The S-Word: Get Over It
Socialism is the political and economic expression of empathy. That’s why it’s so dangerous.
The presumptive nomination of liberal Democrat Zohran Mamdani for Mayor of New York City has raised the age-old specter of “socialism,” a word that has been twisted into a boogeyman for decades. It’s important to understand that socialism is in no way connected to Marxism—whatever that is—or communism, which is essentially a dead ideology at this point, despite its continued usefulness as a scapegoat.
Here’s the dictionary definition:
Socialism is an economic and political system in which the means of production, distribution, and exchange are owned or regulated collectively—often by the state—with the aim of promoting social and economic equality. [emphasis mine]
In democracies, there is a constant tension between socialism, and capitalism—which ignores the political part of the system and focuses on competition aka free markets as the most efficient path to maximum production.
Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit, typically in competitive markets.
So, contrary to popular conception, capitalism and socialism are not opposites, they are orthogonal to each other. They are two dimensions of the same sociopolitical graph that can and must co-exist, and can and should be adjusted based on the needs of the actual human beings that are being served by the system.
A short parable to illustrate follows.
You are a Wealthy, Powerful Person who wants to find the Best Ice Sculptor in the world. You narrow it down to 20 people with a Grand Prize of One Billion Dollars! You put all the contestants in a single room for the final competition. Whoever comes out with the Best Ice Sculpture wins!
In Pure Capitalism, each contestant can use anything they want for the competition, and bring anything with them, like chainsaws. The only rule is Best Ice Sculpture at the end.
Socialism, on the other hand, says they should all have the same tools, start with the same ice, and shouldn’t bring anything with them. The Contest will provide the means of competition and ensure that it is fair and equitable. May the best person win!
Without some rules, what will happen? The most immoral, deviant person, as opposed to the best, will usually win. A psychopath won’t think about how to make the best ice sculpture, they will think: “OK, for a billion dollars, what else can I do with a chainsaw to make sure I’m the only one who can win?”
I asked ChatGPT to come up with a visual version based on my story. Not bad.
Look around. This is the scenario America is faced with right now. The federal government has fallen to a revolution of psychopathy, a destructive force that fundamentally abhors society, and the emotion that binds it together—empathy.
Democrats keep letting the enemy cheat to get in power so they can change the rules to make it easier for them to cheat to get in power again. And so on. For decades. We are now reaching the end of this progression of eroding the guardrails so now only the people with the chainsaws can win.
Zohran Mamdani terrifies psychopaths like Donald Trump and others in the regime in spite of, or because of, the fact that Mamdani represents everything they rage against—and he’s popular anyway. A Muslim and a Democratic socialist with unabashedly liberal policies blew right past the establishment candidates, and the regime doesn’t like it. At all.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was no “socialist” but he knew damn well that “socialism” was crucial infrastructure for keeping society insulated from the end stage of unfettered capitalism—specifically, a monarchical feudalist slave-state that looks a lot like the British Empire, the Soviet Union, Project 2025, and the “Dark Enlightenment.” That’s why erasing the New Deal and all its benefits, like Medicare and Social Security, is one of the regime’s primary goals.
When psychopaths with Dark Triad or Dark Tetrad personality types—narcissism, machiavellianism, psychopathy and sadism—capture liberal democratic societies, things can rapidly degenerate, ie. Weimar Germany and post-Soviet states.
We will continue to see the erosion of trust in our institutions, manipulation of democratic rituals to serve the regime, increased state violence, and if not contained, a full collapse of the Rule of Law, which is already under severe distress.
Pulling back, America has been laboring under the Anglo-Saxon, or Anglo-American economic model for decades, first introduced as “Reaganomics” and “trickle-down economics” in the 1980s. It didn’t work then and it still doesn’t. It’s time to move well past these old ideas and start thinking much bigger and better.
I don’t know Mamdani well enough yet to opine on his specific policies, but I know enough about his campaign and the effects he is having on the regime to know that they see his ideas as dangerous. And I know those are the kind of ideas I want to hear.
We are going to need a total rethink of the system, a way to ensure that the kind of deviant personalities that seized control of America never get to do it again. Don’t be afraid of using the correct words in the process. It’s not the socialism that’s trying to kill us.
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The F Word (Fascism) is what Americans should be really afraid of!
Exactly! If Mamdani is a socialist, that should liven up the politics a bit. Republicans will go wild and claim the sky is falling. But understanding socialism is long overdue, not that I have any optimism that anyone will understand it, except Bernie and AOC and a few economists. Capitalists are scared to death that the people will actually tax them to recover their own money to pay for their needs. That's why democracy must be destroyed (the goal of Leonard Leo's project of stacking the Supreme Court is to prevent taxation of capital by declaring it unconstitutional). It is not likely that enough people will come to the realization that they have the power to shift the focus of the economy from capital accumulation to labor and social equity, as happened during the two world wars. In other words, it will take another massive global disruption to bring people to their senses, for a few minutes. They are too weak to get past the ubiquitous propaganda coming from Fascists and oligarchs claiming that the people must sacrifice public sector services in order to reduce the debt, a process by which the wealthy get more and more wealthy as their captial grows and the citizens continually lose ground paying for it. In academic terms, it's called austerity. The Orange Menace will eventually disappear. The Anti-Democrats won't.