Most modern socialists revealingly call themselves “democratic socialists.”
The one socialist organization that didn’t do this, the exception that proved the rule, was the biggest communist state of all, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was a place of frank, archetypal dictatorship with no nonsense about democracy; its leaders wouldn’t stoop so low.
But almost everywhere else, socialists feel the need to ameliorate the blunt ugliness of their creed and the sort of governance it produces by modifying it with “democratic.” The word is applied like a varnish to gloss policies that produce gray, unfree, and unlovely societies.
In this, socialists are like other practitioners of the political arts, seeing where they are vulnerable and doing what they can to cover it up. It’s like the Democratic Party knowing it’s weak on the issue of patriotism and trying to blur it by handing out little flags.
Even really hard-line socialist nations such as North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and that former Soviet satellite, East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), camouflaged the socialist facts and all the evidence of their people’s eyes by calling the tyrannies by names that evoked a wholesome and humane democratic character that was wholly absent.
Which brings us to American socialists. They’re at it, too. The octogenarian Soviet sympathizer Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) calls himself a democratic socialist, although he is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. But Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are members, and so is, most notably, Zohran Mamdani, who has just overwhelmingly won election as the next mayor of New York.
He will take office in January, having promised socialist bounty, and it’s a fair bet that his free buses will become homeless shelters on wheels, and his government-run grocery stores will become tatty emporia with shelves sparsely stocked with unappealing goods.
The irreducible problem of socialism is contained in the cry of the French Revolution, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Unless there is a superabundance of fraternity, more than is available in human nature, liberty and equality don’t get along. They fight each other. Socialism fights on the side of radical equality against freedom.
Because liberty is in the warp and weft of what America means, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” socialism is utterly antithetical to the culture of this country and the quintessence of what made it so successful in the quarter of a millennium since it was founded. Socialism works against Americanism.
It’s a chicken-and-egg question whether the likes of Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib arrived at their socialism from the premise of their anti-Americanism, or whether they arrived at their anti-Americanism because they are socialists. But in the end, it does not matter which came first, for they are clearly both.
The people who voted for Mamdani are the same people who reveal their lack of patriotism to pollsters. Gallup found in a survey in June that while 92% of Republicans are proud or very proud of being American, only 36% of Democrats are, down from 87% in 2001.
MAMDANI RIPS OFF HIS SMILING MASK
In a single generation, people on the Left have turned sharply against their own country. Voting for Mamdani is a token of that lamentable enmity.
On 9/11, New York had America’s mayor. Now, it has chosen a mayor against America.