Is Socialism more Dictatorial than Free-Trade?
Socialism is never left-wing. -Ayn Rand maybe
Republicans may cause the National Debt to soar and cause recessions, but they do certainly make the economy run. There’s an argument to be made that Republicans are the gatekeepers to American culture; when the Republicans support Democratic ideas, like gay marriage, it becomes enshrined in American political conversation. I don’t believe in the black-white world as proposed by college Marxists or right-wing internet partisans like Ben Shapiro, but I do believe that both sides have a point or two to say about the world and that you should probably combine it to create a whole new ideology. Perhaps Elon Musk gets his dozen of space colonies, 100 years from now whom will start their own independent, socialist, or theocratic revolutions in response to feeling a disconnect between them and the home planet, or the huge wealth disparity between Musk and the 99% of human Martians. We shall see.
Socialism is a religion, just like Islamic fundamentalism or Christian conservatism. But the main difference about socialism is that it’s a culture left, economic right ideology. It argues for greater state control in the economy. Now I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing, but it has more in line with the 18th century absolute monarchies of Europe than it does with the free-trade Clinton Democrats. I like to use the Nixon quote about the Shah of Iran on Youtube whenever possible; under Capitalism, you have some freedom, but under any other form of economic governance, you have no freedom at all. I guess you can say that this falls almost in line with Ayn Rand and stuff, even if her arguments aren’t perfect.
There are certainly some good elements to socialism, particularly in cultural facets. The sexual revolution, art, toleration of minorities, etc… The breaking up of large estates in Asia and Europe during the 20th century was also another good thing to (which the Soviet Union did at times). But when you look at China today, can you really say that that’s a left-wing government? No. It’s explicitly left-wing in terms of following Marxist-Leninism, but it looks more like Nazi Germany but without genocidal murders of ethnic groups. What China is doing to the Uyghrs is certainly a form of cultural genocide and apartheid, however, and it’s saberrattling over its lost territories brings many similarities between them and the pre-1914 European empires.
Perhaps it’s better to say that socialism is a slippery-slope into authoritarianism. Perhaps it is like drugs then where the most common thing is to do like marijuana but do not go for the hard stuff like cocaine or whatever. It’s interesting to compare in a way the American and French Revolutions. The American Revolution in a lot of ways was a top-down revolution, even a libertarian revolution. The puzzling thing about it is that it never had the class conflict element like the French or Russian revolutions, or the genocidal murder of ethnic minorities like in 1940s Nazi Germany or Russia. You can even almost see this phenomenon in the English Civil War too, where the main majority of the persecution and killings was done in the name of Protestantism vs Catholicism.
I just hope that the forces of urbanism will force Republicans to come back to the middle and electoral failures will also force Democrats to go back to the middle too.
P.S. This article is basically an addendum to my earlier Wannabe Historian’s Political Compass post.
