Writing in the New York Times on Saturday, an impressive theology scholar offered an unimpressive take on socialism.
In his very first paragraph, David Bentley Hart inadvertently explained socialism’s critical flaw: its arrogant trust that government knows better than individuals. Hart decries how, at “smallish airports” in the Midwest, travelers are caught between Fox News’ “bestial din” and the “T.S.A.’s gauntlet of gropers.”
Griping about Fox News, Hart evidently believes the airport should be airing a different news network. Yet, assuming airport authorities air the news networks they believe the majority of travelers will prefer, this sot of undermines his point. The “bestial din” must be gone — the plurality of interests be damned.
The gripe against TSA is more absurd. TSA is, quite literally, an organization made poor in service by socialism. The post-9/11 nationalization of airport security screening was unnecessary nationalization, and the result of Democrats’ demands of the Bush administration. With the profit incentive for efficiency and merit now evaporated, airport security is badly organized, often poorly led, and largely unaccountable. When I visit smallish Midwest airports, for example, I’m often struck that many TSA officers are on duty. Why aren’t they posted at busier airports where they could help provide more efficient screening amid higher traveler traffic? Because government thinks it knows best, yet it doesn’t.
This theme of delusion sustains throughout Hart’s piece.
He rightly identifies that the “health care cost per capita is far lower” in Europe than America, but fails to include Europe’s corollary reality of aggressive triage-based access to care, lengthy waiting periods for treatment, and higher taxes. He also disingenuously ignores that the vast majority of medical drugs and devices used by Europeans are American-developed, American-manufactured and then subsidized by Americans for Europeans’ benefit.
More broadly, Hart claims he has “lived abroad often enough to be conscious of the flaws in various nations’ social democratic systems. But I know too that those systems usually make possible something closer to a just and charitable society than ours has ever been.”
This is manifestly untrue. American contributions to charity are far higher than those in Europe, and economic opportunity in America — both in post-tax earnings and capital formation — is also far greater. Moreover, Hart must not have stepped foot outside the Versailles palace if he believes Europe is a fiefdom of harmonious social intercourse. Racism, employment prejudice, and class tensions are much greater problems in Western Europe than in America.
And, in the finest tradition of Euro-wannabeism, Hart also appears to hate America. Lamenting “our unique national genius for stupidity,” like European socialists, Hart fails to recognize that democratic socialism is only democratic by virtue of American military power. Instead, indirectly calling for appeasement of Xi Jinping’s less-than-democratic ambition for global socialism, Hart wails about the “purchase of needless weapons systems.” Some military programs are unnecessary, sure, but the democratic international order depends on more missiles and submarines — specifically, American ones, unless he wants to see Xi or Russian President Vladimir Putin control all of his favorite socialist countries.
Hart also defends Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., claiming that conservatives criticize her not because her ideas are bad, but rather “mostly because they suspect that in high school she was one of those girls they had no hope of getting a date with.” Really?
Then, clarifying his own interest in getting a date with AOC, Hart adds “(though, really, she comes across as someone who could look past a face of even the purest suet if she thought she glimpsed a healthy soul behind it).”
I’m sure AOC means well, but her power in the Democratic Party reminds us of socialism’s greatest flaw: It centralizes power in the hands of a very few individuals who aren’t necessarily especially knowledgeable or bright, just well-connected. Humans are flawed. In contrast, when bound to the democratic rule of law, capitalism’s market-driven interaction of many individuals ensures the best ideas ultimately triumph.
So no, sorry Hart, we can’t relax about socialism.
