There was a chemistry professor in a large college that had some exchange students in the class.
One day while the class was in the lab, the professor noticed one young man, an exchange student, who kept rubbing his back and stretching as if his back hurt.
The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting Communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country’s government and install a new communist regime.
In the midst of his story, he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked: “Do you know how to catch wild pigs?”
The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line.
The young man said that it was no joke. “You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come every day to eat the free food.
When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence.
They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side.
The pigs, which are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat that free corn again. You then slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd.
Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.”
The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening in America & Canada. The government keeps pushing us toward Communism/Socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tax exemptions, welfare entitlements, free healthcare, etc., while we continually lose our freedoms, just a little at a time.
Here is thought to remember, Marx said, “Remove one freedom per generation and soon you will have no freedom and no one would have noticed.”
In 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt sought reelection to the presidency, some of his critics labeled him a “socialist.” The charge was so incendiary that the White House moved quickly to rebut it, labeling it an accusation “which no patriotic, honorable, decent citizen would purposefully inject into American affairs.”
Meanwhile, the overwhelming and seemingly improbable support among America’s youth for the 74-year-old Bernie Sanders—a self-described democratic socialist who once proudly defended communist dictatorships across the world—is the latest example of a historical illiteracy that treats socialism as a benign economic system that is more equitable and fair than capitalism.
A Pew poll from June 2015 shows a staggering 69 percent of voters under 30 expressing a willingness to vote for a socialist for president of the United States.
This was well before Sanders’ electoral successes in the early Democratic primaries.
A more recent YouGov survey found that voters under 30 actually have a higher opinion of socialism (43 percent in favor) than they do of capitalism (32 percent in favor).
“For older people, socialism is associated with communism and the Soviet Union and the Cold War,” says Michelle Diggles, a senior policy analyst at Third Way, a liberal D.C. think tank. “The oldest millennials were 8 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. They have never known a world where the Soviet Union exists. … The connotations associated with the word ‘socialism’ just don’t exist with millennials.”
Today, 20 percent of the world’s population continues to live under communist regimes, in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Laos and North Korea. These countries are some of the worst violators of human rights in history.
Maybe we should have seen this loss of historical memory coming.
Perhaps we should have heard the alarm bells of a 2011 Newsweek survey that reported 73 percent of Americans “couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War” in response to a question taken from the official test for U.S. citizenship.
Ignorance of socialism and America’s decades long struggle against it has become the norm, and the data suggest this norm will only get worse as a generation of Americans pass away and national memory fades.
For a generation with no memory of bomb shelter drills or sledgehammers smashing the Berlin Wall to pieces, the sad reality of life under socialist rule has been forgotten, and the lessons of the Cold War have been relegated to the “ash heap of history” alongside communism.
Instead, the concept of socialism has often been confused with liberalism. Socialism seems like a fine idea that means a more social equitable society for everyone—free health care and free education for starters.
Socialism is not roads, welfare, and free education. Socialism has always had a more ominous goal and shares close historical and ideological connections with more evil terms: Marxism and communism.
Karl Marx took socialism to what he viewed as its natural conclusion: The “abolition of private property.”
Class warfare is a long-running theme in socialism, even in this country. American socialist (and failed presidential candidate) Eugene Debs promised a world where “no man will work to make a profit for another.”
To break down the supremacy of one class,” the ultimate “aim of socialism, whether collectivist or communist, is to transform capitalist property into social property.”
The process of transforming “capitalist property”—that is, something legitimately purchased, inherited or otherwise earned—into “social property” for everyone is when socialism becomes sinister.
This promise of redistribution always involves winners and losers picked by the government. What if one has acquired capitalist property and does not wish it to become “social property?” Well, then the government might have to step in and take it.
The loss of private property—which ensures one’s independent livelihood— by force, erodes one’s ability to exercise free speech. What if the owner of some capitalist property taken by the government dares to protest its seizure?
