Socialism: They Want More of What Already Failed

Forty-three percent of Americans now say they have a positive view of socialism. Among Democrats the figure is 65 percent. Jonathan Turley calls it a fashion cycle: wait long enough and a generation with no memory of empty shelves will try the jacket on again. The slogan this time is warmer. Collectivism with central heating. Imagine the end of landlords. Food, energy, medicine and transport as "common goods."

The poll would be a curiosity if the West were still the place of 1980: a market economy with a safety net, a noisy press, and a state that mostly stayed out of the dictionary. It is not. The worry is not that Americans are about to vote in the Politburo tomorrow. The worry is that a large slice of the public wants to go further Left from a society that has already walked a long way in that direction and called the walk kindness.

Ask the 43 percent what they mean and you will get Norway, student debt and "the rich should pay." You will not get the Cheka. That is how the brand survives. The historical product: state ownership of production, suppressed prices, suppressed people, keeps dying on contact with reality. The marketing product is a mania: someone else will make scarcity illegal.

Scarcity does not take instructions. What the state can do is ration. What it rations, it politicises. Housing as a right becomes a waiting list and a favourite. Energy as a common good becomes a blackout with a moral lecture. Medicine as a utility becomes a queue plus a committee that decides which treatments are "appropriate." The warmth of collectivism is the warmth of an office that has your file.

Americans can already see pieces of this and misread them as capitalism's failure. Housing is expensive because supply is strangled by the same politics that then offers the tenant a slogan. University is a debt machine because the state subsidised demand and guilds restricted supply. Healthcare is a maze because third-party payment and regulation ate the price signal. The socialist answer is to complete the job: take the remaining prices out and call the wreckage justice.

Look at what already exists before anyone nationalises the power stations.

Governments spend two-fifths to half of national income in much of Europe and a rising share in America once you count the regulatory state as a tax in kind. Central banks allocate credit in a crisis and call it stability. Industrial policy picks winners again. Speech is managed by platforms that take guidance from ministries of truth that insist they are only fighting "disinformation." Energy policy is a plan, not a market. Planning law is a veto held by people who already have houses. Universities are not argument shops; they are credential cartels with a liturgy. Corporate HR is a private politburo for the professional class.

That is not Milton Friedman's nightwatchman. It is a mixed economy that kept mixing until the mix was the point. The postwar social democrats at least admitted trade-offs. The new enthusiasts want the consumption of capitalism and the moral theatre of its abolition. They live in the richest societies in history and describe them as a crime scene.

If 43 percent already like "socialism" after that record, they are not asking to try a new experiment. They are asking to turn the dial on an experiment that is already running.

First, the word 'socialism" has been laundered. Young voters hear "socialism" and picture a free bus. They do not picture Venezuela's caloric intake or East Germany's secret police or Britain's winter of discontent, which Turley usefully drags back into the light. Fashion needs brain fog; socialism is a fashion.

Second, the demand comes from the class that will write the rules, not empty the bins. Professors, graduates, NGOs, the DSA's campus chapter. The Jacobin rhyme is not decorative. The people who want a unicameral passion machine and a war on "the wealthy" are not the foundry. They are the seminar. Seminars that capture the state do not wither. They hire.

Third, a majority of Democrats in a companion finding who would countenance a military coup against a president they despise is not a separate story. It is the same story. If property and speech are already half-political, the other half of politics, who holds the gun legally, becomes negotiable too. Socialism is not only an economic programme. It is a claim that opposition is illegitimate because the programme is moral.

Fourth, the West's existing Left settlement is brittle. Debt is huge. Fertility is down. Energy is dear by choice. Borders are optional. Trust is low. A public that answers "socialism: yes" in that weather is not asking for a slightly higher top rate. It is asking for someone to command the wreckage.

1776 and The Wealth of Nations arriving in the same year was not a coincidence of printers. Smith's argument was that people need disposable power over resources or their liberties are smoke. Dependence on the treasury is a quieter king. The American bet was that a commercial republic could make enough surplus to be generous without making generosity the constitution.

That bet is what the 43 percent are bored of. They have been taught that prices are violence and profit is theft and the alternative is "care." Care, when it is a system, is an allocation bureau. Allocation bureaux need enemies. The landlord will do. Then the farmer. Then the person who still thinks a contract is a contract.

Catastrophe is not required for this to matter. Soft socialism already delivers slow housing, slow courts, slow energy and a culture that treats success as a confession. Harder socialism delivers the same goods with less food and more police. We are at the soft socialism stage now but rapidly spiralling towards the hard.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/almost-half-americans-now-hold-positive-views-socialism