It’s a Riot: Socialism, and its Statist Cousin, are Failing Everywhere

Most young Americans want socialism, polls in recent years have shown. Addressing one of these tender-aged voters recently, Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) issued some reassurance. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), he told the young woman, will in the future become “the mainstream Democratic movement.” This is ironic because socialism — and its little cousin statism — are failing everywhere as I write this.

Oh, but don’t worry (says Alfred E. Neuman?), it’ll work this time.

Or maybe not. After all, some observers would ask, what could you call the riots currently ravaging Europe?

They’re a “bill coming due for socialism and globalism,” commentator Fred Fleitz answers. (Of course, importing millions of unassimilable people didn’t help.)

This bill is higher than the Europeans perhaps expected (and government virtually always undershoots cost estimates). As one observer put it, “It’s like going out to eat and realizing that you picked a pretty expensive place.”

A Restaurant That Needs to be Shuttered

Addressing this Friday, Fleitz tries explaining the European unrest:

The core reason is that Europe’s massively expensive socialist welfare state does not work.

The French riots began in high schools so overcrowded and understaffed that students blockaded them in protest. A state that spends lavishly on pensions and benefits cannot even keep its classrooms staffed.

Of course, school conditions are largely a pretext, and at most a catalyst, for the violence. At issue appears to be a red-green (socialist-Islamic) alliance that’s exploiting the educational woes. This isn’t surprising, either. Riots are generally the handiwork of a minuscule but malevolent percentage of the population, of miscreants smelling the opportunity to indulge their predatory inclinations.

This makes authorities’ unwillingness to apply the force necessary to quell the violence especially shameful. After all, it isn’t millions of people who need a firm hand, but just a few bad apples. And allowing them to wreak havoc and hurt the innocent is a gross dereliction of duty.

As for Fleitz’s socialism characterization, some European officials have emphasized in recent years that their nations are not socialist. And guess what?

They’re right.

These countries are not places such as Cuba or North Korea. What they are is deeply statist, and this should be even more alarming. For they’re relatively poor and unproductive just being nanny states. What would they be like after jumping from the statist frying pan into the socialist fire?

Know here that as it is, France (and Britain) is poorer than our poorest state, Mississippi, in nominal per-capita GDP.

In fairness, this measure doesn’t factor government benefits into the equation (like overcrowded schools!). Nonetheless, perhaps nothing better illustrates statism-borne economic stagnation.

Returning to Fleitz, he continues:

Meanwhile, European economies and security are under siege from a huge influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, which has imposed enormous costs in government benefits while contributing to surges in crime and radical Islam.

The denialism I heard in London [Fleitz gave a speech there] is everywhere. Consider a recent New York Times opinion writer who drew the implausible conclusion that the French riots were part of a student revolution to build a better France.

Or the BBC calling the Paris riots “mostly peaceful.”

Or a panelist on MS NOW who made the absurd claim that although we don’t know who is behind the riots or their motivations, we know Trump is responsible.

What these elites refuse to admit is that Europe is in deep trouble because socialist and globalist policies are destroying European civilization — and that radical change is needed to save it.

The Trump cop-out is amusing. After all, even people languishing in a real socialist hellhole — Cuba — don’t blame our president for their problems. They blame socialism.

Just consider the reporting of Atlantic magazine’s Robert F. Worth. He recently spent time in Cuba trying to infect the natives with a disease: TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). Yet as American Thinker reported Sunday:

Worth’s questions about American policy produced … [a] revealing exchange. During nine days of travel, he had not met a single person who blamed Donald Trump or the United States for their situation. He sometimes reminded people about the blockade and asked whether conditions had worsened. Retired engineer Guillermo Almeida told him he saw no change since January. Venezuelan oil, he explained, had not been reaching ordinary Cubans anyway. Another man offered a concise explanation: “It seems to us that the real embargo is inside of Cuba.” Worth’s questions suggest he was trying to establish the consequences of Trump’s blockade. The Cubans’ answers kept taking him back to the consequences of their own [socialist] government.

The Real Issue

So far from the cure, socialism is an exacerbation of the disease. Consequently, Fleitz is right about Europe’s need for “radical change.” Is it, however, just an economic system that must be altered?

Or is the relative material poverty a reflection of moral poverty?

As I explained in “Written in the Eternal Constitution” in 2008, discussing the consequences of a lack of population-level virtue:

Consider, for instance, the strategy of playing one group against another. Why does such a callow ploy work? Well, let’s take … the class-warfare card. If greed and envy find no home in our souls, it’s to no avail. If it’s otherwise, though, the rich will use their power to trample the modest, thereby abusing the system. Or the modest, in the grip of the green-eyed monster called avarice, will imagine they are being trampled. In any case, there is a division that can and will be exploited by demagogues.

Or consider those poor Americans we’d once hear about (now an endangered species) who were too proud to accept charity. These were individuals who simply would not take handouts. Now, there is of course nothing wrong with accepting generosity with gratitude and appreciation. In fact, this can help create human bonds and fellowship, with action-exhibited love expressed by both giver and recipient. The point, however, is this:

Is there not a profound moral difference between such people and the spirit-of-entitlement spoiled brats?

When you’re living with modern comforts our ancestors couldn’t even imagine — and you’re agitating for socialism because you’re not commanding the $500K salary you think you “deserve” — well, beatification may not lie in your near future.

What may, though, are the fruits of moral corruption and vice: tyranny with socialist window dressing.