Ronald Reagan was fond of an unconservative thought, Thomas Paine’s “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Reagan had an excuse.
He thought Americans needed a cheerfulness infusion after assassinations, urban riots, Vietnam, Watergate and stagflation. Today, Paine’s delusional sense of the possible has resurfaced in the enthusiasm of many young people for socialism. It is a longing in search of a definition. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s former running mate, has said socialism is “neighborliness.” Like taking a casserole to the family that moved in next door? The “Internationale,” socialism/communism’s anthem since 1871, begins: “Arise ye prisoners of starvation.” But socialism always means more, and less, than casseroles for all.
Zohran Mamdani’s election helped to ignite 21st-century interest in socialism, a 19th-century doctrine that had a deflating 20th century. Socialism, New York’s mayor says, prioritizes the “working class.” But what is that? “I think,” he told the New York Times, “if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being a part of the working class.” But if everyone with bills to pay — essentially, everyone — is socialism’s priority, what is not socialism?
The Democratic Socialists of America, a political party, sort of, recently issued its “program,” which begins by urging readers to imagine “a future without capitalism.” You “control your own labor and see it going to good use. It’s not just a job to pay the bills”:
“Speaking of bills: you don’t really have them anymore. You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities … what if you were free to spend your time how you like without worrying about cost or dreading going back to work? What if you didn’t have to think about paying rent or loans at the end of the month, or saving for college, or affording groceries?”
In 1845-46, a philosopher not yet 30 sounded a similar trumpet. Socialism, said Karl Marx, would allow each man to “escape” from what capitalism has “forced upon him.” Socialism would end the division of labor, which Marx called an “exclusive sphere of activity” and considered dehumanizing.
Under capitalism, he wrote, man “is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.” But in communist society nobody will be so confined. Socialism will enable everyone to “become accomplished in any branch he wishes … to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.”
Seventy years ago, rediscovery of the young Marx’s gauzy ruminations about ending “alienation” thrilled leftists. They could enjoy the frisson of naughtiness by calling themselves Marxists, without having to plow through his turgid “mature” writings (e.g., “Das Kapital”) about the labor theory of value.
Today’s DSA program has nothing to do with politics understood as the art of the possible. DSA socialism is Peter Pan politics, the root-and-branch rejection of adulthood, understood as oppression by reality. It is psychotherapy for disappointed young people who are offended by the everydayness of everyday life — work, bills, groceries, mortgages. Yuck.
Even when the DSA ostensibly talks about politics, its extremism is merely infantilism. For example, the DSA proposes to “abolish the Senate,” which is undemocratic because large and small states have equal representation there.
Abolition would require a constitutional amendment, which 13 small states could, and more would, defeat. The DSA’s supposedly political program (it includes dismantling the presidency and the Supreme Court) is earnest and unserious.
Because socialism shares Paine’s delusion about society’s, and humanity’s, plasticity, socialism invariably ends in disappointment. In today’s America, it begins there, with sandbox revolutionaries who think growing up is incompatible with social justice.
The New York Times reports that at a recent DSA convention in Chicago, Leon Trotsky was “talked about.” Rightly so. He said that under socialism “the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.” So, socialism is Garrison Keillor’s imagined Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average.”
At the Chicago gathering, socialists could purchase “far-left merchandise,” including “guillotine earrings.” This is today’s socialism — naughty and fun but unlikely to begin America over again.
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