Free Shit - The Resurgence Of Socialism In America

During the Red Scare of the Fifties, Senator Joe McCarthy conducted a witch hunt which unearthed supposed Communists in every corner of America, especially in Hollywood and academia.  'Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?', his voice rang out over the airwaves as millions tuned in to the Army-McCarthy Congressional hearings. 

 

Americans had cause for concern.  Winston Churchill had been right about Stalin and Soviet Communism, and Russia was now a nuclear power, threatening to use it against the armies of the night.  The Cold War was at its height, children were taught 'duck and cover' drills, and the hunt was on for subversives, Russian spies, traitors, and internal enemies. 

However, the anti-Communist campaign was really a pogrom.  Most of the accusations were false.  Most of those under fire were intellectuals united under the banner of Lafollette, Brandeis, and Gompers in the days when socialism meant workers' rights.  Few of those Upper West Side Jews meant any harm, they just wanted assembly line conditions to improve, a modicum of benefits provided for those who labored on them, and a compassionate eye cast on the working man. 

McCarthy and his shills created an atmosphere of fear - Communists were everywhere at work dismantling the very architecture of liberal democracy.  Americans had to be vigilant and pursuing, and if a few innocent men were blacklisted, so be it.  The anti-Communist net had to be cast widely to catch the worst offenders. 

The arms build up in those days was significant, and at the height of the Cold War, enough nuclear missiles were pointed at the United States and the Soviet Union to destroy the world a hundred times over. 

Ironically, or perhaps expectedly, the Cold War period was an era of peace - two equally armed superpowers with their fingers on the trigger assured that neither of them pulled it.  Yet, as far as ordinary Americans were concerned, it was a frightening time. 

It passed of course.  It took a while before the Soviet Union collapsed under its own ponderous, inefficient, autocratic weight and after Ronald Reagan shook his finger at the Soviet Premier and said, 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall'. 

After the fall of Communism, Francis Fukuyama, historian and political philosopher proclaimed 'the end of history'.  The nuclear superpower clash over, the world would be at peace, and peace would spread throughout the land. 

He was wrong of course, very wrong, for as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed every man Jack with an AK-47 decided to get what was coming to him, and the world is just as violent now as it was before. 

The Soviet Communist experiment was a dismal failure.  What the West found east of the Dnieper after the fall of the Berlin Wall was an empire in ruins - failed industry and agriculture, poverty, despair, and economic misery.  The regime had been propped up with cant and socialist promise but could not and did not deliver .

Nowhere did Communism succeed.  China after the horrors of Mao gave up on statism and rigid Marxist-Leninism and while retaining the official mantel of communism unleashed the entrepreneurial energies of a billion people, turning it into s world superpower. North Korea and Cuba are failed states.  For all intents and purposes communism and socialism are dead. 

Or are they?  Despite the fact that socialism has never worked, and even democratic socialist states like Sweden and Norway have turned from overbearing, oppressive statism and opened their markets, American socialists are gaining power.  New York's Mayor Zorhan Mamdani is a professed Democratic Socialist who intends - like his Soviet bloc forbears - to take control of the means of production, the foundational principle of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.  In New York's case this means returning finance, real estate, and commerce to government in order to equalize the currently unequal society where the top one percent controls 80 percent of the wealth. 

Wealth redistribution - i.e. taking money earned by some and giving it those who have earned nothing, all in the name of fairness and equity - is at the heart of Mamdani's municipal policies. 

The result? The wealthiest New Yorkers are picking up stakes and moving to states like Florida and Texas which have dismantled the old liberal punitive tax system and welcomed those willing to invest.  Middle class and poor New Yorkers will now have to shoulder the increased tax burden caused by Mamdani's socialist 'reconfiguration'

There is no such thing as a free lunch, but Mamdani and the new self-proclaimed Socialist Mayor of Washington, DC, Janeese Lewis George insist there is.  Mamdami has opened a free supermarket, has promised to make public transit free, and will empty the treasury to assure diversity, equity, and inclusion.  New York will face bankruptcy, will turn to New York State and the federal government for a bailout, Mamdani and his inner circle will be turned out of office, but it will take years to repair the damage. 

