Socialism Can't Win Against Trump in 2020
Democrats should know when to walk away, know when to run.
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. March 15, 2016. (photo: Gage Skidmore)
Sen. Bernie Sanders' brand of Democratic Socialism, of radical reform and economic equality might sell in a down year. It might drive droves of disenfranchised, unemployed workers to the polls during a recession.
But on this U.S. Election Day 2020, a Tuesday, most people will be working. And they will be making more money, or at a better paying job than last year.
Privately owned companies, in healthy competition for your almighty Dollar, Euro and Yuan are responsible for nearly everything that makes your carbon-excessive, technologically advanced lifestyle possible; from the computer screen you are reading this on to the phone in your pocket to your next Metro ride.
Give me two money-driven individuals competing for my money over a staff of tenured government bureaucrats with no motivation other than to show up on time to work everyday and collect a paycheck any day of the week and twice on Cyber-Monday.
Been to the DMV lately? How user-friendly do you find the IRS? Ever tried to get off the no-fly list? Looked at the Afganistan Papers?
Pop Quiz: You have an important document that MUST get to its destination on time, do you use the U.S. Postal service or UPS?
Of course wealthy people send their children to private school; so would everyone else if they could. The private schools wealthy people send their kids to are better than the public ones.
Let's do another thought experiment on the communism versus capitalism question. Proponents of communism believe that as a system, communism spreads more power out to the people.
In fact, the opposite it true. Let me prove it:
Who is more powerful in the U.S., President Donald Trump or Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg? As thought provoking as it is, there is no clear answer to this question. They both have power surely, as to who would win in a power struggle between the two, who can say.
That we can even ask this question, and not know the answer, proves how good capitalism is at spreading power. That we can ask this question over an over again about various wealthy power-brokers, who wax and wane with the year, in the U.S. proves it again and again. Donald Trump or Bill Gates? Nancy Pelosi or Jeff Bezos?
The private sector in the U.S. is filled to the brim with private citizens in possession of vast amounts of money, power, and influence. Anyone in the U.S. government trying to seize control by force, or attempting a military coup, would have a hard time of it.
In contrast, who is more powerful: Chinese President Xi Jinping or Alibaba's CEO, billionaire Jack Ma?
Easy; since the Chinese government owns , and employs , President Xi Jinping is Ma's boss and is ultimately more powerful.
There is no social system ever devised by human kind, in all of recorded history, that can spread power equally to everyone in a society. Power, as a dynamic, simply doesn't work like that. Power has a tendency to concentrate on those who actively seek it; those who, incidentally, are often the very worst candidates for it.
When that power concentrates in the private sector, it does so with those whose transformative ideas, economic contributions, and yes, even inherited wealth, give them a more weighted influence.
When that power is concentrated solely in the government, those who seek higher and higher position do so for a different set of motivations. Only certain people have the right skills, temperament, and desire for government work; the private sector of capitalism is populated by everyone from the Sierra Club founder to Oprah Winfrey to Warren Buffett.
The case against communism is best made by former President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, in his memoir. In it, Yeltzin gives an account of his first visit to the United States.
A stranger in a strange country, one that had been locked in a decades-long cold war standoff with his own, Boris Yeltsin had been trained since birth to believe in the superiority of the U.S.S.R. and the communist system.
Yet Yeltsin was, by his own admission, unmanned by what he saw in 1989 America.
It wasn't the power plants, the executive towers, the government buildings, even the space center Yeltsin and his diplomatic party toured as U.S. officials rolled out the red carpet, just as eager to show off the superiority of America and it's Democratic free market system.
It was Boris Yeltsin's trip to a Clear Lake, Texas grocery store that made him break down in the airplane afterward. He was awed and overwhelmed by the choices, the quality, the vast quantity available at prices affordable to most.
He reflected that if his countrymen in Russia could see what he had just seen, there would be a revolution in the streets of Moscow. He felt overwhelming guilt and shame at the suffering his own people had endured under communism in the U.S.S.R.; the privations; the breadlines; the bleak austerity.
People living in the U.S.S.R. in 1980 didn't have 20 kinds of soap; they had soap. If they were lucky enough to get it.
"When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It's terrible to think of it." — Boris Yeltsin
Yeltsin quit the Communist Party.
U.S. Democrats must do the same.
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