“On the shoals of roast beef and apple pie, all socialist utopias flounder.”
-Werner Sombart
As Bernie Sanders becomes more and more popular and apparently more likely to win the Democratic nomination – assuming Joe Biden’s campaign doesn’t catch up by Super Tuesday – I see the same kind of question popping up on Quora and other discussion sites. The question is something along the lines of “why has socialism become so popular?” or specifically “why has socialism become popular along millennials?”
Well, I’m a libertarian, and a confirmed anti-socialist, so I think I can answer the question. But it’s going to go into some detail. There are three broad answers as to why socialism is getting more popular.
Socialism has lost its power to scare.
For socialism to be a bad thing, it must be worse than the system we have. “Conservatives” and most libertarians will point to Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela as an example of where socialism will lead. We will say, “If we went to a socialized healthcare system, the government would be in charge, we wouldn’t have any choices, and with only one provider, the government would be rationing urgent procedures!” And millennials will look at us and go, “Oh. You mean like what we have NOW?”
What we have is itself mandated by Big Government. During World War II, the federal government instituted wage and price controls and then allowed employers to sponsor health insurance programs to compensate for the wage increases they were no longer allowed to offer. So, a huge part of our country is run on the basis of a wartime policy which no longer has a reason to exist. Like much else in the government. This second-hand socialism means that government doesn’t have to cover the costs of healthcare like the United Kingdom does, but it also means that individual insurance is mostly dependent on the employer, if the employer offers it at all. In this system, your only “free-market” choice is to switch jobs. And if you do, you don’t necessarily know what your healthcare plan is going to be. You also don’t know if your job gives you medical insurance after 90 days, or six months, or the beginning of the year. And even if you like your policy, you don’t know if the employer is going to go through negotiations and change the plan, or change the provider. And then you have to find out what prescriptions and providers are actually covered, often after the fact.
As John Oliver recently put it, “the American healthcare system gives you so many choices in how to get fucked, it is truly the Kama Sutra of healthcare.”
Not only that, the fact that the healthcare system is based on private insurance is another flaw. Among other things, it’s one of the reasons that employers do have to negotiate prices for coverage, because these are largely dictated by the insurance giants. I’ve gone over this before, but let me do it again: While the Affordable Care Act is considered the government’s most unacceptable advance of socialism by many right-wingers, Obama with the ACA was trying to save the insurance-company paradigm of healthcare.
The comparison to other forms of insurance comes up, but what it amounts to is that with most forms of insurance, there is a difference between the “risk pool” and the total number of policy payers. The risk pool is the number of people who might be expected to collect on a policy. You don’t expect to crash your car and need auto insurance the same month you start the policy. You don’t expect to collect on your life insurance policy as soon as you start it, and if you do, the insurance company may investigate your estate.
But with healthcare, since private insurance is expected to cover all healthcare, including preventative medicine, the risk pool is functionally identical to the pool paying in. You buy insurance because you EXPECT to collect on it as soon as you get it. Insurance companies cannot survive on this principle. Forget “healthcare is a human right” – it’s just economics. Which is where the insurance companies came up with the bogosity of “pre-existing conditions” so that people couldn’t get coverage on the basis of the very conditions they needed coverage for. Otherwise the insurance companies would not be profitable.
The Affordable Care Act solved this issue – sorta – by simply obliging everybody to buy insurance and expand the payer pool whether they wanted to or not. However this does not make healthcare actually affordable, because forcing everybody to buy a service does not automatically decrease prices and in fact gives business an incentive to increase them. But that was the “socialism” right-wingers object to. And that IS socialist BS when your choice is eliminated, but this was the only way the system could preserve the private standard of health coverage. With socialism.
But since the system is still based on insurance-company coverage, we are obliged to play by insurance company rules, for example, this wonderful concept called a deductible. It’s a little hard to explain, mainly because it’s hard to justify, but basically as a “cost control” some plans require you to take a deductible, let’s say $2500, so that most of your services have to be paid for out of pocket until you pass that threshold, and only then does the plan cover you. Which raises a question I have never gotten a sufficient answer to: If I’m paying for my medical care out of pocket as if I didn’t HAVE a policy until I pass this threshold, then what the fuck am I still paying premiums for until then???
If we’re defending that as capitalism versus a nationalized system, the difference between capitalism and what we have here is like this: If I want to get satellite TV, I may have to sign a 24-month commitment for the equipment, which is bogus in and of itself, but then I don’t HAVE to have satellite TV. And that’s a choice that a lot of people have made. You can switch from DirecTV to Dish, or to cable, and back, or just go to Netflix or streaming services and antenna.
