopes are now being dashed by those who seek to minimize the possible electoral damage by obscuring the true meaning of socialism.
So let's play it straight--if you believe the allocation of resources should be determined by central planning instead of market forces and that private ownership of the means of production should be replaced by public, you are a socialist. If you don't, you are not.
"Boutique socialism" isn't the real thing and it isn't serious, but merely play-acting by ignorant pajama boys.
It is also a profound insult to the 100 million people who had no real choice in the matter and were murdered by real socialist governments in the past century.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 04/22/2019