So how is it that New Yorkers voted Mamdani into office?  Couldn't they see that socialism has had a sorry history since its inception a hundred years ago?  That it is fundamentally economically unsound.  Its principles sound good - equality, fairness, social justice, compassion, and  community - but the means to these idealistic ends have never had sense or utility.  An interruption of the private market - a fair exchange between buyers and sellers, supply and demand to determine price, value, and inventory - and replacing it by a politically motivated system run by bureaucrats and ideologues has never worked and can never work. 

One New Yorker said that the city is now racially and ethnically diverse, and these  uneducated, politically and economically unsophisticated immigrants see only two things: 1) Mamdani looks like them, a brown-skinned African-Asian mélange; and 2) he is going to make everything free. What's not to like?

As conservative economist Thomas Sowell has noted, government is the only enterprise which can spend money with no accountability.  If it feels good and right to invest in something, then it must be right and good.  Soon to be inaugurated Socialist Mayor of DC is a prime example of feel-good socialist excess.  Washington's black population, no longer the mega-majority it once was but still significant, has been given short shrift in the past, says George, and thousands of families, because of white supremacism and oppression remained mired in poverty.  Crime and anti-social behavior in the ghetto are nothing more than expressions of frustration and anger, and government has a duty to satisfy their needs. 

Already billions have been poured into the public trough by successive DC municipal governments, but because there has been no accountability this money has disappeared.  Not only have socio-economic indicators not improved despite this infusion of public funds, they have gone down. The inner city is worse off than it has ever been. 

Socialist mayors like Janeese George do not want to face facts - equally poor ethnic groups, like the Chinese and the Jews before them, have risen out of poverty to high educational and economic achievement because of culture - an ethos of work, responsibility, individual merit, competition and high expectations.  Money is not the issue.  Culture is. 

Socialists like Mamdani and George prefer to overlook the underlying causes of poverty and economic disparity and jump to the same idealistic conclusions of their Soviet forbears. 

It is not surprising that young, adolescent Americans have fallen for the blandishments of socialist politicians. Adolescence is too early to become hardened by facts, hemmed in by logic and intellectual discipline.  It is a time for optimism, hope, and idealism, perhaps the only time, so don't waste it; but a mature adult to persist in the belief that a discredited, disavowed, oppressive and impoverishing system can actually work is unthinkable.  Yet, there it is.  Ordinarily reasonable people are turning to a system with no future, no promise, no traction whatsoever. 

Part of the problem is Trump-hatred. The Left has been convinced that Donald Trump is so evil, destructive, arrogant, and mindful only of increasing his wealth and power that only the most radically progressive measures can stop him in his tracks and return America to the path to a utopian future.  Only diametrically contrary policies will work to right the ship.  Socialism is the answer to MAGA, right-wing terror. 

Trump alone cannot account for the febrile thinking that has enabled politicians like Mamdami, George, Bernie Sanders, and others. Idealism, the last refuge of scoundrels, says one commentor, playing on the patriotism meme, is the real issue.  Progressives simply cannot think beyond promise, hope, and some dreamy confection remembered from A Child's Garden of Verse. If it sounds good, it must be good; and doesn't diversity, equity, inclusion, self-esteem, sharing, and compassion sound good?

This resurgence of socialism will peter out once the cracks show and the foundation crumbles.  Mamdani's policies are already under scrutiny and his programs - like the free supermarket in East Harlem - are shown to be hypocritical failures.  Free, yes, but supply and demand - you can't empty the shelves - still operate. 

Yet the American voter's credulousness seems to have no limits.  Millions endorsed progressives' idea of gender fluidity, male motherhood, and a full range of sexual choices.  They cheered the opening of the borders to illegal immigrants despite the unmistakably clear reason for it - these new arrivals, thanks to no voter ID requirements could be 'encouraged' to vote Democratic and their numbers would create enough census pressures to reconfigure electoral districts. Voters saluted higher taxes and unaccountable public spending. 

So it is no surprise that they have endorsed Mamdani and George; and despite Bernie Sanders' personal wealth, three houses, and plutocrat lifestyle, love his compassion. 

Progressives will see the light as every last citizen of the Soviet bloc saw - socialism is nothing but an idealistic sham, a failed philosophy, and a coruscating, destructive force. 

