BAD BLOOD

There’s no getting around it: A majority of Americans, especially those who lived through the Cold War, have an abiding suspicion of socialism and, in many cases, even a deep hatred for it. It’s fair to say that the United States and many European countries were not exactly welcoming of the world’s first socialist nation when it emerged from the ruins of tsarist Russia in 1917. Indeed, they viewed it as a threat, which may not have been entirely ill founded. “Workers of the world, unite!” was, after all, the slogan of the International Workingmen’s Association, which the Soviet Union dominated.

The putative ally of the US during World War II, the USSR engaged with the US in a shadowy, spy-versus-spy competition for territory, resources, and alliances that began even before the war ended. The rivalry’s most visible and worrisome component took the form of a nuclear arms race, competing arsenals that stood at the tip of war machines that rarely engaged in open conflict, but that competed for the appearance of superiority at every level, from foot soldier to fighter jet. The two nations engaged in proxy wars involving smaller “client” countries, in which each made efforts to conceal its involvement in regional conflicts in which they may or may not have had a legitimate interest other than to keep the other power from gaining influence. Tensions were heightened to the point where rational people built bomb shelters in their backyards. The war even extended to “friendly” venues like the Olympics, where each gold medal represented a vindication of the moral and superior physical makeup of the winning country.

Those were the days!

A LOT OF HUMAN BEINGS LOVE POWER

Let’s stick with the example of the Soviet Union. But you can apply this one equally to China, Cuba, North Korea, and the flavor of the month among socialism haters, Venezuela. The American scholar Bertram Wolfe, a founder of the Communist Party USA who became a vocal anti-communist during the Cold War, observed that in the case of the USSR, the Marxist belief that economics determines politics was turned on its head: In the USSR, naked political power was used to determine economics. Wolfe was referring, of course, to Leninism (see the Know Your Socialist Thinkers chapter), the offshoot of Marxist thinking that sought to overturn tsarist rule and achieve socialism under the leadership of a small cadre of “professional” revolutionaries who would direct the proletariat and lead it to victory and an enlightened, egalitarian rule. Which it did, in 1917—at least the first part. But then a funny thing happened along the way to enlightened, egalitarian rule: The professional cadre failed to awaken proletarian class consciousness to the point where leadership felt it could cede power to the workers, or to anyone else, for that matter. Or possibly the leaders of the revolution simply fell in love with being in power—they were human, after all.

It’s naive to think, according to this argument, that human beings will ever cede power and status willingly, so how can a socialist revolution led by people ever work? In the words of a reporter for the National Review: “If the argument for socialism is that it’s a noble theory that delivers economic and social equality on paper, but that every single time it gets tried, the leaders succumb to temptation and start accumulating wealth for themselves and stifling dissent and building a secret police and gulags… then as a theory, it’s worthless. It would work when it’s run by human beings who can resist the temptation to take what they want through force, and those humans don’t exist.”

Take that, Mother Teresa, Doctors Without Borders, and all you humanitarian workers!

SOME HUMAN BEINGS WHO LOVE POWER ARE EXTRAORDINARILY TWISTED

Perhaps inevitably, the most ruthless and cunning of all of the Soviet leaders, a young Georgian (from the central Asian republic, not the American state!) named Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, schemed his way to supreme power within the revolutionary cadre. Dzhugashvili, better known by his adopted revolutionary name, Joseph Stalin, systematically eliminated potential competitors and dissenters, sidelining some by imprisoning them in remote gulags (work camps), ordering the execution of others, and conducting show trials of large groups of them to ensure that no one else got any ideas about challenging his authority. Stalin went on to persecute kulaks (once-prosperous farmers whose land was appropriated when agriculture was collectivized) and orchestrate a famine in Ukraine in which an estimated five million were killed. He caused the forcible relocation of thousands of ethnic minorities to special settlements run by the secret police. By the time he died in 1953, Stalin had made tremendous strides in industrializing the Soviet Union and raising the standard of living for most citizens, but he did so at the expense of at least six million of his own countrymen’s lives, by one expert’s estimate—as many as twenty million by others.

It’s unclear whether authoritarian power attracts twisted individuals or possession of such power twists the individual. Probably some combination of the two. The point is that if too much power is in the hands of the government, especially one that hands individuals unchecked power, terrible things will happen because, you know, people.

