By David Harsanyi
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
A number of pundits have recently argued that younger
voters, especially those under 30, are less inclined to be bothered when they
hear the word “socialism,” since they have no firsthand memory of the Cold War.
To some extent, this must be true. Those who weren’t
alive during socialism’s cruelest catastrophes — or even its many banal
failures — will be less put off by the idea. Then again, if a presidential
candidate were praising the excellent public transportation system of the Third
Reich or going on about the some alleged benefit to American slavery, they
would rightly be chased from the public square forever even though the vast
majority of voters have no firsthand knowledge of the Holocaust or slavery.
Anti-Semitism and racism haven’t disappeared, and neither has Marx, sadly.
For that matter, many Americans — including Bernie —
lived through Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao and they still champion the idea of
socialism. It’s completely unsurprising that Bernie once defended the Viet
Cong. Because many of us over 40 immediately recognize who Bernie is. I grew up
with people like him. In those days, though, adults generally didn’t take their
crazy disheveled Commie uncles who taught economics at the local commuter
college very seriously. Maybe that’s the problem.
It’s true that Bernie’s fans aren’t acquainted with
socialism (and, incidentally, this is true only if we ignore the existence of
Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, China, etc.), but the fact is that most Bernie
supporters don’t seem to have a rudimentary grasp of basic economics much less
the “socialism” they think exists in Scandinavian nations. What they do have
are lots of feelings. And, like millions of other saps over the past
century-plus, they’ve been enticed by the collectivist “ethic” — its
revolutionary appeal, its religiosity, and its quixotic promises.
“Fascism is remembered as a crime,” John Hayward
correctly points out. “Communism is treated like a mistake.” I’d add that
capitalism is judged by its few failures and socialism by its few successes.
Sanders will never praise the “literary programs” of any non-tyranny. But if
I’ve learned anything from Twitter — or perhaps, more accurately, if Twitter
has solidified any of my existing suspicions — it’s that academia is teeming
with hard-left apologists. There are plenty of fantastic historians out there,
of course, but many of loudest academics, the ones media often relies on, are
either apologists for socialism or socialists themselves.
Actually, forget college. There are few more powerful
arguments for school choice than seeing a high-school kid bring home Howard
Zinn’s preposterous Marxist history of the United States. I suppose an
adventurous young reader could seek out Gulag Archipelago, Darkness
at Noon, or Animal Farm. How many do?
Actually, forget high school. When Bernie says he wants
to institute a universal “free” pre-K, I just picture little boys and girls
with red scarfs singing Pete Seeger songs because I’m pretty sure that’s
exactly what he pictures.
Education, or a lack of it, isn’t the only problem. As
David Bernstein notes, “the cultural elite in this country — Hollywood, the universities,
etc. — treats the Cold War as if the great world-historical crime of the
mid-twentieth century was not Stalinism and its aftermath, but McCarthyism and
its aftermath.”
Indeed, a person consuming culture during the last 20
years of the Soviet Union’s existence, as I did, would be led to believe that
McCarthyism was the single worst crime perpetrated in the 20th century — and
capitalism its single most destructive idea. Though collectivism has rained
down more starvation and death on humanity than any other ideology, I can
recall maybe a handful of films that even took an oppositional position to it.
And most of those movies were infantile (don’t get me wrong, I love Red Dawn,
but it’s silly.) Even James Bond rarely treated the Commies as the enemy —
mostly, he was trying to stop rogue agents from pitting the two superpowers
against each other.
Most educated Americans have not only seen movies
depicting the Holocaust, but they’ve seen the horrifying real-life pictures of
that genocide. How many of Americans have looked at pictures of the Ukrainian
famine? Or the Great
Leap Forward? How many Americans have ever even heard of those events?
Maoism was responsible for 50 million or more deaths, and
Stalinism another 20 or 30 million, but I can’t think of a single important
American novel or film depicting those holocausts. Offhand I can recall one
American movie that seriously portrayed the inhumanity of collectivism — The
Killing Fields, though one hopes there are at least some others I’ve
forgotten. That movie is now 36 years old.
Today, though, a person can watch more than one movie
romanticizing a murderous thug like Che Guevara (two of them were produced in
the 2000s), but not one about the bravery of refuseniks (a group that Bernie, a
man who claims he is deeply moved by his Judaism, couldn’t spare a single word
for on his Soviet Union honeymoon) or courageous anti-Communist fighters of
Latin America, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or anywhere else. It’s a shame.
No, Bernie isn’t Stalin. He claims to be a democratic
socialist. I get it. But there’s an array of good reasons no one says, “Hey,
let’s give democratic fascism a shot.” There are just as many good
reasons not to normalize socialism. At their core, both ideologies are
authoritarian. The only difference is that academics and our cultural stewards
have whitewashed one of them.
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