DSA in the USA?  Bad Plan.

This business of promoting, nominating and (gasp!) even electing Democratic Socialists is bad news for America. I’m hoping it’s just a knee-jerk reaction or frustrated folks protesting business as usual in our American political system, but what if it’s something more significant? Or even more insidious? Socialism has been a disastrous failure wherever and whenever it’s been tried. We need a lot of things in this nation but we do not need to reinforce failure.

Let’s talk for a while about DSA, the Dumb Shits of America…wait. What? DSA doesn’t stand for that? Sorry, my bad. Or the nation’s bad if these brain dead pseudo-commies of the Democratic Socialists of America ilk keep gaining political traction.

I’m reminded of a guy I knew back when the Cold War threatened to get hot at a moment’s notice. Crazy old Lloyd was a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist and he firmly believed everything from taxes to toilet paper was somehow a communist plot. He saw lurking Reds under every bed and around every corner. Right-minded folks, confident in the American way of individual liberties and economic opportunity, generally scoffed at his ravings. Now I’m starting to become old Lloyd.

At the time when my Lloyd was running around with his hair on fire, our nation had fought commies to a draw in Korea and rooted out a batch of Soviet spies at various levels of American society. At the heart of all this, the real threat beneath the waving red banner of communists worldwide was socialism. That theory, espoused most stridently by a couple of German anarchists (Karl Marx and Friederich Engels) claims a state owns and controls all production, factories, and land. In simplest terms the plan is to share wealth among all people, rather than letting individuals make profits by thinking and working for themselves. That flew in the face of American capitalism. It was a wild-eyed proposition bandied about elsewhere, mostly in poverty-stricken third-world nations and far from our borders. Couldn’t happen in our good old liberty-loving, rugged individualist USA. That was then.

In those days we automatically connected communism and socialism as horrific concepts that brought grief everywhere they were tried. We looked around at starvation-level rationing in socialist countries of the world. We heard horror stories about Soviet gulags, bloody cultural revolutions, and melting nuclear power plants. We saw bleary-eyed automatons struggling to survive in socialist societies. We saw people with no hope of flourishing beyond simple survival dependent on loyalty to the central state and suffering under brutal regulations. Then we saw the Berlin Wall fall and assumed that meant anyone with an IQ above room temperature could realize that socialism was a failed experiment.

This is now. And I’m beginning to sense that we are facing a new and substantial threat. My hair is not yet on fire but it’s smoldering and gets hotter each time I read or hear about one American community or another nominating or electing a Democratic Socialist to public office. This new crop of socialists creeping into our political life is not cut from the Bernie Sanders curmudgeon cloth. This is something new to the American body politic, grown beyond a laughable third party option. This is a blatant call for such things as abolishing the Senate, eliminating national and international borders, and doing away with prisons. They call it progressive socialism. I call it anarchy. And a crop of older citizens jaded by tough times in their personal lives or younger naïve voters addicted to government largesse and freebies are buying into it with abandon.

Say what you will about this emergence of socialism and its supporters right now. Call it a fad, a knee-jerk, grassroots rebellion against a quirky and often volatile U.S. economy, but you’re a fool if you think it’s a better way of doing business and living your life. I put it down to our failed higher education system. We’ve got professors in colleges across this nation—way too many of them—teaching young adults that our capitalist system is at fault for all social problems. These folks preach socialism as a solution and ignore its horrible history. Broom away all the populist rhetoric and obfuscations from people like AOC, Zohran Mandami, Abdul El Sayed, Francesca Hong and a host of their emergent ilk and you’ve got a batch of new-age anarchists hiding in plain sight. That’s an evil omen for our nation. I’ve seen a lot of this discredited dogma around the world firsthand, and I’m telling you that the message of free stuff for all and the other pipedreams espoused in democratic socialist promises are utter nonsense. Just take a look around the world and stop searching for a nonexistent utopia. You’ll get the message loud and clear. Socialism comes at a very high cost in freedom and economic growth.

Click for Books by Dale A. Dye