The Real Danger of Socialism to America's Constitutional Republic

The rise of “Socialism” – specifically, the “Democratic Socialist Party,” now endorsing Democrats from Maine to California – represents a serious challenge to American constitutionalism, with its stated aims including an end to the rule of law, our national institutions, defense, and way of life.

To some, the idea that America – a 250-year-old self-governing nation, state and federal respect for individual rights, our very republic – could ever fall from within sounds impossible, delirium.

Unfortunately, as history teaches, the idea of self-government is actually hard; freedoms are hard to maintain against concentrated power, and socialism quickly becomes oppressive, reverts to centralized administration of everything, and those who oppose it are jailed or worse.

Having seen it all over the world, in recent years and in past decades, a clear warning about how rhetoric and idealized problem-solving, utopia and class-warfare promises die, is in order.

Many years ago, I spent time in the former Soviet Union, in communist dominated Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Later, I spent time in nations like communist Laos, and in Islamically centralized, theocratic but socialist, nations of the Middle East.

Here is what I will tell you simply, but clearly. Every right you treasure can be taken by an enthusiastic, socialist government, from your freedom to speak openly, to your freedom to worship, travel and seek redress, from your freedom to have children to your right to defend yourself and family with a firearm, from your right to be secure in your home to your right to due process and equal protection, from your right to vote and have your vote fairly counted to your right to not be arrested falsely and imprisoned and subject to cruel and unusual punishment.

Socialism is like a disease of the mind, which dulls and then makes cold the heart; it is hostile to religion, unless the religion – traditional or secular, like the Soviet ideology or Islamic radical loyalty – reinforces centralized power and the oppression required to maintain it.

There is a reason the Soviet Union fell, and its satellite governments across Eastern Europe, but there is also a reason they came into being. The weak-minded, the utopians, the usefully naïve and young, the easily manipulated for lack of experience, the fiction-loving who have never had the scary experiences that define socialism as it grows, imagine the perfect world and believe socialists; they also fall victim to emotionalism, class warfare rhetoric, envy, hate, and fear.

Unfortunately, the young are always targeted first, then older and frustrated people who have a box of resentments the socialists can exploit. If you doubt me, look up the Little Octoberists, Young Pioneers, and Komsomol in the former Soviet Union – with adjuncts across the communist world.

Many were later killed, but in their youth, from pre-third grade (Little Octoberists) to third grade to nine years old (Young Pioneers), then into their teens and 20s (Komsomol), the youth were the feeder system and powerful underbelly of Communism, before that Socialism.

To those who say there is a peaceful and prosperous socialism, the lie is baked in, as that is precisely what is told worldwide, as power is centralized; ask the oppressed of China, Cuba, Venezuela, and parts of Africa. The larger the country, the more power must be maintained by coercion.

In places with mixed markets, the reality is that they never again become more free, just slide toward greater central control, oppression by taxes until coercion is used by the central group, until it “runs out of other people’s money to spend.” Socialism is a theft of money and political rights.

So, as you contemplate the wondrous world of free everything, where the terrible villains who are companies that make the jobs, investors who allow the companies to exist, risk-takers who bring forth new ideas and offer opportunities, and those who work to gain wealth – must be persecuted, hunted down, their money redistributed, their lives harassed or worse, remember nothing is free.

More to the point, as so many of the young learned – as they got older – in places like the Soviet Union, with its Socialist horrors and takings, fear and persecution that followed the promises, groups like the Democratic Socialist Party, endorsing Democrats everywhere, are ruthless.

In plain words, if you love America, love your freedom, love your family, want to rise in the world on your talents, do not believe in oppression, you are not a socialist.  The rise of “Socialism” – specifically, the “Democratic Socialist Party,” endorsing Democrats from Maine to California – represents a serious challenge to America. In a word, anything that anyone subscribes to is dangerous.