Rashida Tlaib won an upset Democrat primary in Michigan and then won in November 2018 to become one of the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress. Tlaib gained instant notoriety with her foul-mouthed call to impeach Trump: “We need to impeach the mother-f***er.” So much for civility on the left. I’m sure CNN, though, likely blames Trump for Tlaib’s profanity.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) endorsed Tlaib, but how does Tlaib define her ideology? Tlaib explains: “I’m a member of a lot of organizations; for me I’ve always pushed back on these socialist labels.” Doesn’t sound very definitive, does it?1
She continues: “Socialism, to me, means ensuring that our government policy puts human needs before corporate greed and that we build communities where everyone has a chance to thrive.” Specific policy items include “a living wage for all people, abolishing ICE and securing universal health care.” Sounds not too dissimilar to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.2
Congress’s newest and youngest socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, tweeted her regret that “the restaurant I used to work at is closing its doors. I swung by today to say hi one last time, and kid around with friends like old times.”
The restaurant in question, the Coffee Shop in Union Square, is where the women of Sex and the City frequently met. After twenty-eight years in business, owner Charles Milite announced that he was closing because “rents are very high and now the minimum wage is going up.”
What AOC failed to acknowledge to her followers is that her 150 former coworkers didn’t lose their jobs because of a failure in capitalism, but because of excessive government intervention.
An increased minimum wage is a big part of the democratic socialists’ platform. The most discussed component of their platform is not promoting state ownership of the means of production, but rather a fifteen-dollars-per-hour minimum wage. Kshama Sawant, a democratic socialist, won a seat on the Seattle City Council with a fifteen-dollars-per-hour minimum wage as a main campaign theme.3
According to Fox News reporter Lukas Mikelionis, “Seattle is a troubling case, as research from the University of Washington’s School of Public Policy and Governance found that the higher minimum wage led to significant job declines and actually left the poorest worst off in the city, the Washington Post reported.”4
No wonder that despite Bernie’s love for Scandinavian “socialism,” Nordic countries generally don’t have state-enforced minimum wages.
Not only are the Scandinavian countries largely free of consumer price controls, but they also largely lack governmental control of minimum wages. Those on America’s left who clamor for fifteen-dollars-an-hour federal minimum wage laws might be somewhat embarrassed to discover that Scandinavian “socialism” has no minimum wage and yet workers seem to thrive.5
Scandinavian countries typically do have sky-high individual income tax rates on the middle class, but their corporate taxes have long been lower than American rates. Yet today’s American socialists, who are enamored with Scandinavian “socialism,” clamor for punitive taxes on “greedy” corporations.
Sawant, the Seattle City Council socialist, fought for a $48 million special tax on large corporations, which was apparently too much even for Jeff Bezos’s Amazon to swallow and was ultimately rejected.
So, which is it? Is “socialism” a cry for hiking taxes on corporations or for emulating Scandinavia with its low taxation on corporations?6
Geoff Dembicki, at Vice, points out the disconnect between self-described socialists and historical socialism: “though ‘socialism’ is gaining in popularity, nobody can seem to agree on what it means.”7
If you ask the new democratic socialists directly about socialism, you get gelatinous words intended to soothe and not scare unwitting youths. So, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) claim they “do not want to create an all-powerful government bureaucracy” . . . but they do “believe that the workers and consumers who are affected by economic institutions should own and control them.”
Interesting. So, they seem to intuit big government’s history of disastrous economic results, but they still want “worker ownership” of industry through cooperatives while also favoring “as much decentralization as possible.” They do admit that some big industries like steel and the utilities may have to be owned and run by the central government but “that the whole economy should [not] be centrally planned.” Of course, “major social investments like mass transit, housing, and energy” will need government planning. So, in other words, the new socialists are both for and against government owning the means of production. And to be clear, the new socialists are also both for and against central planning.8
Democratic Socialists of America weren’t even a footnote in elections until Bernie came along. The DSA organized in 1982 and their membership was constant at a few thousand until recently, when membership jumped to over fifty thousand. Are they just excited progressives? Progressives, yes, but progressives on steroids. DSA’s national director, Maria Svart, explains that the socialists she represents don’t “see capitalism as compatible with freedom or justice or democracy.”9
What separates these new socialists from traditional progressives is, according to Dembicki, that “they are less compromising, their rhetoric is more stark, and their demands are often more sweeping.”10
Central to these young socialists is a generalized criticism of capitalism as an economic system or a culture. In socialist fashion, they do ultimately want to get rid of private ownership of corporations, but they seem happy, initially, to band together for a national minimum wage and other common progressive policies such as rejecting corporate donations. Refusing corporate donations or superPAC money is quickly becoming the new litmus test not just for uncloseted, proud socialists but also for progressives in general.
