The Rebirth of Socialism in American Politics

It's not so much as a "rebirth" as an acknowledgment of reality. Democrats are far-left Marixist ideologues. It's just now that they're not afraid to come out that way publically.

At the Washington Monthly, "The Socialist Network: Are today’s young, Bernie-inspired leftist intellectuals really just New Deal liberals?":

It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try.” So declared the headline of a Washington Post column in March; one imagines Katharine Graham spitting out her martini. The article, by a twenty-seven-year-old columnist named Elizabeth Bruenig, drew more than 3,000 comments (a typical column gets a few hundred); a follow-up piece, urging a “good-faith argument about socialism,” received nearly as much attention.

By now, the rebirth of socialism in American politics needs little elaboration. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong showing in the 2016 Democratic primary, and his continued popularity, upset just about everyone’s intuition that the term remains taboo. Donald Trump’s victory, meanwhile, made all political truisms seem up for grabs. Polls show that young people in particular view socialism more favorably than they do capitalism. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, which has been around since 1982, has grown from about 5,000 to 35,000 since November 2016, and dozens of DSA candidates are running for office around the country. In June, one of them, twenty-eight-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, upset New York City Congressman Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary, knocking off a ten-term incumbent and one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.

The meaning of socialism has always been maddeningly slippery, in part because it has always meant different things to different people. Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the DSA and the most outspoken American socialist of the postwar era, writes on the first page of his 1989 book, Socialism: Past and Future, that socialism is “the hope for human freedom and justice.” By the end of the book, the definition hasn’t gotten much more concrete. Karl Marx himself spent more time critiquing capitalism than describing communism, a habit that subsequent generations of leftists inherited. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography that, while he couldn’t define it, “I know it when I see it.” Socialism sometimes feels like the inverse: socialists know it when they don’t see it. Bernie has only made things murkier by defining his brand of socialism in terms hardly indistinguishable from New Deal liberalism. “I don’t believe the government should own the corner drugstore or the means of production,” he declared in the fall of 2015, at a speech at Georgetown University, “but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.” But while the meaning of American socialism in 2018 begins with Bernie, it doesn’t end there. Every political movement needs an intellectual movement, and when it comes to today’s brand of socialism, it’s the thirty-five-and-under crowd doing much of the heavy lifting...

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This is all a scam, of course. Leftists won't define "socialism" because they know the American public will reject it. Real socialism calls for the natioanlization of industry, if not the public ownership of all means of production (think the Soviet Union). It calls for the elimination of capitalist oppression and the eradication of inequality. Most of all, socialism calls for solidarity with the world's workers, anywhere on earth, and thus the eradication of borders and national sovereignty.

And if genuine ideological socialism were practiced, it would then see the so-called withering away of the state and the advance to "full communism."

This is textbook socialism and any leftist that tells you differently is lying.

Via Memorandum.