Socialism is having a renaissance. After having been totally discredited in the 1980ies, when the Iron Curtain fell and the failure of socialist doctrine was evident for all to see, it seems people are again infatuated with the hard left.
In the US, Bernie Sanders and the hapless, but popular, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have made socialism mainstream in the Democratic Party. It’s even worse in the UK: a study found that 43% of the British population tough genuine socialism would make the country a better place to live. And it is predominantly the young who are drawn to the easy promises of the left: it is estimated that up to 80% of under-25 year olds supported the hard-left Labour of Jeremy Corbyn.
But how did people, and the young in particular, get so infatuated by the left?
The evidence certainly does not support the case for socialism. Conservatives and libertarians can effortlessly highlight evidence of the abject failure of every socialist experiment in history: we can point to the economic collapse of economies from North Korea to Venezuela, the human degradation of the Soviet gulags, the censorship and state-controlled media, the human rights violations, the masses of economic and political refugees fleeing socialist states despite heavily guarded boarders designed to prevent mass migration. The list goes on. But somehow it is like water off a duck’s back.
For sure, the problem is that people don’t really understand socialism. But could it be that they don’t actually love it either? The leftist millennials from Europe and the US don’t go on holiday to Cuba and fall in love with the simple lifestyle of the dirt-poor Cuban peasants. They are poverty tourists, drawn by the cheap lifestyle, marvelling at the romantic decay of Havana’s colonial buildings and intrigued by the displays of poverty unlike any they have ever seen at home – but they are not tempted to stay. They didn’t become socialists in Cuba. It happened at home.
No, the typical leftist doesn’t necessarily love socialism. But he hates what he THINKS is capitalism. The young, in particular, see themselves as losers in a system where wages stagnate, skyrocketing house prices have made owning your own home the stuff of dreams, and the (perceived) growing divide between the haves and the have-not’s is constantly rubbed in their faces by conventional and social media alike. So, they gravitate to the opposite of capitalism, by default.
But despite many of them claiming to do so, the young definitely don’t hate actual capitalism either. They want their iPhones and their designer trainers and sunglasses, they binge on Netflix and Amazon, they drink lattes and eat avocado on toast. They are happy with what the capitalist markets have to offer. But they also proudly wear their Che Guevara T-shirts, made by cheap labour in the Far East. The sing homage to Jeremy Corbyn at Glastonbury, where tickets cost £250 – the equivalent of a year’s work at the average wage in Cuba. When Nike elevates Colin Kaepernick, the knee-taking American football player, to iconic status in their new commercials, they cheer, because they identify with the message of an angry man from an oppressed background standing up to the rigged capitalist system, even if that angry man has been made a millionaire many times over by that same capitalist system. And then they buy more $200 trainers: Nike sales rose up to 31% as a result of the campaign. Socialists in mind, capitalist in deed.
Nike is pretty much the definition of what capitalism is about: great at serving customers and rewarded with billions of dollars in revenues. When Nike chooses Kaepernick as an ambassador they do so because their brand of capitalism needs to align itself with the social justice agenda of their core constituency: the young. It is cynical capitalism the socialists would say, but they are snared by it nonetheless, because inherently they subscribe to the capitalist system; they would not want to be without it.
So yes, we should teach the young about the horrors of socialism. But even more so, we need to open their eyes to the virtues of capitalism – virtues which they, in fact, already believe in, as evidenced by their behaviour. They need to be made to believe that it is capitalism, not socialism, which will afford them opportunities in life. The left may promise easy answers, but they are the wrong answers to the challenges of building good lives for ourselves and our families.