A guy with the Democratic Socialists of America got asked recently to give his best pitch for socialism.
Here's what he said:
"Community! Are you tired of sitting alone and being by yourself and having no one to talk to? Be a socialist! It's all about community... to bond over the things that we love and share. That's what socialism is."
Gotcha. Socialism is when you have friends.
A self-proclaimed socialist was asked to define an economic system that reorganizes who owns everything a society produces, and what came out of his mouth was a description of a bowling league.
Churches have been doing "community" for two thousand years without abolishing private property. So has every neighborhood barbecue in America. This young man genuinely appears not to know that the word after "community," in every single place this has actually been tried, was "compliance."
The sad part is that I think he is probably sincere. He, and so many other young “socialists,” think they’re onto something revolutionary when what they really are is a product—what comes out the other end of the most expensive education system in human history.
Last week in Michigan, we got a very clear picture of what that system is producing.
Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's Democratic Senate primary. He ran as the champion of the working man… the tribune of the forgotten laborer, up against the billionaires.
But when we got a look at the county map, it gave us a very different picture.
Of the fifteen Michigan counties with the lowest share of college degrees, El-Sayed won a whopping zero. Of the fifteen counties with the highest share, he won thirteen. The workers he'd come to liberate looked at their would-be champion and said, yeah, no thanks. The people with graduate degrees carried him on their shoulders.
NBC's own analysis said it plainly: it was the younger, higher-educated voters who drove the win.
In Detroit, El-Sayed's opponent took more than 60 percent of the city's heavily black, working-class vote.
The people socialism claims to be for keep declining the offer, while the people with the diplomas keep gobbling it up. Once you notice that, you start seeing it everywhere—including all the way back at the beginning.
Because here's a piece of history that schools somehow never seem to cover:
Karl Marx, who wrote the manifesto for the working class, was a lawyer's son who spent his best years in the reading room of the British Museum, his bills paid by Friedrich Engels, a textile heir. Neither of them exactly punched a clock. Lenin was a lawyer who flatly taught that workers, left alone, would never think their way to revolution; they needed a vanguard of professional intellectuals to do the thinking for them. The worker was the hero on the poster, but of course the educated elite would have to manage them.
History shows what happens whenever the actual workers try to collect on the promises of the “thinking” class.
In 1921, the sailors at the Kronstadt naval base—men who had helped bring the Bolsheviks to power—demanded the freedoms they'd been promised. The workers' state answered them with rifles and shot them down. Sixty years later, in Poland, it was electricians and shipyard workers who formed Solidarity and asked for the same thing. The socialist government answered them with martial law.
In Kronstadt’s Anchor Square, an eternal flame burns as a memorial to the men who attempted to rise up against those who had promised them liberation through “community.” Similar memorials commemorate men and women across every country where people voted themselves into socialism and communism, and then had to shoot their way out.
Over and over, the moment the masses try to speak for themselves, the managerial class reaches for the guns. The workers were never the author of the story, they were just the faces on the marketing posters—pawns used by the managerial elite to consolidate power around so-called equality.
If that pattern feels too abstract or distant, here's one closer to home. Think about how teachers' unions talk. Every strike, every rally, and every salary increase demand is always framed as, "for the children."
The Children™ are the reason for everything—right up until the interests of the kids and the interests of the administrative class point in different directions. The child does for the union exactly what the worker did for Lenin: a sympathetic face, borrowed to make the pursuit of power and paychecks look noble.
Which brings us back to that DSA kid and his “community” pitch, and to the machine that made him.
We are taxed to fund the schools. The schools produce graduates who vote for higher taxes to fund more schools. Money in, ideology out, and ballots cast for more of both. It's a perpetual motion machine, and the people feeding it generally have no idea that they’re paying for their own fleecing.
But there is a crack in the machine. Its dominion isn’t as inevitable as it would like you to think.
Those fifteen Michigan counties, the Detroit voters, the hourly workers and farmhands and home health aides doing grocery-store math at the end of every month are the people who know scarcity as a fact of life and not a seminar topic.
And they weren't fooled by the socialists.
It wasn’t because they had more schooling; it was because they had less of a particular kind of schooling. One group got an education. The other bought a very expensive counterfeit.
That counterfeit gets sold to kids who show up to campus never having heard the other side of the story. Kids who never learned what came after "community" in Moscow and Havana and Caracas, because nobody taught them, and by eighteen it's a lot harder to un-teach a mind that twelve years of pro-state indoctrination has built. The truth remains that the single best defense against a bad idea is to have been introduced to it, and taught why it is wrong, early.
A kid who already understands how wealth actually gets made, who already knows the real history of every place that tried the socialist brand of “community”, isn’t easily converted.
He's got antibodies.
That's the entire reason we do the work we do. To introduce real economics and real history to kids early—years before they encounter activist teachers and community organizers.
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Marx ended his manifesto by calling on the workers of the world to unite. Last week in Michigan, in their own quiet way, they did. Every one of the state's least-credentialed counties looked over the newest vanguard sent to save them and lined up behind somebody else.
That’s good news.
And really, at the end of the day, our job is just to raise the kind of kids who can see through the lies the powerful elite have always used to subjugate the masses. As parents, we can do that no matter how much schooling our kids end up pursuing.
Because the most important work has always been within the walls of our own homes. The vital role of parents as teachers and shapers of the next generation cannot be overstated.
All it takes is the willingness to put in the time.
— Connor
