The Weekly Signals Brief gathers the most interesting articles that I have read over the past week. Each link below is a piece that piqued my interest (click the titles to go to the full articles).
As you all know, I have set my sights against the rising popularity of socialism in the West, particularly in the United States. Specifically, I am talking about the Democratic Socialists of America, who are gaining in popularity, especially among American youth. When I say socialism, I am not talking about the Nordic model of large welfare systems, as those welfare systems are free-market economies with private property rights, legal rights for private enterprise, with no central planning. I define socialism as centralized planning, market and price controls, and severe limitations on property rights. One of the larger figures in the fight against socialism, or communism, to be more precise with definitions (socialism is a transitory phase before the full communist utopia is reached, according to Marxist theory), is James Lindsay. In this essay, James traces everyday progressive, socialist language back to its foundations in Marx own words. In the opening of the Democratic Socialist’s platform, found HERE, he highlights how the fantasy of a workday without bills or bosses is not a utopian sketch, but rather an echo of the Critique of the Gotha Programme and The German Ideology by Marx.
He goes through the entire platform, section by ugly and frightening section, and demonstrates the pattern repetition through every step, whether it’s the calls for housing and healthcare for all, the demands to tear down American society and rewrite the Constitution in order to build a Democratic Socialist Republic, or the plan to abolish the Senate, as well as have the new mono-cameral representative body appoint (not elect) the executive and judiciary, and then subordinate both of them to the legislature. These measures, despite being less democratic and more centralized, are framed as an expansion of democracy, yet operate on the same logic Lenin spelled out when he insisted true democracy requires the silencing and disenfranchising of people labeled as class enemies and exploiters. “All power to the soviets!” James’s breakdown rightly shows that these are not isolated policy choices that have their roots in Western European social democracies, but are a program for replacing the existing order with something that has never produced the classless utopia it promises. Socialism, despite every effort, never moves beyond that transitional phase into the utopia. What it does do, however, is reliably produce scarcity, coercion, and the systematic repression of dissenters. This matters more than anything, especially today, because the language in the DSA platform is circulating in ordinary political conversation and the people using it rarely pause (or intentionally obfuscate) the historical record.
Anyone who cares about how power actually works should give this a read. It is long, but it is well worth it, and important. Lindsay digs in deep to measure the tenets of the DSA platform against the manifestos and regimes that implemented similar policies. The result is clear. You come away from his article less able to dismiss the rhetoric as mere idealism and more able to evaluate the costs it has carried everywhere it has been tried.
As I said, I have set my sights on socialism and have taken a prosecutorial stance against its underlying ideology, and have shared multiple anti-communist essays from other authors since taking this turn. However, I do not want this tack to devolve into yet another social media echo-chamber separating the left from the right in exclusion. The whole point of democratic institutions, and my ardent defense of the American Republic, in particular, is based in the free exchange of ideas, and debating the merits of those ideas in a civilized manner. Despite my rhetorical emphasis in my recent podcast episodes, I do encourage debate, as I view debate as a way to test ideas, in the Socratic manner, in order to arrive at a deeper truth. In that spirit, Georgi Georgiev has opened his own line of debate on my podcast series, through the lens that, unlike my thesis that the seizure of power is baked into the socialist system, argues that ideas do not seize power. Rather, ambitious human beings reach for whatever ideology will advance their political aims.
He makes a convincing argument, raising deep questions about the nature of man and how cruelty is not specific to socialism, but finds roots no matter what century or ideology lies underneath the power in question, whether under the banner of religion, nationalism, or even liberalism. My own arguments target socialism in particular because, unlike examples Georgi uses, socialism did not die off in the collapse of the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc. Unlike Nazism, it has survived the twentieth-century and continues to grow in popular support.
Georgi’s rebuttal to my series provides a deeply-pondered and well-constructed counter-argument to my own, rather than the dismissals typical of the social media forum, and I encourage anyone who is interested to join in the discussion and debate. I think you will come away with a stronger sense and clearer view, in these debates, of the points where our diagnostics diverge. If you value testing ideas, rather than just confirming or hand-waving them, this is the kind of exchange worth joining, and I am glad to be a part of this discussion. I think the rest of you will, too.
I chose this article by John Hawkins because it is not just another right-wing economic talking point, though I have heard this argument before, going back to the Tea Party era of the early 2000s. The point John is making is that claims like the one he highlights are not harmless opinions floating around the aether, detached from reality. Despite the appeal to emotion and egalitarianism of the claim that someone working at McDonald’s should be able to afford a house, claims like that are not new, have been tried before, and have real-world effects on real human beings.
As I said, the broader point is that choosing a socialist framework over one that demands personal growth and self-discipline has a lineage of results that we can trace. Long waits for availability in subsidized housing projects and a continuous cycle of ever-increasing mandates come to mind as historical examples of the equity framework that the statement under examination invokes. The rejection or implementation of such ideas determine whether a society will encourage people to aim for something greater, or will lock them in to dependency on an increasingly centralized system.
John’s article is worth the read because it offers a challenge to a popular sentiment. It is one of many examples of identifying when good intentions start demanding unrealistic expectations both from the market and from the working class.
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