What to Do About the Rebirth of Socialism

Column: Where it came from and how to stop it

THE WASHINGTON FREE BEACON, by  Matthew Continetti — February 15, 2019

Excerpt:

“The most important political event of the twentieth century,” wrote Irving Kristol in 1976, “is not the crisis of capitalism but the death of socialism.” Plenty of self-described Marxist and socialist regimes existed throughout the world, Kristol recognized. It was rather the ideas behind such regimes that had reached a moral and intellectual endpoint. Nor was this passing away entirely to be cheered. “For with the passing of the socialist ideal,” Kristol went on, “there is removed from the political horizon the one alternative to capitalism that was rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in the Western civilization which emerged from that tradition.”

The inheritors of the socialist ideal were totalitarian states on one hand and stagnant social democracies on the other. By the end of the twentieth century, these too had passed. China (and later Vietnam) decided that to get rich is glorious, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact states collapsed into squabbling nationalities and kleptocracies, the socialist autocracies that had depended on Moscow for support receded into irrelevance. What Kristol called “a dwindling band of socialist fideists” remained behind, the last remnant of a dwindling faith. “People who persist in calling themselves socialist, while decrying the three quarters of the world that has proclaimed itself socialist, and who can find a socialist country nowhere but in their imaginings—such people are anachronisms.”

Not any more. If the death of the socialist idea was the most important political event of the last century, then the rebirth of this ideal must rank high in significance in the current one. ……

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