In tracking political comments on social media, and working hard not to engage, I’ve come across hundreds of accounts that answer every charge against the Administration with one word. Socialism.
Following the threads, it’s clear that many have no idea what socialism even is. They can’t, or won’t, see any difference between safety net programs such as Social Security and Chairman Mao forcing college professors onto farms in the 1960s. Others deliberately display a callous nihilism so obnoxious as to make them unfit for any society.
Both are using the word “Socialism” as an all-purpose incantation that’s supposed to shut down discussion.
In a previous life, in a previous galaxy, I was one of these people. The Young Republicans of 2025 are no different than those I met in 1970, when my own personal rebellion took a sharp right turn. I suspect many of today’s YRs are grandsons of my old friends, shielded from the reality of life by money and privilege, blind to it even as they defend it as some kind of natural order.
In doing this they come off as 19th century toffs, sons of landed gentry with no clue that the man who made the pile had to scrabble up by his fingers, or cross an ocean, just to make their lives comfortable. There’s no sense of responsibility or obligation to anyone. The world was made for them and for no one else.
It’s from this attitude that empires die, and America did make itself an empire in the 20th century, with possessions across the Spanish speaking world, colonial wars, and military bases meant to bend local governments to our will.
Social Progress vs. Socialism
In terms of seeking progress for its citizens, America has been socialist since its founding. In the 19th century it was socialist with its land, giving it away willy-nilly to railroads, to homesteaders, and for land grant colleges, or forming it into forests and parks for the benefit of every citizen. Our public schools were born in the 19th century. What is Yosemite other than property kept from private hands and used for shared public benefit?
The 20th-century socialism that the Right most objects to are programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. These were instituted by democratic government for the care of our elderly, who a century ago were our poorest citizens.
Socialism has a different face in the 21st century. It’s the face of Jerry Jones. The NFL is state-sponsored socialism, with clubs sharing revenue and given stadiums by the state. This now includes the land around the stadiums, which they’re free to develop for their own profit. Baseball and other American sports are the same way. Running soccer in this way, through Major League Soccer, is threatening a global game which still runs on capitalist principles.
Socialism works for the socialist.
The Point of Cruelty
For most MAGAts, I suspect, there’s no thought given to any of this. It’s as though wealth is the only morality, imposed by force and enforced by evangelical preachers.
We’ve seen it before. Afrikaaners had all sorts of rationalizations for apartheid. Note that the world’s richest man is now Elon Musk, a white Afrikaaner. Afrikaaner racists had their own denomination, the Dutch Reformed Church. American racists had theirs, too, the Southern Baptists.
Charity means nothing to the nihilist until something happens to them. Until their home falls into the ocean, until they can’t sell their crops, until their sons can’t get into a rehab, or their parents are tossed from their nursing home, until they want to build an electric car. Suddenly, they need government help. No, they demand it. Moreover, since Trump is in power, they get it. It’s the advantage of amorality.
What is evil, other than blindness to everything outside of yourself? It isn’t socialism.
