Socialism always and everywhere decays into outright abuse of the human person. Has there ever been a socialism that didn’t result in the establishment of a gulag, a holocaust camp, or a killing field?
At age 58, I can state with utter earnestness that one of the most devastating things of our present age is its re-found interest in socialism. I’ve spent my career trying to promote the dignity of the human person. Socialism, everywhere and always, denigrates human free will and human dignity. In its violent phases, it utterly wipes the map of any dissident. What happened, people? I fear a century more of holocaust camps, gulags, and killing fields.
Let me unpack this as I express some frustration about the current state of the world.
As is obvious everywhere in politics, the news, and social media, socialism has made a surprising (well, surprising to me), roaring comeback in American culture. Historically, of course, we’ve gone through Red periods before. During World War I, socialism mixed with anarchism. During the 1930s, the Great Depression saw the most open support ever for the Communist party and for Red causes. The end of the 1960s and early 1970s also saw a massive resurgence among the New Left, but, like World War I, mixing anarchy with socialism and socialist causes.
The Old Left has espoused a strictly economic form of Marxism. Their children—the Red diaper babies of the New Left—were much more clever, much more patient, and much more willing to play the Long Game. For them, economics mattered, but culture mattered much more. They were more taken with Gramsci C. Wright Mills than with Marx and Stalin. Accepting political defeat in 1972, they entered every avenue of education—from primary to collegiate and graduate—and the cultural and artistic institutions of America.
They bided their time.
The first inkling that they had done some serious damage came in the very late 1980s and early 1990s with the “politically correct” movement. Then, they ramped it up in academia with the unholy trinity of race, class, and gender. To be sure, the Old Left had cared most about class. The New Left and their offspring cared far more about race and gender.
Then, forming a truly strange alliance with radical Islam, the new New Left revealed itself about a decade ago with the rise of the so-called Squad (often combining Islam and socialism), with a New York City mayor (Muslim and socialist), and now, openly, an alliance between the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Democratic Party.
Here’s the amazing thing. Conservatism over the past seventy years has done an amazing and admirable job of policing its own, nullifying extremists and racists. But the Left, just very recently, has embraced its extremists and its racists (think SPLC and Graham Platner), failing to police their own.
Now, the DSA seems to be everywhere, and they have very serious allies in Congress, especially in the House of Representatives, and at least one ally on the Supreme Court.
Given their sudden rise to prominence, it’s worth considering exactly what the DSA stands for. According to their own platform, they seek
- Abolition of all student debt
- Government run health care
- Publicly owned housing
- Queer liberation for women (ending the patriarchy in families)
- Freeing Palestine
- Abolition of the Electoral College
- Abolition of the Senate
- Public ownership of corporations and industries
- Expanding the House of Representatives, giving them power of the Executive and the Supreme Court
Of course, this is just a sampling of things they advocate. But, imagine, not just socialism, but democracy and socialism. For some, democratic socialism sounds better than, say, Cambodian socialism, but combining democracy and socialism sounds like a form of Hell to me.
When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was recently asked about supporting the abolition of the Senate, she responded bizarrely and in complete ignorance that “elements” of the Senate come from Jim Crow. Clearly, she’s not the brightest person, but even this is outrageous in its stupidity. If she’s talking about the filibuster, she’s just plain wrong. The filibuster dates back to the beginning of the Senate, well over a century before Jim Crow.
OK, I’ve argued until I’m blue in the face, recently, that democracy, while necessary in a republic, is not the best aspect of society and that democracy, since Plato, has been widely recognized as a scam, a mere sham to allow 50.1% of the people to act as tyrant and brutalizer.
So, let’s focus on socialism. First, it’s totally unnatural. Let’s imagine the human person in the Judeo-Christian world. Man is made in God’s image, as we discover very clearly in Genesis 1, but God takes on man’s image in the Incarnation. In other words, no matter how fallen we are, we are uniquely made in His image, and He, through Mary and the Holy Spirit, took on our image. Both, as such, become sacred. Socialism and democracy both demand conformity. But, what holds us together as human beings? Our sin, our depravity, the lowest parts of each of us. What distinguishes us as individuals—our excellences—that which is different from every other human. In a free and stable society, community not only dampens our sin, it promotes our excellences. In some mysterious way, we become more of our selves in community, not less. Yes, we are made for community, but not for conformity.
Second, socialism always and everywhere decays into outright abuse of the human person. Has there ever been a socialism that didn’t result in the establishment of a gulag, a holocaust camp, or a killing field? Everywhere, socialism—whether hard or soft—was resulted in oppression and mass slaughter. The numbers don’t lie. As we well know, governments between 1917-1991—some fascist, some National Socialist, and some communist—murdered 205,000,000 persons. Never in the history of the world has there been a greater mass killer, except for diseases.
Third, a practical concern. Why in God’s name would any sane person want to give yet more power to the political sphere of life? Yes, politics has a place, but so does family, and so does religion, and so does education, and so does associationalism, and so does small business. There’s no reason that politics should grab and control any of these other spheres. Plus, when does government control of anything ever work? Would you really want your healthcare to be run by the Department of Motor Vehicles?
