Bernie Sanders and The Resurgence of Socialist Sentiment In America

by Ralph Benko, Contributing Author:  Quite a few articles have been written lately on the receptivity of Millennials to socialism and even (7% of them) communism.  What’s up with that? U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, that’s what. In a speech delivered at Georgetown University, “Democratic Socialism in the United States“ he said:
So let me define for you, simply and straightforwardly, what democratic socialism means to me. It builds on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed economic rights for all Americans. And it builds on what Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1968 when he stated that; “This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor.” It builds on the success of many other countries around the world that have done a far better job than we have in protecting the needs of their working families, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor.

Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.

Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system in America today which is not only grossly unfair but, in many respects, corrupt.

... In my view, it’s time we had democratic socialism for working families, not just Wall Street, billionaires and large corporations. It means that we should not be providing welfare for corporations, huge tax breaks for the very rich, or trade policies which boost corporate profits as workers lose their jobs. It means that we create a government that works for works for all of us, not just powerful special interests. It means that economic rights must be an essential part of what America stands for.

It means that health care should be a right of all people, not a privilege. This is not a radical idea. It exists in every other major country on earth. Not just Denmark, Sweden or Finland. It exists in Canada, France, Germany and Taiwan.He goes on.

Sound good? Sounds wonderful!

Pity it doesn’t work.

Yet it resonates. As reported by VictimsOfCommunism.org:
For starters, as of this year, more Millennials would prefer to live in a socialist country (44%) than in a capitalist one (42%). Some even said they would prefer to live in a communist country (7%). The percentage of Millennials who would prefer socialism to capitalism is a full ten points higher than that of the general population.I find the rising tide of socialist sentiment more quaint than alarming.

What the Millennials are expressing is a dissatisfaction with how so-called capitalism has been, and is, failing them. “Free markets” are not a dogma. They are a law of nature. They should never be, although often are, used as a beard for oligarchy.

We will know if free markets are at work, rather than merely being invoked, by whether there is, to quote JFK, a “rising tide that lifts all boats” for the economy and the ecology.
No rising tide? No free markets.

For a full generation -- the Millennials’ generation -- the American economy has been somewhere between sluggish and stagnant. It has been this way under both Republican and Democratic administrations. That is a sure sign that, whatever lip service may have been paid to them, free markets have been choked (by Democrats) or subverted (by Republicans).

No wonder the Millennials are disgruntled. They ask for bread. We give them a stone.
The kids are on to something. But as the Victims of Communism Foundation demurely points out, “despite Millennials’ enthusiasm for socialism and communism, they do not, in fact, know what those terms mean.”

Memo to the Millennials: Communism and socialism suffered repeated Epic Fails at creating a Socialist Workers Paradise.

Note, in passing, that the Scandinavian versions, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats (among those who Sen. Sanders extolled, in his speech, for universal health coverage, a Hayekian principle) have been far more successful and consistently show up as the happiest countries in the world. As I wrote here:
The erennially happiest countries in the world, after all, such as Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Sweden all were, last time this columnist looked, social democracies.One might infer, however, that they are socialist because they are happy rather than happy because they are socialist. And their socialism, argues Corey Iacono, at FEE.org turns out to be more mythic than real.In response to Americans frequently referring to his country as socialist, the prime minister of Denmark recently remarked in a lecture at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government,

"I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy."Sorry, Sen. Sanders.

Let me confess to some bias here. During the Cold War I was passionately, if lyrically, anti-communist. Yes, my old anticommunist slip is showing. That said, my opposition to the Soviet Union did not include a hostility to Russia, or the Russians, who were themselves victims of Communism.

During the waning days of the Cold War, when President Gorbachev was liberalizing things via Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (economic liberalization) I assembled the Prosperity Caucus -- a group of free market economists which I founded around 30 years ago which meets monthly to this day -- at the Soviet Embassy. We were hospitably, if a bit warily, received.

To break the ice I opened the gathering with a joke.

“I have discovered that communism and capitalism might be closer than it superficially appears. I prove it thusly:

How many Marxist economists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?  None! The light bulb contains within itself the seeds of its own revolution!