THE GOVERNMENT IS NOT THE SAME THING AS THE PEOPLE

These authoritarian cliques tend to be self-perpetuating and responsive only to their own needs and interests, not necessarily those of the people they’re supposed to represent. In the USSR, Stalin’s death left the country with a rigid, secretive centralized bureaucracy in place of democratic proletarian rule. The Soviet politburo (the elite decision-making group at the head of the government) gutted the consumer economy in favor of the military and large-scale industry that would enrich the state. The primary purpose of the politburo appeared to be its own preservation and continued privileged access to consumer goods and services from Western Bloc countries, as the United States and its western European allies were called. The Soviet Union had devolved into an authoritarian regime in which the very revolutionaries who ostensibly risked their lives to liberate the masses ended up subjugating the masses.

The same can be said to be true of the governments in China, Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela today. The governments of each of these countries by virtue of their being completely insular, unaccountable, and more or less omnipotent, will never respond to the needs of their citizens because they don’t need to, and they will enforce bleak, gray conformity.

The very nature of a state-controlled economy, this argument goes, leads to the creation of a nondemocratic, isolated elite at its top.

HAVING YOUR PROPERTY APPROPRIATED STINKS

Let’s say your family owns a sugar plantation on a paradisiacal tropical island (which, generations ago, it plundered from the indigenous people who lived there prior to your ancestors’ arrival, but let’s not concern ourselves with that now). The land has been in your family for more than a century, you have Easter dinner with your extended family in the plantation house every year, and the name of the dog you had when you were ten is carved in the fence post around what long ago had been the slaves’ quarters. Suddenly, there’s a revolution, the sugar industry is nationalized, and the government appropriates your family’s property. Boom—now you’re having Easter dinner in a condo outside of Opa-Locka.

No matter how justified the appropriation of property is in the abstract, no one likes having things of value taken away. Just ask the US government. It’s still sanctioning Cuba for its 1960 appropriation of the Cuban subsidiaries of several US oil companies, as well as the thirty-six sugar mills owned by US firms there (the US got Guantánamo as part of its exit deal).

Some critics of socialism would go beyond this, contending that even heavy taxation of the wealthy in order to fund programs for the less fortunate is a form of appropriation. According to this argument, socialist rulers use the coercive power of the state to regulate, tax, and redistribute the wealth of those who work for a living.

NO ENGINE FOR INNOVATION

Without the profit motive inherent in capitalism, why would anyone bother to innovate? Wouldn’t everyone just do the absolute minimum of work required of him? Imagine every business in America, some opponents of socialism would argue, from your local coffee shop to the neighborhood bookstore to the manufacturer of your favorite body lotion or aftershave, being run like the Department of Motor Vehicles. People are inherently lazy, and if there’s no reward, there will be no risk, or even extra effort, taken.

NANNY STATE

The meddlesome government is taking away my plastic drinking straws. They’re going to make me adopt a vegan diet. They’re already counting my calories for me right on the damn menu of the takeout place around the corner from my office that has those incredible tacos. “Look what’s happening in New York,” one citizen complained to the New Yorker. “You can’t even supersize your sodas because they think we’re too stupid to make our own choices.”

These seem like trivial things, but in the minds of many people, they represent intrusions of “big government.” People put up similar resistance to warning labels on cigarette packs and seat belts in cars. Americans do not like “big government,” just read your Thomas Jefferson. (Of course, Alexander Hamilton would have refuted him…)

RELIGION

Among Marx’s most famous utterances was his assertion that religion is the “opium of the people,” a dismissive wave of the hand at an institution that brings millions comfort, solace, and purpose in a chaotic and cruel world. Even if you accept the Marxist critique of capitalism and view socialist efforts to bring dignity to the lowest echelons of society as fundamentally Christian—a belief shared by a substantial number of Christian socialists—this is a tough pill to swallow. Though Marx embraced the importance of a spiritual life, noting in the “Wages of Labor” (1844) the importance of people having time “at their disposal for spiritual creative activity and spiritual enjoyment,” some of his followers, including Lenin, did not: The Soviet Union was declared an atheist state on its formation, and at times throughout the early histories of religious groups (and in some cases, more recently), believers have been persecuted in the USSR and other socialist states.

A LOT OF SOCIALISTS ARE ANNOYING

Marx himself was probably at the top of the list for this one, at least if you weren’t in his inner social circle. Marx was charming and gracious in private, but to his fellow socialists, he was known as an epic and masterful infighter, prone to petty and prolonged squabbles. The best-intentioned Marxists can sometimes seem a little Johnny One-Note, pushing socialism as a panacea for all of society’s problems. Perhaps this is why Marx allegedly disassociated himself from the ways in which others used his ideas, by telling people, “I am not a Marxist.”

Have I left off your favorite reason to hate socialism? Email me at tnsh.con@gmail.com. Unfortunately, neither the publisher nor I can pay you for your labor.