But if I have type II diabetes or some other “pre-existing” condition that obliges me to get regular prescriptions or get sick and DIE, then I can’t just “cut the cord” on my insurance or switch to Netflix.
Like I said, I’m a libertarian. And the reason I switched to supporting national health care is on fiscal conservative grounds: The US spends more money (both public and private) on the health care system than any other developed nation (most of which have ‘socialized’ systems) AND gets worse results. And that’s because, unlike most capitalist endeavors, the system is not geared to consumer demand. It is a cartel to benefit the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and it is set up that way by both Big Government and Big Business. Comparing the free market to American healthcare is not like comparing apples to oranges, it’s like comparing apples to Cadillacs. Most people don’t need Cadillacs. Most people don’t even want Cadillacs. But if you can’t afford a Cadillac, you have other options for transportation. But if the government tells you you either have to buy a Cadillac or you go on foot, and you still can’t afford a Cadillac, you’re fucked.
And if that’s what you’re calling capitalism, you can’t be surprised that socialized medicine is getting popular.
Socialism has lost its point of contrast.
If we on the Right – using innumerable examples in history – can describe socialism as a collectivist system that destroys freedom, human rights and political choices, the Left has a counter for that: Just call their system “democratic” socialism! Depending on the person, this may be more or less disingenuous. After all, even Lenin described his system as democratic. But the real problem with “conservative” opposition to the socialist agenda is that if we are going to define socialism in terms of Soviet-style communism and illiberal politics, we can no longer say that conservatism is the opposite of that. Donald Trump’s signature policy, almost a fixation, is building a border wall. The only other modern politician who likes border walls served in the KGB in East Germany. The Banana Republican Party has abandoned not only its flirtation with libertarianism but fiscal conservatism itself to embrace deficits, tariffs, and then, subsidies to farmers to cover up the natural results of the tariffs. This is all defined by Trump himself as a “nationalist” agenda. The resemblance of “good” nationalism to “bad” (Soviet style) socialism is something that the Left could really use against Banana Republicans, but they won’t, because that would require “democratic socialists” to admit that any collectivism could be bad. It might be a bit much to say that fascism is synonymous with socialism, but there are common roots (at least with Mussolini) common goals, and some common elements.
In fact, if you divorce the Aryan-vs.-Jew mythology peculiar to Nazism from every other type of fascism, you’ll see that all fascism, even original Italian fascism, is nationalist socialism, that is, it uses socialist means towards nationalist and reactionary ends. If you think that the purpose of socialism is to benefit previously oppressed groups of people, of course you see fascism as the radical opposite. But if you see the goal as nationalizing the entire society towards a certain ideology, it definitely qualifies.
This even applies to leftist “real” socialism, if only by default and not ideology. The goal of Marxist socialism of course was to create a total class revolution, but in practical terms it only happened in the Russian Empire at first, and then mainly under conditions that orthodox Marxism did not hold to be ideal for changing the system. Because of this there was a real struggle in the early days of the Soviet Union between endorsing a world revolution or the idea (ultimately championed by Stalin) of creating “socialism in one country.” For obvious practical reasons (among them, losing to the Poles in the Polish-Soviet War) Stalin chose the latter path. This led to various nationalist measures to create a new “Soviet” identity under Russian culture, which involved crushing dissent in Ukraine and other areas. Until the Soviets won World War II, they were simply not able to export their view of the world across national borders, and so their political ideology, internationalist as it was, was practically limited to national ends.
The point is not whether leftists disagree with the assertion that Nazism is a type of socialism. Let’s say I agree with the assertion, although I would phrase it more that socialism is one method of nationalism. The problem is that the new Right presents the argument in a bad-faith way that you don’t have to be a leftist to figure out. To wit: If Socialism Is Bad, and Nazis Are The REAL Socialists, then why are “conservatives” emulating the Nazis?
You might say that what you’re endorsing isn’t Nazism, but why did the Trump Administration change immigration standards based on race, why is the Administration not wanting the public to know about detention policies that lead to the deaths of migrants, and why does the government actively turn away volunteer efforts to stop such people from dying?
Just as the new Right deliberately confuses the definitions of socialism and liberty, they have also conflated the definitions of “democracy” and “republic” so that stopping an agenda that is increasingly unpopular is deemed to be “thwarting the will of the people” – with “the people” apparently being only those people who support the agenda. When socialist Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said recently that the Electoral College should be abolished, Representative Dan Crenshaw (BR-Texas) responded, “We live in a republic, which means 51% of the population doesn’t get to boss around the other 49%.”
