Socialist Ignorance!

In his book “Animal Farm,” George Orwell tells a fictional story about farm animals who rebel against their farmer. The animals decide that they are being mistreated by the farmer and that their only recourse, if they expect to live good lives, is to throw the farmer out of the farm and run it themselves. Eventually, the pigs rise to the top and make a compact with other humans who provide them with many amenities in exchange for trading with them. Thus, the pigs become a sort of oligarchy within the system that they initially instituted, the original design of which was to make all animals equal and abolish the hierarchy they had previously labored under.

Although Orwell was himself a socialist, he understood the dangers that unfettered socialism can devolve into. In his other, perhaps more famous book, “1984,” Orwell demonstrated a great deal of prescience in describing a society that was led by an elite few and which allowed no deviation from its dictums. Everyone had to uniformly and meekly acquiesce to the will of the party and to big brother. To do anything that those entities found objectionable meant reeducation and perhaps death. In order to control the population, the elites even invented a non-existent war.

I was reminded of all this when hearing about the self-declared, avowed socialists/communists that won the recent congressional primary in New York. Two of them are women who are younger than 40 and whose platforms include things such as a complete stop to deporting illegal aliens (one of them even said that borders should be abolished), support for Palestinian causes including complete opposition to the state of Israel, and the seizure of property from landlords (a la Chinese and Soviet communists). The other individual, a man in his mid-50’s, is also a sympathizer of socialist ideas. All three of them were supported by the current New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, himself a self-declared communist under whom New York has, if you can believe it, become even more of a mess than it was before he became mayor.

One has to wonder how it is possible that people can see what socialist policies cause and still insist on going down that road. It must be mentioned that only about 7% of New Yorkers went to the polls for this election. Primaries have notoriously very poor turnout, but this primary is a demonstration that when the majority of citizens are asleep at the switch, bad ideas can win the day. New York being an overwhelmingly democratic city, practically guarantees that these three individuals will be installed in congress after this coming fall’s mid-term elections. Thus, the US congress will have  three self-proclaimed communists coming to its halls in January.

At victory rallies for these individuals, one could not help but be struck by the fact that the people in attendance were overwhelmingly young, white, affluent women. Our political landscape has undergone quite a shift in recent years and that demographic has become increasingly dominant in our political discourse. One would think that the poor, minorities, and the like would be the ones supporting such communist ideas. After all, they are the ones whom these politicians are supposedly helping. Yet, in New York, it was those very poor minorities who in large numbers voted for the more moderate candidates. It is clear, then, that white, female, liberal guilt is driving the urge to turn our country into another communist “utopia.”

To get back to the books I previously mentioned, I opened this article with them because they demonstrate exactly what is wrong with our current rush to socialism. People who are so enamored with such ideas fail to understand the reality behind them. Not only do socialism and communism bring about untold suffering and poverty, but it is only those at the top of the system that alone profit from it. We will often hear socialists such as the above three talk of how capitalist oligarchs are destroying the country and how they have way too much money, and so on. Those same socialists, however, ignore the fact that the top 1% never changes, whether socialist, communist, or capitalist. There will always be those at the top profiting to a great degree.

There is, however, a difference between the communist and capitalist upper class. In the capitalist system those individuals will normally create conditions that will benefit those below them. “A rising tide lifts all boats” is more correct than most people would like to think. In the communist system, however, the bottom always remains the bottom. Those at the top continue to enrich themselves and to suppress the masses which they are purportedly helping. Communism does not create equal wealth, but equal poverty.

In light of that truth (and it is true, as decades of communist rule in places like the Soviet Union and China, before they decided to become economically capitalist, demonstrate), how is it that we have in our own country people advocating such terrible ideas? Because our society has become increasingly illiterate. We no longer know our history. People today do not live with an assured understanding of what happened in the past and how that past affects them today. Their knowledge of history goes back to the invention of the iPhone about 20 years ago. The history of communism is, to them, as ancient as the Peloponnesian or Carthaginian Wars. In other words, they will ask, who cares?

We all should care. At the same time, we should not grow despondent at such turns of events. As Christians, we should remind ourselves that God is ultimately the only deciding power in the universe. The recent events in New York and, indeed, around the world are not some sort of random set of activities over which God has no control. If you want to have a good laugh, think about the fact that people who are, almost to a man (or woman) atheists, are being used by the God whom they say does not exist to accomplish His ends. Just like the Assyrians in the 8^th century BC, today’s communist politicians will find to their chagrin that what they think is utopia is, in reality, the darkest pit they can imagine.