Democracy is nothing other than a sham for conformity and power, and socialism is nothing more than a sham for conformity and power. Combine the two, and we have a sham for yet more conformity and more power. There is nothing good, hip, or cool about socialism. Everywhere it has abused the human person, all in the name of humanity.
The Catholic church has always known this. As Pope Pius XI stated, unequivocally: “No one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.” Two-hundred-and-five million souls would shout in agreement, if only we listened.
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The featured image, uploaded by Art Jarka, is a photograph, taken on 16 April 2017, of the Memorial to the Victims of Communist Injustice (Pomník obětem komunistické zvůle) in Klatovy, Czech Republic, created by prominent Czech sculptor Olbram Zoubek. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Everything you write is, no doubt, true, but the rote rejoinder to the evils and horrors that socialism has perpetrated is invariably, “But that wasn’t ‘real’ socialism” — as if that of its current proponents will be.
Professor, Let’s don’t just focus on “Socialism!”, but let’s focus on our Roots.
Our original constitution would not be in this position – the wildly gyrating 50.1% from election to election.
17th amendment delenda est.
Please think before you denounce me and my children for this idea. I’m fairly confident that Aristotle, Cicero, Montesquieu, Locke, Burke, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and de Tocqueville would approve this message. I would hope that Russell Kirk would also abhor what the Senate has become. More about that below. (Note: If you disapprove, please bring receipts. The Imaginative Conservative is a deliberative body.)
Why repeal the 17th? Because our Founding Fathers created the Senate as a distinguished body, filled with older statesmen, at the highest levels, who were paid by their bosses to say “No, let’s stop and think about that.”
Prior to the 17th amendment, the US Senators had one boss: their state legislatures. They had one purpose: As our “Natural Aristocracy”, keep the balance between the President (Aristotle’s monarch/ tyrant) and the House (Aristotle’s polity/ democracy). Don’t believe me? Read Federalists Papers 62, 63, and 64. Read the letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on “natural aristocracy”. George Washington called the Senate “the body that cools the passions of the House, like a saucer cools tea.” (or words to that effect). I have receipts dating back 3500 years to Moses wandering in the desert – he appointed judges over Israel.
Today? The Senate has one boss- Mammon- the God of Re-elction, Wealth and Greed.
Let’s do a thought experiment. What happens if we repeal the 17th?
1) Immediately removes $3-4 billion from each election cycle. (good thing)
2) Immediately gives Senators time to think instead of chasing dollars for re-election. (good thing)
3) Immediately gives them accountability to state legislatures. (states typically like balanced budgets)
4) Immediately removes the Paxtons, AOCs (she’s coming for NY), and the other demogogic blowhards.
The only change I would make?
a) “While serving as a state’s Senator, Senators cannot campaign for any other elective office, nor can they endorse any other candidate for elective office.” (That gets rid of 100 future Presidential campaigns.)
b) “All Senate actions require a 60 percent majority. The full Senate must meet every day that executive or judicial appointments are unfilled.”
Otherwise? The Senate are just another Aristotelean demagogic body- which is very unhealthy for a functioning republic.
p.s. I propose that Russell Kirk would support my position. In his day, the Senate still had an over-riding concern: the USSR was an existential threat to us and Western Civilization. With the removal of the USSR? Just as Cato and Scipio removed Carthage?
History notes that we will fight someone, even our own brother. It’s human nature. Today’s Senate (and our republic) has echoes of the Gracchi brothers, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar. The PRC and Russia? Our present day Jurgurtha and Mithridates.
p.p.s. Before you denounce this, think about those who most strongly wish to dismantle the Senate’s last vestige of filibuster: Obama, Clinton, Pelosi, the entire House, the entire “Democratic Party!”, the DSA, and every democratic presidential candidate of 2028. Sadly, the republicans are little better, but their cry “Democrats are going to do it anyway” rings hollow in my ears.
Hello Professor Birzer,
I to am worried about the socialists within our nation and the havoc they wish to implement. In this essay you state that the right was justified in getting rid of their extremists.
I disagree with you on this being a good thing. Getting rid of our extremists was one of the worst things we did to the political right. With no extremists we have no one with a backbone to fight the insanity of the political Left. I’m mainly speaking about the John Birch Society and other similar groups.
If we’re being honest, many on the political “right” today would find the likes of Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, Russell Kirk, T. S. Eliot, Richard Weaver, and M. E. Bradford as being too extreme and kick them out of the party.
As you probably know, this happened to a degree with Kirk and Bradford in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s when the Paleoconservative’s and Neoconservatives where fighting it out, with Kirk being called antisemitic because of one sentence in a Heritage Foundation lecture. Put simply, we need many more extremists if we wish to save our republic.
Are you at all familiar with John Ruskin’s version of socialism? I’d be interested in your response.