How many Austrian economists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None! If the government would just leave it alone, the lightbulb would unscrew itself!This witty foray, such as it was, elicited gazes of incomprehension from our host, an official of the Soviet foreign service, and the entire assembly of supply-side economists. In short, I bombed. (Fortunately, only metaphorically.) When an FBI agent phoned me up some months later to politely inquire what the heck I was doing in there, she too didn’t find my recounting of the joke hilarious. This cut short my already unpromising career in Stand-Up Comedy.

There is very likely a recording somewhere in the archives of the KGB -- and the FBI -- if you wish to audit my failed attempt at humor. There is a reason why Carlyle, shamefully arguing for the reintroduction of slavery into the West Indies and referencing that great (and discredited) pessimist Thomas Malthus, called economics “the dismal science.” There is a reason why that epithet stuck.  Lesson learned!

What many Millennials may not quite grasp is that the heart of the Communist Manifesto was not about fighting Big Business. It was pitting the workers (called the Proletarians) against the Middle Class (called the “Bourgeois”):
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.Attacking the Middle Class-based social order did not end well. Nor, one infers, is it what the Millennials really are yearning for.

What was the Communist Manifesto’s stated agenda to bring about the Socialist Workers’ Paradise?
These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.

Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, ...

More significant than the Millennial’s sentimental receptivity to the socialist, and even Communist, brand is the Democratic Party’s embrace of significant portions of the core agenda of the Communist Manifesto, albeit in somewhat modified form.

The Democrats remain largely invested in #2, steeply rising tax rates on the affluent; #3, fighting to preserve the Estate Tax’s confiscatory rate on substantial estates; #5, the Federal Reserve System; #6, formerly somewhat doing business as “net neutrality;” and #10, staunch opposition to School Choice. Many of the Manifesto’s other elements, such as the abolition of property in land, the cultivation of waste-lands, and the combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries (whatever that could have meant, maybe tractors?) have become obsolete as we have moved from an agrarian to an industrial to a post-industrial economy.

Otherwise, one supposes, we would have found these propositions too in the National Democratic Party platform.

Democratic Party doctrine peculiarly embraces, or at least clearly echoes, Marx and Engels’ core platform. This observation is not “Red Baiting.” I do not suggest that the Democrats have directly quarried from the Communist Manifesto in devising their platforms and policies or that they should be persecuted. It is merely that progressives, to whom these splendid doctrines of yore remain beloved, have disproportionate influence on the Democratic Party.

I urge the Democratic Party, and progressives, to openly celebrate, rather than hide, their ideological roots. I do not begrudge the progressives, or the Democrats, their privilege of bitterly clinging to old Communist dogma. Nor do I begrudge the Millennials' rhetorical sympathies for it.

I am merely incredulous. It seems that the Millennials and the Democrats -- unlike, say, the Russians and the Chinese -- somehow have failed to grasp what a colossal failure socialism and Communism proved in practice. Both the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China scrapped that system as soon as the Cold War ended. And prospered!

That said, the Millennials’ grievances are well founded. I consider these grievances rooted in our government’s drift from, rather than embrace of, free markets. To quote Jack Kemp -- who called himself a Democratic Capitalist -- quoting from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar on the floor of the House:

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.The Millennials have indeed found their lives, after almost twenty years of economic stagnation, “bound in shallows and in miseries.” Free markets have not failed. Both national political parties have, for a generation, failed free markets.What to do? To complete Kemp’s quote from Shakespeare, “On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves. Or lose our ventures.”

Millennials! I feel you and take your disgruntlement seriously. Your mission, in support of your own interests, is to restore the American Dream rather than conniving at state control of the means of production, which is what Socialism is, was, and ever will mean.

Socialism offers a very pretty story. Yet it has always led, and would only lead, to more shallows and miseries to bind our lives. Don't fall for it.

Let us give thanks to Sen. Sanders for his wonderful diagnosis of the pathetic state of the economy and the society. And then let us politely decline his patent medicine prescription for its cure.

The American Dream is one of "prosperity and justice for all." Bringing that about for the future cannot be done by reference to an antique dogma. The project to create a new rising tide that lifts all boats now is, as it should be, in the hands of the Millennials.
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Ralph Benko is an advisor to nonprofit and advocacy organizations, is a member of the Conservative Action Project, a contributor to the contributor to the ARRA News Service. Founder of The Prosperity Caucus, he was a member of the Jack Kemp supply-side team, served in an unrelated area as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House. The article which first appeared in Forbes.

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