That sort of dissent must be stifled to maintain order, so free speech is replaced by government-sanctioned propaganda. Unpopular opinions are shamed, and those expressing them are barred from forums like colleges and universities.
How do we know? Because we’ve seen it happen time and again. One Hundred years ago the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia showed the danger of combining socialist ideas with totalitarian violence, which created modern totalitarian communism.
It was Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin who expressed a sort of unifying theory, finally achieving Marx’s goals. “In striving for socialism,” Lenin said in 1917, “we are convinced it will develop into communism.” The result in more than 40 national experiments since then has been either totalitarian dictatorship or economic collapse, costing some 100 million lives before the communist experiment collapsed in Europe and the Soviet Union.
To be sure, not everyone in these societies was a loser, which gets at one of the great paradoxes of all socialist systems: the extreme inequality that allows a small group of party members to control the political and economic power in a country to the exclusion of an overwhelming majority of the citizens.
Only socialist countries have achieved the tragic distinction of launching rockets into outer space while millions of their citizens starve to death in famine.
Why are we seeing this rise in socialism?
There is a huge generation gap in today’s society when it comes to knowledge concerning socialism.
A survey and report by Emily Ekins a research fellow and director of polling at the Cato Institute recently published an article in The Federalist.
Her research points out that while a majority of voters under 30 support socialism, that figure drops to a mere 15 percent among those over 65. The reason for this is not difficult to see. It reflects a difference in personal experience.
Millennials either missed the Cold War entirely or were young children in its final years, with little or no conception of the triumph of liberty achieved with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
They do not understand the menace that socialism posed to the people it enslaved and to the free nations that it threatened.
The violence and brutality of the communist regimes of the past are irrelevant, just lines in the history book somewhere between the Spanish-American War and 9/11.
It’s more personal for older Americans. Perhaps some of their friends or neighbors—or they themselves—arrived in this country just ahead of Soviet tanks that were rolling into their homeland.
Perhaps they remember the stories of citizens of these supposed utopian socialist prison states arrested, “disappeared,” tortured, or shot simply for trying to cross a border.
Perhaps they remembered cowering under their school desks during drills in case of a nuclear attack (Duck and Cover), planned in communist Russia and launched from communist Cuba.
This is the context young American voters should know as they prepare to cast their votes in upcoming elections.
We cannot forget the lessons of history.
It seems like only a few years ago being called a socialist in American politics was an insult.
Millennials are simply not that alarmed by the idea of socialism.
In fact, millennials are the only age cohort in which more are favorable toward socialism than unfavorable. Young people are also more comfortable with a political candidate who describes him- or herself as a socialist.
So why are millennials so much more favorable toward socialism compared to older Americans?
Millennials Don’t Know What Socialism Is
First, millennials don’t seem to know what socialism is, and how it’s different from other styles of government. The definition of socialism is government ownership of the means of production—in other words, true socialism requires that government run the businesses.
However, a CBS/New York Times survey found that only 16 percent of millennials could accurately define socialism, while 30 percent of Americans over 30 could. (Incidentally, 56 percent of Tea Partiers accurately defined it. In fact, those most concerned about socialism are those best able to explain it.)
With so few able to define socialism, perhaps less surprisingly, Emily Ekins national survey found college-aged millennials were about as likely to have a favorable view of socialism (58 percent) as they were about capitalism (56 percent). Only about a quarter of Americans older than 55 have a favorable view of socialism.
Conservatives often use the word “socialist”, but they don’t realize that neither their audience nor even their political opponents really know what the word even means.
So what do millennials think socialism is? A Ekins survey asked respondents to use their own words to describe socialism and found millennials who viewed it favorably were more likely to think of it as just people being kind or “being together,” as one millennial put it.
Others thought of socialism as just a more generous social safety net where “the government pays for our own needs,” as another explained it.
If socialism is framed the way Bernie Sanders does, as just being a generous social safety net, it’s much harder to undermine among millennials.