Man Up! - Closed Borders, No Foreign Assistance, And Take Care Of Your Own

Liberals have howled at what they consider the unconscionable razing of USAID and the end to limitless American foreign assistance.  The Editor-in-Chief of The Economist in an interview with Elon Musk, the leader of the charge against America's behemoth bureaucracy, asked him if he realized that by closing USAID, he has the blood of millions of children on his hands?

Musk, characteristically cool, confident, and without anger, said no, he did not.  The charge was spurious and ignorant, politically motivated, superficial and inflammatory.  Channeling Ronald Reagan, Musk said, 'USAID is not the solution.  It is the problem'. 

Anyone who has worked for or with USAID knows that American foreign assistance has been a total, dismal failure.  It has been transparently and overtly political in its choices of 'investment', overlooking fraudulent, corrupt, and hopelessly criminal regimes in exchange for political support, opposition to American enemies, and access to raw materials.  Given this nod to dictators, autocrats, and their oppressive policies, it is no surprise that the Presidents-for-Life up and down the African continent have taken the money, offered thanks and a willingness to reform, and filled Swiss and offshore bank accounts with unearned dollars.  

As part of this intellectually and morally corrupt pas de deux, African governments did nothing to facilitate the development projects included in international loans and grants.  Without government support, these projects rarely got off the ground, and if they did, they foundered and died within a year. 

The donors themselves - USAID and European development agencies - were complicit in this failure to implement projects funded by them.  American projects were hopelessly optimistic in their projections, mired in political cant, and overseen by either rank amateurs, or progressive-minded inclusivists for whom Africa could do no wrong. 

In one infamous project where a USAID-sponsored non-profit agency got a supplemental grant from a private foundation to 'save newborn lives'.  While the funds could easily have been invested in wide-coverage tetanus vaccination campaigns which would have dramatically reduced the disease immediately, the agency refused such a 'top-down, siloed' approach and preferred a more participatory, community based one which would focus on maternal intimacy, warming, and love.  Needless to say, deaths from tetanus remained at their high levels. 

Because of a politically-motivated campaign for exclusive breastfeeding, mothers who chose to work outside the home, but could only do so if they relied on bottle feeding, were refused inclusion in the campaign.  The American women who had made exclusive breastfeeding a progressive cause celebre denied women of promise and enterprise the information necessary to properly bottle feed their infants. 

AIDS prevention campaigns which refused  because of 'cultural sensitivity' to recognize the dangerously promiscuous behavior of both African men and women and come down hard on the serial and multiple sexual partnerships lost the opportunity to inject the key component in prevention - moral responsibility. 

When George Bush instituted PEPFAR, a program which aimed at the rapid production and distribution of anti-retroviral drugs which could dramatically reduce mortality from AIDS, there was initial resistance from the anti-top-down advocates; but when Bush insisted, said that traditional behavior change campaigns were not working, the drugs went international and AIDS mortality dropped significantly. 

'By closing down USAID [and PEPFAR]', the Economist editor went on, you were consigning millions of people to unnecessary suffering and death'; but Musk replied that it was African governments' responsibility to rationalize their profligate spending, stop the corruption which robbed the people of billions in financial resources, and negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for favorable arrangements; and up to private foundations and non-profit agencies to take up the slack.  

Continuing to pour money into corrupt regimes, whatever the short term benefits, only perpetuates the corruption. 

The Scandinavian donors, hoping to promote in Africa the same 'democratic socialism' they had in their own countries, poured hundreds of millions of foreign exchange into Tanzania where President Julius Nyerere and his socialist nationalism party promised universal reform and rapid development.  Of course nothing of the like happened, and Tanzania remained poor, undeveloped, and dependent on foreign aid. 

'Pull the plug', said a development economist of the Rand Corporation. 'It is time cut off these dependent, corrupt, manipulative African 'leaders' completely from foreign assistance and force them to borrow on international capital markets.  Let the World Bank return to its original role of lender of last resort.' 

The Bank played an important development role in the past as this specialized lender.  Governments went to Chase, Dresdner, Citibank and others for loans, and if refused but having put together a reasonable and creditable proposal, the World Bank would step in. 

Once Robert McNamara took over the Bank presidency in hopes of restoring his credibility after a disastrous tour as Secretary of Defense prosecuting the failed American military adventure in Vietnam, the Bank hemorrhaged money.  'Poverty reduction' was the refrain, and the Bank began down the same failed road as USAID. 