Income inequality and fairness are never far from the surface, though. Some analysts, like Dembicki, see the roots of these new socialists in the historical socialism of Eugene Debs. Debs received 6 percent of the vote in 1912, the high-water mark for socialists in American elections. Some DSA members point to the Occupy Wall Street movement as a recent momentum builder, but the new socialists are almost entirely an outgrowth of Bernie’s presidential campaign.11
Ever since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory over Democrat leader Joe Crowley, conservatives have been pointing out her inconsistencies. But in our postmodern world facts are not what they used to be. Historical definitions or examples of socialism are immaterial to this new generation. To them it seems to be enough to stand up and proclaim, “I am a socialist!” And if asked to define its meaning, you will get some drivel about “I’m for fairness.”
On a recent trip to Prague, I had the opportunity to talk with a true hero of liberty, Vaclav Klaus, the first prime minister of the Czech Republic after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the president of the Czech Republic from 2003 to 2013. President Klaus has been one of Europe’s leading voices for free market capitalism since the Czechs gained their freedom in the Velvet Revolution.
As we were having lunch together, Klaus observed that the socialist dogma being preached to today’s youth is actually worse than it was under Soviet rule, when teachers taught Marxism because they had no choice, but it was obvious that they did not accept its utopian propaganda as they were living every day under socialism’s bleak reality. Klaus contrasted that with the academic climate in American universities today, where “intellectuals” who are true believers are zealously promoting socialism to young people. He laughed at the bitter irony that “there are more true believers of Marxism at the University of California Berkeley than we had in all of communist Czechoslovakia.”
In a speech to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, President Klaus warned, “We have to fight communism in its new disguises, in its new clothes, which are sometimes so chic and colorful that they camouflage their true content.” Today’s socialists use attractive disguises like income and lifestyle equality while providing zero specifics as to how they will bring it about. When pressed about the level of government control their plans would require, they obfuscate and demur.
Even Bernie, in the past few years, shies away from calling for outright state ownership of production. In fact, Bernie does not present his ideology as pure socialism, but rather dresses it up in its more palatable form: “fairness.” In an interview with Time he now argues: “I don’t believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.” Who knows exactly what a “fair deal” means, but I suspect that it’s code for state-enforced redistribution of wealth.12
Today’s new socialists have no clue what socialism means. Which makes them doubly dangerous, because they don’t understand that, throughout history, enforced equality or enforced fairness starts out sounding “noble” but inevitably evolves into a society ruled by truncheon.
Marion Smith of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation decided that since today’s youth seem infatuated with socialism, he’d survey them to find out what they thought socialism really was. Smith found that 69 percent of millennials couldn’t really define socialism.13
Over time, Bernie’s direct support for Russian, Venezuelan, and Cuban socialism has evolved into less specific calls for income equality and fairness and fewer specifics about how that jives with historical examples of socialism. Seems Bernie’s socialism is now a “kinder, gentler socialism.” You know. The kind without the gulag.
To date, though, Bernie has made no attempt to disavow his support for democratic “Scandinavian” socialism. So let’s take a look at the Nordic form of socialism the left so loves.14
Typically, political scientists have defined socialism as a society in which the government owns the means of production. But the past century has given us example after example of governments that appear to have economies that function in the middle space between capitalism and socialism. In fact, even the U.S. economy is somewhere between capitalism and socialism.
Some economists argue convincingly that an economy with diffuse price controls inevitably leads to de facto control of production and a form of socialism.15 Some also argue that when the state owns the main industries of a country but not all industry, that economy shares aspects of socialism.