Critics of socialism often confront New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and other advocates of socialist policies with socialism’s long record of failure wherever it has been tried.
They might as well be talking to a wall.
While the extent to which socialism’s dismal record matters to voters is yet to be seen in this year’s midterm elections and in the 2028 presidential primaries and general election, it is apparent that socialist officeholders and candidates don’t care about it.
Even when they acknowledge aspects of it, they treat it as irrelevant.
They don’t care about the Soviet Union’s starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s or the tens of millions killed by the subsequent famines that China’s, India’s, Ethiopia’s, and North Korea’s socialist policies produced.
They don’t care about the Nazi Holocaust, the Soviet purges, or the Cambodian Genocide that collectively murdered tens of millions more.
And they don’t care about Venezuela’s and Cuba’s draconian impoverishment of most of their populations, the failures of wealth taxes in European nations, or the deadly rationing of timely healthcare by Britain’s National Health Service.
They don’t care because they don’t expect that implementation of socialist policies that they advocate will cause them — personally — any suffering.
They expect to occupy their envisioned socialist nation’s positions of governmental power and, like socialist government officials around the world, to instead live in privilege, with the best of everything, exempt from the suffering that socialism has inflicted.
In the Soviet Union, for example, the nation’s leaders, members of the ruling nomenklatura, and the few that they designated for special status, such as their favored staff members and star athletes, lived well while other Russians suffered privation.
The privileged elites enjoyed exclusive access to special stores, stocked with goods not available to the rest of the population (other than through the black market), while everyone else had to queue for hours to shop for meager, low-quality rationed goods in stores with mostly empty shelves.
The same was true for medical care. The elites alone had access to special higher-quality clinics and hospitals. The rest of the population struggled to receive minimal medical care, with payment of bribes often required to receive even that.
Our aspiring socialist leaders expect, more importantly, to enjoy the power to dictate every aspect of our lives.
Consider some of the aspects of life that various highly socialist nations have chosen to regulate to varying degrees and which those who seek to be our socialist rulers could choose to determine for each of us.
Where each of us lives, both in which city or town and in which specific house or apartment. The specific job in which we may or will work and for which employer. How much we may earn.
Which foods and other goods we may purchase. How much of each we may purchase. And from which vendor(s) we may purchase.
The specifics of the medical care we may obtain, when we may obtain it, and from which provider(s).
Whom we may marry. How many children we may have.
And even who lives and who dies, either by deprivation of sustenance or medical care, or by administration of arbitrary socialist justice that lacks any of the due process that Americans take for granted.
The socialism that they advocate encompasses the power to decide all of this for each of us.
THEY LIVED THROUGH SOCIALISM. HERE IS THEIR TERRIFYING WARNING TO AMERICAN VOTERS
While this sounds extreme, it is entirely consistent with the socialism implemented by those that socialist officeholders and candidates lionize: historic socialist leaders like Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chavez.
This is also why the prospect of a socialist America terrifies those who understand what that would mean, except for those who expect to be its rulers.
David M. Simon is a lawyer in Chicago and a writer at www.dmswritings.com.