 

The Chinese have gone one step farther.  Forget 'development' and simply conclude favorable bilateral contracts. Guarantee us oil at a fixed, below-market rate, and we will rebuild your transportation infrastructure, no strings attached.

'Development' - the traditional 'cooperative, community-based, participatory, inclusive programs in which the means are more important than the ends - is finished, and Elon Musk knows it. 

The illegal immigration crisis has two damaging effects - first and foremost it is causing disruption and social chaos in those European countries which, seduced by the progressive notion of 'inclusivity' let in all comers across their borders. These migrants, by and large Muslim have taken the charity of their recipient countries and given nothing in return.  France in particular is home to nests of radical Islamists who adamantly refuse integration and assimilation.  Finally conservative leaders throughout Europe have said basta! and are likely to win the next elections. 

Refusing illegal immigration has a second benefit, forcing corrupt and inefficient governments to address the needs of those citizens who flee and those who would like to.  Popular revolt is likely and welcome. 

Only those who have lost their jobs at USAID are shedding tears.  The rest of the country, thanks to the exposes of Musk, Rand, the Trump Administration, conservative journals and thinktanks, is finally seeing the phenomenal waste of dollars and resources because of in intellectually corrupt and practically inefficient program. 

Millions of deaths? Hardly.  A reform of foreign assistance according to conservative principles will be an important step in forcing recalcitrant, entrenched autocrats to react or to incite their governed to revolt.  In either case, the demise of international aid can only be a long term benefit. 

Republican, Democrat, And 'I Don't Care' - The End Of Partisan Politics In A Virtual, AI Age

It is hard to envisage any world but our own; impossible to imagine a future where what matters now does not matter, where religion is simply part of history, and where concerns about equality, environment, and demography disappear or take on unimaginable forms. 

Yet the 'post-human' generation - one which has been genetically modified and where mind and computer are interchangeable - that prosaic issues, those which limit rather than liberate, disappear and the world becomes a limitless universe of possibility. 

Ours will be the last recognizable, old-fashioned human generation – a human race unchanged since the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago.  Soon genetic engineering and symbiotic interface with the computer will alter this living fossil and render it recognizable only to paleontologists who will look upon it as today’s scientists look at Neanderthals, apes, and dinosaurs.  Slow, progressive Darwinian evolution will be a thing of the past.  Radical, immediate, revolutionary change will be the new algorithm.

Since the human genome was completely sequenced, the identification of specific gene configurations linked to human characteristics and behavior has become routine; and the engineering of some of those sequences to modify or eliminate them has proceeded quickly.  It will not be long before all genetic sequences will have been identified, codified, sorted and catalogued, and available for modification. 

Even more impressively such genetic engineering will be able to replace unwanted genes with more desirable ones. Once that happens, parents will be able to purchase the genes of beautiful, talented, brilliant celebrities and create the infant of their choice.

At the same time, engineers, currently working on a mind-machine interface will soon be able to seamlessly and completely link the human mind with the electronic circuitry of the computer thus creating a purely virtual world in which individuals will be able to instantaneously have access to all the world’s information, images, and experiences; to manipulate them at will,  and to create worlds of their own choosing. 

Artificial Intelligence, now just an important, revolutionary interface with human agents, will soon be completely integrated within the human brain.  Virtuality will not simply change the means of perception; it will define a completely new way of thinking - an unlimited, unimpeded, infinite intellectual and sentient world. 

Genetically engineered human beings, living in a perfectly virtual world where physical reality is meaningless and irrelevant, will be of a new race, a post-human race.

Melanie Tripp had been immersed in partisan politics from a young age.  Although born and bred of conservative parents in a conservative age, she like many of her generation was drawn to the social revolution of the Sixties.  Action, involvement, and engagement were the only ways to validate one's existence in a complex world.  To sit by, ignoring the problems of racial discrimination, the warming planet, the persistent glass ceiling, and the frustrated aspirations of gay men and women was tantamount to moral failure. 

Melanie never lost her way, and while many of her colleagues treated the Sixties as a right of passage and nothing more, found comfortable sinecures on Wall Street and K Street, and left demonstrations and political activism far behind, she held the course. She had been a progressive's progressive, aligned with each and every cause in the canon.  Progressivism and activist, confrontational politics had become her whole life. 

