
Multiple forms of socialism, from hard Stalinism to European redistribution, continue to fail.
The soft-socialist
In contrast, current American deregulation, tax cuts and incentives, and record energy production have given
So why, then, are two of the top three Democratic presidential contenders --
Why do polls show that a majority of American millennials have a favorable view of socialism?
There are lots of catalysts for the new socialism.
Massive immigration is changing the demography of
Many of these immigrants flee from poor areas of
When they reach the
Another culprit for the new socialist craze is the strange leftward drift of the very wealthy in
Some of the new progressive rich feel guilty about their unprecedented wealth. So they champion redistribution as the sort of medieval penance that alleviates guilt.
Yet the influential and monied classes usually are so well off that higher taxes hardly affect them. Instead, redistributionist taxation hurts the struggling middle classes.
In
From 2008 to 2017, the now-multimillionaire
Universities bear much of the blame. Their manipulation of the federal government to guarantee student loans empowered them to jack up college costs without any accountability. Liberal college administrators and faculty did not care much when graduates left campus poorly educated and unable to market their expensive degrees.
More than 45 million borrowers now struggle with nearly $1.6 trillion in collective student debt, with climbing interest. That indebtedness has delayed -- or ended -- the traditional forces that encourage conservatism and traditionalism, such as getting married, having children and buying a home.
Instead, a generation of single, childless and mostly urban youth feels cheated that their high-priced degrees did not earn them competitive salaries. Millions of embittered college graduates will never be able to pay off what they owe -- and want some entity to pay off their debts.
In paradoxical fashion, teenagers were considered savvy adults who were mature enough to take on gargantuan loans. But they were also treated like fragile preteens who were warned that the world outside their campus sanctuaries was downright mean, sexist, racist, homophobic and unfair.
Finally, doctrinaire
Add up a lost generation of woke and broke college graduates, waves of impoverished immigrants without much knowledge of American economic traditions, wealthy advocates of boutique socialism and asleep-at-the-wheel
Regrettably, sometimes the naive and disaffected must relearn that their pie-in-the sky socialist medicine is far worse than the perceived malady of inequality.
And unfortunately, when socialists gain power, they don't destroy just themselves. They usually take everyone else down with them as well.
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Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, a professor of classics emeritus at California State University at Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.