Socialism Says: “You Like Me. You Really, Really Like Me!”

The downside of democracy is that sometimes the people and their will are wrong. Even then – especially then! – democracy dictates that their will be honored.

What’s dumb is done, so to speak.

We’re now at just such a juncture.

Filed here at FITS under We Can’t Believe We Missed This But Then Again So Did Everyone Else, Rasmussen reported last Thursday that despite all the obits and postmortems, capitalism is not dead.

It is definitely knock-knock-knockin’ on death’s door, though.

Its chance of survival? Three percent.

Why three percent? That’s the margin by which Americans prefer capitalism to socialism, when polled by Rasmussen researchers in a telephone survey.

Lest anyone think we’re spinning spurious implications, we should note that the researchers used that exact language: Capitalism versus socialism.

That’s not a small point, either. We’ve long recognized the socialist shakedown that’s going on, but we had no idea that people were willing to call it by name in anything other than an “uh-oh watch out” kind of way.

And that’s just it.

Conservatives have so often cried “socialism!” that it’s now nothing more than a bygone has-been of a warning – a cheap and lazy namedrop, a wilted way to self-identify as a bootstraps-and-heartland sort of citizen.

Nobody’s crying wolf anymore, though. There’s a zeitgeist brewing, and though it’s not quite here, the percolations are undeniable. It’s all cusps and brinks now – thresholds waiting to be crossed.

The Rasmussen study is one of those thresholds.

That socialism is no longer a radical term – that median-type Americans don’t mind the word, and actually even embrace its meaning – suggests that the idea of it has been normalized. Stripped of its shock factor and its incendiary connotation, socialism has become benign and even attractive … an inevitability, a fact of life.

I’m blaming it on populism.

Populism is the new way, enlightened and hip but with a studied conventionality. It is both a throwback and a forecast … the new old way of doing things. It’s been ignited primarily by the people’s fury at those others – people, of course, but not the people apparently – who have dared to profit during this Time Without Profit.

The populist seeds were planted probably sometime last year, their germination having occurred contemporaneously with Barack Obama’s “we-the-people” rise to power. But it wasn’t until this spring that populism came into bloom under the guiding light of the AIG bonus bonanza.

Now people have sprouted into full-grown populists, shouting meta-Americanisms from their foreclosed-upon rooftops and proud of it.

Here I’ve got to go against the grain of things – veer off momentarily from this pied piper trip we all seem to be on.

I’m not much for populism, because, as indicated in the Rasmussen research, “the people” can be pretty wrong-headed – which, people being people, isn’t much of a surprise or even all that important a fact.

But populism yields some serious groupthink: If nobody is perfect, then a bunch of nobodies anchored by their shared imperfections are . . . not worth belonging to. “Belongingness” mired in the mar of humanity – harmony based on inharmony – is a recipe for some really bad stuff.

Like the news that capitalism is just barely squeaking by, falling behind to socialism at a velocity made possible by the brute kinesthetic inertia of populism.

The whole thing is quite the conundrum for those who believe simultaneously in democracy and in capitalism, libertarianism, Americanism.

Those people, fewer in number but still around, want to say this: Screw “the people.” Collectivism is alive and well on Israeli kibbutzim, in at least half of Europe, most of South America, and all of Africa and Eurasia. There’s plenty of room for the collectivists among us, just not in the U.S.

That’s the capitalist talking, and the libertarian, and the American. But then they remember stuff like the Rasmussen survey, and they can’t help but think: The people want what they want. Democracy’s not dead, right? So the people should have what they want. Hello, socialism.

Not yet. Not quite. Capitalism is still – short-lived as it may be – the American ideal. Just barely, but still … a majority is a majority, right?

Comments