So the idea of this virtual, artificially intelligent world disassociated from the reality she knew, was unthinkable.  No matter what the platform, the vehicle, or the modality, life would always be about compassion, consideration, and doing the right thing. 

Alfred Tomkins, Professor of Cybernetics And Brain Function at MIT had this to say about the coming post-human generation:

The implications of this engineered evolution are profound.  First, we will no longer be hindered in our mental and spiritual evolution by the inefficient use of our brains.  When a mind-computer interface (i.e. once decoded, human brain impulses will be able to be read by the computer and vice-versa) has been completed, the range of our mental capacities, however limited in the past, will be limitless.  Imagine a Google search without a screen or keypad.  The mind will not only have access to all information available in real time, but all past information that has been digitized.  

Not only will we have access to this information, but we will be able to use it however we want.  The distinction between fantasy and reality will disappear; and we will no longer be tethered by what is but what might be or what might have been.

In other words the ties that bind will be cut, and we - the human mind - will be free to explore both interior and exterior worlds.  Old passions, concerns, issues will be irrelevant once the mind itself is freed from brick and mortar. At play in the fields of the Lord, suggested author Peter Matthiessen - a limitless, epiphanic journey through realms only dreamed of. 

What most upset Melanie Tripp was the idea that in this brave new world individualism would reign. Anyone with access to the indefinably vast universe available to the human mind via a seamless link with the computer would need no one to travel with. However, relationships might be virtual but no less satisfying, and so perfectly created to fit one's personal, particular desires that any thoughts of who or what was left behind would immediately disappear. 

Individualism, Melanie and her fellow progressives believed, was at the heart of the conservatism which was threatening to disassemble the carefully designed utopian visions they had long held. If advocates of AI and futurists like Alfred Tomkins were even partially right, then the world would be consumed by and subsumed within an artificial, unstructured, sybaritic world of fantasy.  Human beings were not meant for such a rudderless, undisciplined chaos.  

The American census form asks questions about political party affiliation, and there are only three choices - Republican, Democrat, and Other - but political scientists have often wondered why there was not a fourth category, 'Indifferent'.  For as hard as it might be to believe in this divisive, contentious age that there could be anyone indifferent to the issues facing the world, there are a growing number - a number which will only increase as absorption into a virtual, cyber-mediated world becomes a reality.

The new world of virtuality, artificial intelligence, and complete interface with the electronic circuitry of of the computer will be fundamentally different - unrecognizable in fact - from that of today.  It will not be just a modified version of life, but an unimaginably different one. Once the tethers from reality have been severed, all bets are off - religion, philosophy, economics, finance will mean nothing, or will be reconfigured in an artificially constructed, personal universe. 

In order to accommodate this virtual permanence, the 'real' world will also change.  Robotics of infinite variety will make, produce, harvest, process, and supply, all controlled by independently intelligent machines.  The human body will be reconfigured and adjusted through recombinant DNA to adapt to this new environment.  The human organism will fit the function of the new cyberspace. 

Professor Tomkins went on:

It is quite normal for today's citizen to wonder what the world is becoming, so radically different it will be from anything they can imagine.  The toll has been most telling on the progressive mind, so inextricably linked as it is to its particular notion of a socially utopian future.  This notion, borne and raised in the days of Brandeis, Lafollette, and Gompers, has long since lost its relevance and intellectual elasticity. AI and virtuality are redefining 'utopia' and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the progressive vision 

Melanie, who had always been a fierce advocate of progressive causes, a firebrand of righteous indignation, was now even more animated and eager.  She marched in Iowa against the construction of AI data centers, in every silicon valley in the country against the further development of AI tools, on the steps of Congress to demand legislative action to prevent the pernicious spread of this destructive, existential threat. 

The genie, however, is out of the bottle and there is no putting him back.  AI will continue apace as will advanced genetic research, and the post-human generation is a certainty.  Those already stoic and sanguine about the future, those with the intelligence and insight to be able to imagine a future with few of the road signs and mile markers of today, welcome the new world.  Those penitential worriers like Melanie Tripp will never be able to see beyond the cant and confining canons of belief and will go fighting and struggling to oblivion.