Socialist ideas are very much on the ballot in November.
This formulation does not merely reflect right-wing fear of Joe Biden and his party. The pitch that a Biden presidency would be further left than anything we have seen before is one that Biden acolytes themselves have offered approvingly.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the superintendent of socialism in the United States, said in August that the Left will “come together to make the Biden administration the most progressive administration it can become.” Biden’s campaign agenda is “the most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in the modern history of the party,” Waleed Shahid, a member of the activist group Justice Democrats, told Vox. Speaking of Vox, a recent headline reads, “Democrats are running on the most progressive police reform agenda in modern American history.” Superlatives abound.
To be sure, the ever-rising appeal of socialist ideas has more than one cause. It comes, in part, from some realization like that of American novelist Jack London, who, upon registering that one day, his able body would become feeble, embraced socialism as a means of protecting the vulnerable from “the Pit.”
Yet support for socialism in the U.S. seems to come primarily from notions that “the system” consistently trods on the little guy, that free enterprise “capitalism” has led only to poverty and suffering, and that only socialism and redistribution can right the ship.
This notion is the primary target of rebuttal in Linden Blue’s book Losing Freedom: Socialism and the Growing Threat to American Life, Liberty, and Free Enterprise.
Blue begins by reminding readers that all history considered — this book was published before COVID-19’s very unwelcome arrival, though his proposition still stands — those alive in 2020 have it pretty good, relatively speaking. Especially in the West, the “desperate effort to survive against the perversities of nature and the ravages of totalitarian governments” that plagued humanity for millennia continues to be a diminishing reality. The yields of wealth-generating free enterprise economies have driven this improvement.
Blue details his harrowing experience of being detained, interrogated, and eventually released by Fidel Castro’s communist Cuban regime in 1961. He draws the correlations between communism and socialism that conservatives are so keen to do: Both coerce and limit personal freedom as government imposes its vision of the collective good. “Freedom and socialism are mutually exclusive,” he writes. “You cannot have both.”
There is a debate to be had about whether the oppressive character of communism is baked into all expressions of socialism. Certainly, Scandinavian countries offer a better quality of life than a communist Cuba, though it remains that socialist policies can’t promise better overall social outcomes than free enterprise policies. In their more insidious expressions, they only bring poverty.
Blue’s main thrust is that no expression of socialism has brought any measure of prosperity that rivals what we enjoy — not in Soviet Russia, Latin America, nor Sweden, nor anywhere else. “The best evidence against socialism is its own track record,” Blue writes.
One piece of Blue’s argument is that socialist policies of the Swedish sort are not transmutable to a vast and pluralist country such as the U.S. This notion may be true, but the most compelling argument against socialism is that its outcomes wouldn’t be welcome even if it could be transmuted. The governmental role in one’s life would only grow.
Free enterprise proponents have a duty to situate the socialist sympathizer, to contextualize his hopes and his grievances. “Many people, particularly those in the West, take their freedom for granted … They wake up in a home or apartment,” Blue writes. “They have electricity, food, shelter, heat, potable running water and sanitation facilities. They can buy a car or cell phone.” Basic necessities are not the endgame, but these assurances, and scores of other needs and pleasures, have been satisfied under our mostly free enterprise regime.
The single best argument against socialism is that its antithesis has made America a rather good place to live, all things considered.