This narrative says government is a benevolent caretaker and pays for everybody’s needs .
However, young people do not like the true definition of socialism—the idea of government running businesses. If socialism is framed as government running Uber, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, etc., it does not go over well.
But there must be more to the story, because most Americans have an unfavorable opinion of socialism despite not being able to define it outright.
So why do millennials have a less negative view of socialism?
Again, they don’t know their history.
Throughout the Cold War, socialism in the public mind became associated with clearly visualized economic, political, religious, and moral evils.
A major reason Americans realized the dangers of socialism in the past was that it was linked to the foreign threat of the Soviet Union and tyranny—and that is something regular people can understand.
Because Americans already associated socialism with their enemy, people were more willing to accept the reasons socialism was wrong.
Thus, throughout the Cold War, socialism in the public mind became associated with clearly visualized economic, political, religious, and moral evils.
First, it was clear that Soviet socialism was at odds with the American-style free enterprise system.
The USSR had a completely centrally planned economy with shortages, rationing, long lines, less innovation, less variety, lower-quality goods and services, and a lower standard of living as the consequence.
Thus, free-market economists had an easier time convincing Americans that American capitalism was far preferable to Soviet socialism.
Second, the Soviet socialist system was a system of political repression that disregarded human freedom.
Soviet socialism required total control not just over the economy but also over people’s lives—it demanded conformity, not autonomy, as a centralized bureaucratic force attempted to achieve equality of outcomes.
Thus Soviet officials sought to stamp out any source of possible opposition to state authority, including from artists, musicians, religious clergy, and even regular people making jokes or raising complaints about the government.
The Soviet socialist system was a system of political repression that disregarded human freedom, particularly evidenced by it sending tens of millions to forced labor camps.
Third, Americans also saw the moral dangers of socialism. For instance, in recent study involving interviews with older Tea Party members, many explained socialism in moral terms.
They would reference the USSR and explain how socialism hurts the human spirit because it takes the drive out of people and makes them dependent, thereby undermining their self-worth and self-motivation.
They saw socialism as inherently demoralizing for punishing producers and achievers and rewarding the lazy. Thus, socialism became a moral evil, as well as a political and economic one.
Fourth, many Americans came to view socialism as threat to religion. The USSR’s state-sponsored anti-religious campaigns in efforts to promote atheism shut down most of the churches and decimated clergy.
Given how the USSR treated religious groups, Americans came to view socialism as a system that attempted to replace faith and community with government.
Millennials reached adulthood after the Cold War ended, however, and they don’t remember hearing much about Soviet socialism. Neither have they learned much about it in school.
To teach the truth about socialism in our schools today. is political suicide. I have been a victim of this practice as have many fellow teachers I know. If you want to keep your job, support common core, revisionist history, the removal of civics, American history, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence from the classrooms at all levels from grade school through college.
This lack of knowledge has allowed the progressive movement to promote the concept of socialism that everyone, regardless of his or her achievements and efforts, should be rewarded equally or at least rewarded according to his or her needs—“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” as Karl Marx stated in the Communist Manifesto..
At its most basic level, this is similar to the debate over kids’ participation trophies. Should all kids get a trophy regardless of what they do? Or should only kids who earn the trophies receive them?
In Emily Ekin’s research she found college-aged Americans were the only age group who thought all kids should get a trophy. After that, older cohorts split in favor of the winners getting trophies.
The fact that millennials disproportionately think that all kids deserve a trophy regardless of achievement probably at least partly explains their disproportionate support for Bernie Sanders & Alexandria Ocassio Cotez.
While millennials could forever be a “everybody gets a trophy” generation, as young people take on more responsibilities—buy a house, get married, have kids, get a promotion, start paying noticeable taxes, and work long hours—they may start to think their hard work and sacrifices should be rewarded more and socialism may not be the best answer.
We can only hope.