By Staff
There is a peculiar ritual in American politics, one that repeats roughly every generation. A new crop of bright eyed believers emerges from the academy, clutching pamphlets and hashtags, insisting that this time it will be different. This time the central planners will be smarter. This time the bureaucrats will be incorruptible. This time the five year plan won't end in bread lines.
And every time, the people who actually lived under the system they're selling look on in disbelief.
The American education system has not taught history in decades. It has taught narrative. Students exit high school and university with a visceral conviction that government is the solution to every problem, that markets are inherently predatory, and that profit is a dirty word. They can recite the sins of colonialism and the robber barons chapter and verse. Ask them what happened in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1991 and you will get a blank stare or something about not real socialism.
This is not an accident. The progressive education apparatus has spent a century capturing institutions, from teachers' colleges to accreditation bodies to textbook publishers. The result is a closed loop, professors who never held a private sector job teach students who will never hold a private sector job and together they construct elaborate theories about how the economy should work without ever having to test those theories against reality.
The Paulo Freire model of education, which explicitly frames teaching as a political act of liberation against oppressor structures, has thoroughly colonized American pedagogy. Students are not taught to think. They are taught to feel. And what they are made to feel is that the market is violence and the state is salvation.
Here is the part the pamphlets leave out. The people selling socialism are never the people who suffer under it.
When the revolution comes, the commissars do not stand in the bread line. The party secretaries do not share the one room apartment. The central planners do not wait three years for a car that arrives without an engine. The people who design the system always, without exception, end up in the class that administers it rather than the class that endures it.
This is not a bug. It is the entire point.
Socialism promises to abolish hierarchy. What it actually does is replace a dispersed, competitive hierarchy based on voluntary exchange with a concentrated, coercive hierarchy based on political connections. Under capitalism, if you want to get rich, you have to persuade millions of strangers to hand over their money voluntarily. Under socialism, you just have to persuade the right people in the right ministry. The second path is shorter, and it attracts exactly the personality type you would expect.
The progressive who rails against billionaire wealth is not volunteering to take a pay cut. The politician who denounces inequality while flying private is not a hypocrite by accident. He is demonstrating the actual operating logic of the system he advocates, power flows to the people who control the levers. Everyone else gets what the government decides to give them.
The 20th century ran the experiment at scale. The results are in. They are not ambiguous.
In the Soviet Union, central planning produced chronic shortages of consumer goods while the privileged shopped in special stores inaccessible to ordinary citizens. In Mao's China, the Great Leap Forward killed tens of millions through famine while party indoctrinated leaders maintained their rations. In Cuba, the revolutionaries who rode down from the mountains in 1959 ended up in Havana mansions while the people they liberated learned to make do with whatever the ration book provided. In Venezuela, the oil wealth that should have made every citizen prosperous was funneled through a corrupt state apparatus until the currency became worth less than the paper it was printed on.
The pattern is invariant across cultures, continents, and centuries. Different languages, different flags, different slogans. Same outcome. The people at the top live well. The people at the bottom get promises.
And yet the American left insists that this iteration, the one with the rainbow crosswalks and the diversity statements, has somehow transcended the structural logic that produced identical results everywhere else it has been tried.
The psychological appeal is straightforward. Socialism offers a seductive bargain. You are not responsible for your own life. Your failures are not your fault. The system is rigged, and only a benevolent government can save you. This is an immensely comforting message to deliver to a generation that has been told since kindergarten that they are special and then discovered, upon entering adulthood, that the world does not seem to agree.
Add to this the algorithmic radicalization of social media, where every grievance is amplified and every solution involves someone else paying for it, and you have a recipe for mass delusion. The young person who posts eat the rich from an iPhone manufactured by the global supply chains they claim to despise does not perceive the contradiction. The cognitive dissonance is the point. The ideology is not a description of reality. It is an identity.
Which brings us to the present. Zohran Mamdani sits in Gracie Mansion. His endorsed candidates are winning primaries across the country. The Democratic Socialists of America has moved from the fringe to the driver's seat of one of America's two major parties. The language of socialism, once taboo, now flows freely from the mouths of mainstream politicians who have learned that it excites the activist base and the donor class alike.
What happens next is not a mystery. The playbook is written. Promise everything to everyone. Blame the previous administration for the inevitable shortfalls. Expand the bureaucracy to absorb the newly discontented. Repeat until the productive class leaves or gives up. Then, when the whole thing collapses, insist that it failed only because it was not pursued vigorously enough, and that the next round of central planning will finally get it right.
America may soon get a taste of Zohranomics. The people who actually fled socialism to come here, the Cubans in Miami, the Vietnamese in Orange County, the Soviets who risked their lives to cross the Iron Curtain, will recognize the flavor immediately. They have tasted it before. It is the taste of empty shelves and full prisons, of promises made and promises broken, of a government that owns everything and therefore owns you.
To the young socialist who believes, with genuine conviction, that this time the revolution will be humane, the world is a big place. There are countries right now, today, that are attempting to build the society you dream of. Venezuela will welcome you. Cuba has been waiting. Nicaragua's doors are open. Go. Live there. Build the new man. Prove the skeptics wrong.
Nobody ever takes this invitation.
Because at some level, beneath the hashtags and the moral posturing, even the truest believer knows what the 20th century demonstrated at the cost of a hundred million lives. The government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have. And when it does, you will not get a vote on the matter.
The people pushing socialism in America are not offering you utopia. They are offering you a job application for the next failure. The question is whether enough Americans can recognize the sales pitch before the contract is signed.
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