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With polls showing a majority of American Millennials view Socialism favorably, with two of the top Democrat candidates running on socialist agendas, and with U.S. House Squad progressives calling for socialist redistribution schemes, Victor Davis Hanson tries to make sense of what is going on in America, explaining that there are many catalysts for the new socialism.
Massive Immigration
- The number of foreign-born U.S. residents and their children has been estimated at almost 60 million, or about 1 in 5 U.S. residents. Some 27 percent of California residents were born outside of America.
- Many of these immigrants flee from poor areas of Latin America, Mexico, Africa, and Asia that were wrecked by statism and socialism. Often, they arrive in the U.S. unaware of economic and political alternatives to state socialism.
- Without marketable skills and unable to speak English — many assume that America will simply offer a far better version of the statism from which they fled. Consequently, many take for granted that government will provide them an array of social services, and they become supportive of progressive socialism.
The Leftward Drift of Silicon Valley, Corporate America, Wall Street
- The progressive rich feel guilty about their unprecedented wealth. So they champion redistribution as the sort of medieval penance that alleviates guilt.
- influential and monied classes usually are so well off that higher taxes hardly affect them.
- Instead, redistributionist taxation hurts the struggling middle classes.
Universities Also to Blame
- Manipulating the federal government to guarantee student loans empowered universities to jack up college costs without any accountability.
- Liberal college administrators and faculty did not care much when graduates left campus poorly educated and unable to market their expensive degrees.
- 45 million borrowers now struggle with nearly $1.6 trillion in collective student debt, with climbing interest. That indebtedness has delayed — or ended — the traditional forces that encourage conservatism and traditionalism, such as getting married, having children and buying a home.
Goodbye Main Street America
- A generation of single, childless, and mostly urban youth feels cheated that their high-priced degrees did not earn them competitive salaries.
- Millions of embittered college graduates will never be able to pay off what they owe — and want some entity to pay off their debts.
Clueless Republicans
- Doctrinaire Republicans mouthed orthodoxies of free rather than fair trade.
- They embraced the idea of creative destruction of industries, but without worrying about the real-life consequences for the unemployed in the hollowed-out red-state interior.
Why Socialism Suddenly Seems Cool
As VDH writes:
Add up a lost generation of woke and broke college graduates, waves of impoverished immigrants without much knowledge of American economic traditions, wealthy advocates of boutique socialism, and asleep-at-the-wheel Republicans, and it becomes clear why historically destructive socialism is suddenly seen as cool.
Read more here.