Quite so. But that raises the question: Why is it MORE fair for the 49 percent to boss around the other 51 percent?
What we now refer to as the conservatives claim to be defenders of freedom and democracy, but their idea of “democracy” is where a plurality of the most gullible and vicious gravitate to a demagogue because he validates their regressive opinions, so they allow him and his cronies to gang-rape the Constitution and loot the national piggy bank while the majority of Americans who knew better are apparently supposed to just sit and stew because Liberal Tears.
THAT’s what you’re calling democracy. And you wonder how socialism got popular.
Young people have no sense of perspective.
As the prospect of Bernie Sanders winning the Democratic nomination became more likely, lots of people – many of them Democrats – objected to Sanders’ previous support for hard-left movements around the world and even his recent defense of Castro Cuba’s education system. Leftist supporters act as though this isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a problem given that Sanders qualified his statement as not being a defense of the Cuban government in general.
Well yes, it IS a problem. And it’s that much more obvious because the same people who emphasize the differences between Leninist/Chavista socialism and democratic socialism are the same people who praise the Castro government and defend the Chavista government against any alternatives, such as, letting people vote for someone else.
But it comes down to the same factor as the other two points. We choose between the devil we know or the devil we don’t know. In 2016, people chose Trump because they didn’t like the “devil” (Democrats) that they knew. In 2020, people know Trump all too well but they don’t know much about socialism at all, either the “good” socialism that leftists endorse or the “bad” socialism that right-wingers emphasize in history. To choose A over B, or vice versa, and have that count as something other than an aesthetic preference, one must not only be different to but superior to the other.
Young people, frankly, don’t know why we thought socialism was such a terrible thing, nor why it is such a good thing to emphasize business over unions and business over regulations. They aren’t familiar with how Lyndon Johnson tried to have both an escalation in Vietnam and the Great Society, they aren’t familiar with how Nixon succeeded him with policies that were both culturally conservative and economically Keynesian, and that Carter’s policies at least in the short term made everything worse. They don’t remember how the Soviet Union seemed to be humiliating us at every turn. They also don’t know how people reacted by putting Ronald Reagan in office, and how his policies right from the get-go were intended to break unions and break inflation. In a certain respect, Reagan’s willingness to confront the Soviet Union also broke them, ultimately by undercutting their economy. Reagan was rewarded by having 49 of 50 states vote for him in his re-election campaign of 1984. Even after Reagan, those few liberals who did get in had to make concessions to the new paradigm, with Bill Clinton saying “the era of Big Government is over.” It wasn’t, really, but the era of leftist government was.
I had talked with a left-wing Facebook friend about these subjects, and told him my overall theory that just as leftists can’t seem to understand that the right-wing paradigm of today is a response to what went before, that the union-busting business model and anti-inflation fiscal policy were intended for previous conditions that no longer exist, and that while what they see as a golden age really wasn’t so great, likewise right-wingers can’t seem to understand that the economy they crow about really isn’t working for everybody and that they have set the conditions for their own upheaval. Not every leftist corresponds to the Right’s tyrannical caricature of them, but then one of the reasons Reagan succeeded back then is because it was very hard to imagine him as a xenophobic fascist ogre. It is on the other hand very easy to imagine Trump as such. The longer a given group stays in power with its assumptions unchallenged, the more they assume they can get away with whatever they want and not have to care about public reaction.
And that is based on the assumption that The Way Things Are is the a priori Way Things Are Meant To Be rather than a simple chain of causality in which the way things are now is because we previously did things a different way and didn’t like the results.
I mean, if you’re voting for duopoly, your two choices are Spam, Socialism, Sausage, Abortions, Socialism, Drag Queen Story Hour and Socialism, or Spam, Spam, Socialism, Border Walls, Racism, Corruption and Socialism. And if you stand up and go, “But I don’t LIKE socialism!” tough, because they’re BOTH socialism. If you don’t like socialism, you can always vote for the Libertarian Party, which is the only American party that is not explicitly or implicitly socialist. Assuming, that is, you’re serious about not wanting socialism.
But you’re not, are you?
You want a big, heavy handed government that creates the society you want. And the kids who want the socialism that admits to being such just want the same thing that you do: A big, heavy handed government that creates the society they want. It just happens to provide them with more material benefits than liberal tears.
I’m not sure why that concept is so radical.