Socialism in America

Vincent J. Curtis

11 Mar 2019

A strange political conversation is taking place in the Democratic party of the United States.  It isabout whether the United States of America should become a socialist country.

It is remarkable that this conversation is taking place in the country that is regarded as the citadel of capitalism.  The United States vanquished National Socialism in 1945 and International Socialism in 1991.  Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea remain as examples of socialist outcomes today.

The conversation on socialism in America is incoherent.  Capitalism and socialism are not ideological opposites.  Socialism refers to a high degree of state control, and capitalism to a low degree. Socialism is an ideology, but capitalism is not – though it can be made out to be.  The programs the Democrats are calling socialism are, in fact, radical new uses of state power for social aims.

Strictly speaking, socialism is when the means of production and exchange are owned or tightly regulated by the state.  Obviously, there can be socialism in degrees, and state control often extends beyond basic economics.  But, the essence of socialism is that it is an ideology of state control and power for the sake of a greater good.  Socialism was invented.  The need for socialism is often asserted dogmatically, the sign of an ideology.

“Capitalism” is an absence of ideology.  No ideology is vindicated when a farmer hires help to bring in the harvest.  No ideology is vindicated when a business owner hires workers to make a product or deliver a service.  No ideology is vindicated when someone pays you for something you’re selling, or when you barter at a swap meet.

An ideology is vindicated, however, when that farm is collectivized, when that business is appropriated by the state, and when private transactions are made illegal – for the sake of a higher good.

Free markets simply come to be.  They are empirical.  Capitalism was not invented, it developed practically.  Human beings engaged in commerce long before the invention of government.  But government does have great usefulness in ensuring the fairness and regulation of markets.  State power can enforce the trust that is necessary for commerce.

Socialism was invented as a redress and punishment for the excesses of 19^th century industrialization.  Capitalism was constructed as a rival ideology by the socialists and communists of the day, something to contrast their new ideology against.

The habit of creating ideologies became a feature of 20^th century political thinking.  Everybody had to have an ideology.  You were a socialist, a communist, a fascist, an imperialist, a mercantilist, a capitalist.  The believers in less government foolishly adopted capitalism as their ideology.  In doing so, they admitted the premises of socialism to the conversation.  The socialist construct of economic morality becomes the frame of the discussion, against which the “capitalist” can only offer practical rebuttals, which lack a ring of moral vengeance.

Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders is the leading candidate so far for the Democrat nomination.  He honeymooned in the Soviet Union in 1974.  His models of socialism are the Scandinavian countries, which in reality have mixed economies.  These work because those countries are small, are racially, religiously, and culturally homogenous, and – importantly - have limited immigration.

The battle for the Democrat nomination in 2020 is between the old socialist Sanders and those who are adopting the “New Green Deal” socialism of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

You would think that after 100 million dead and the example of Venezuela before the nation’s eyes, the Sanders brand of socialism would be discredited at the starting gate.

The annihilating critique of the Green New Deal by Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore ought to have discredited the foolish AOC aims of state power.

That socialism could be seriously discussed nowadays is attributed by critics to the robbery that passes for an education in the humanities.  At American universities, empirical thinking is discouraged and ideologies, to which conformity is expected, form the core of the curriculum.  Rot in higher education is why political correctness and free-speech suppression are so prevalent, and why the moral vengeance of socialism is appealing.
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Vincent J. Curtis is a research scientist and occasional free-lance writer.