Trump is Wrong that America Will Never be a Socialist Country

Mainstream Conservative™ Twitter was abuzz last night over Trump’s State of the Union line that “America will never be a socialist country.”

President Donald Trump slams socialism: "America was founded on liberty and Independence and not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free and we will stay free."

"America will never be a socialist country."

Bernie Sanders has a massive frown on his face pic.twitter.com/dY0D2J2CKJ

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) February 6, 2019

It was a nice sentiment–in a vacuum.

What I mean is, Trump’s words sounded nice. It was a rah-rah statement that free enterprise-loving libertarians and conservatives could cheer. But it wasn’t true.

If you really think about it, as things stand, how can America not become a socialist country in the future?

For clarity’s sake, when we discuss “socialist” countries, the word “socialist” doesn’t mean a country that strictly adheres to all of Marx’s requirements for socialism. It doesn’t necessarily require government ownership of the means of production.

We’re not talking about theoretical socialism, but rather socialism in practice.

We’re talking about a corrupt, plundering oligarchy ruling over a bunch of permanently-poor people. We’re talking about a country where the utter dysfunction and corruption causes fleeing capital and increasing scarcity, which then necessitates police state crackdowns and even outright, Soviet-style totalitarianism.

Socialism in practice boils down to plundering: a charismatic leader like Hugo Chavez promising to plunder the greedy rich and redistribute all that hoarded abundance to the long-suffering poor masses.

Socialism is the view that redistribution = salvation.

Of course, as history shows us, this never works. What happens in practice with socialism is the ruling socialist party scares all the private capital away, takes the money from the rich, and then hoards it all for itself, never redistributing it the poor masses as promised in any meaningful way.

Socialists say, “We’ll take all the money from the rich and give it to you, the people.”

But what actually happens is the socialists take all the money from the rich and keep it for themselves.

The poor people who put the socialists in power (whether democratically or violently) remain poor (and usually get even poorer), while the ruling socialist party simply replaces the old upper class of rich people, the former having stolen the latter’s wealth and capital (and probably killed most of the latter in the process).

The gulags and police state thuggery we generally associate with socialism come after the poor masses get angry upon realizing the socialist revolution hasn’t panned out and they never got the money they were promised.

Ultimately, even if they’re not explicitly, avowedly Socialist™ governments (in fact only a handful of countries around the world are self-proclaimed Socialist™), many, many countries around the world fit this description of a poor majority under the boot of a corrupt, plundering leftwing oligarchy.

The poor masses of people who live in de facto socialist-style countries may not even consciously consider themselves socialists, but I’m sure they’d be highly amenable to socialist policies if you ran down a list and polled them.

It’s not the Cold War anymore. The whole world is not locked in a transnational battle for global supremacy between Communists and Capitalists today. People aren’t consciously picking sides and applying labels to themselves. Socialism in the 21st century is different from the socialism of the 20th century.

Many Mainstream Conservatives™ hear the word “socialism” and think of Venezuela, Cuba or even the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders hear socialism and think Sweden and Denmark.

But the truth is that there are very few countries that fit both sides’ conception of socialism. Most socialist countries fall somewhere in between. There are very few Cubas, North Koreas and Vietnams, just as there are very few Swedens and Denmarks.

An example of a country that fits my description of 21st century socialism is Brazil: it has major wealth disparity (arguably the highest in the world) and has until very recently been run by corrupt, plundering leftists who pay lip service to leftist/socialist ideals. Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, with its land seizures (another form of socialist redistributionism) was and remains socialist. South Africa is going down the same road as Zimbabwe. India is still largely socialist.

The fact that there are countless shithole socialist countries around the world is exactly the point I’m getting at: if we keep importing mass quantities of people from socialist countries, we will become one ourselves.

But before we even get to the immigration aspect of socialism, America is already well on the way to becoming a socialist country because it features major disparities between rich and poor: when the wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few, and when the poor and miserable greatly outnumber the rich, you already have the stage set for some form of socialist revolution.

In order for capitalism to succeed, you need a large, thriving middle class. Discontent among the masses creates an opening for disruptive politics. For people who are constantly broke and miserable, socialism sounds awfully appealing.

This is why you need middle-class “stakeholders” with steady jobs, mortgages on their homes, families, and preferably even small businesses. Those people benefit from a capitalist system and have a vested interest in seeing the system maintained. They have a lot to lose if the system is overthrown in favor of socialism.

The ideal capitalist country has a large majority of people like this.

But when your country consists primarily of rich and poor with little in-between, you are absolutely on the path to socialism.

America is getting there:

Not only does our top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90%, it owns nearly double the wealth of the bottom 90%. This is a recipe for disaster because it will get to the point where only the top 5-10% have a vested interest in preventing a socialist revolution, and even in the case that one happens, they’ll probably find a way to benefit from it or even control it outright (as today’s Limousine Liberals are doing).

Socialism appeals to poor people. It appeals to people who are unsatisfied with the state of their lives; people who have little to lose from overthrowing the system.

A country with a thriving middle class, where everyone can get a decent home with a white picket fence and a minivan, and where it’s easy to raise a family, will always reject socialism. Always.

Because contentment is kryptonite for socialism.

Now, our ruling class is certainly trying to manufacture contentment and docility among the masses in other ways, namely entertainment and consumerism (i.e. bread and circuses).

Whether people are content with financial security, a nice, affordable home in a safe neighborhood in the burbs, and the ability to provide for their family, or they’re content with affordable big-screen TVs, Facebook, Netflix, porn, Grubhub, video games and cheap Chinese shit from Amazon–contentment is still contentment.

But the former is genuine contentment, while the latter is superficial contentment.

Genuine contentment among the masses has staying power, while superficial contentment can only stave off the inevitable uprising for a time.

The America of the postwar boom-era (1950s-1960s) featured genuine contentment and a thriving, healthy middle class.

But following the financialization of the 1980s and the globalization that took off in the 1990s and 2000s, America experienced a major divergence in fortunes between rich and poor. The rich got richer while the poor either stayed the same or got poorer. The middle class shrank, with some people moving up, but many also moving down:

In 1971, over 60% of Americans were middle class. In 2015, it was barely 50%. Increasingly, Americans are either rich or poor.

You may respond and say, “50% is still a whole helluva lot of people,” and that’s partly true, but if this trend continues–and there’s no reason to believe it won’t given that it has been ongoing for nearly 50 years–then sometime in the near future we’ll see an America where just 40% of the country is middle class.

Right now, the real concern is that nearly 1/3 of Americans are either lower-middle or outright lower class. What if that number approaches 40%? An America where nearly 40% of the country is lower class will be ripe for socialist plundering.

You only need 10% of the people to be committed to a cause for it to gain traction.

Already polling shows huge levels of support for taxing the rich, and Americans have responded very favorably to Democratic proposals to levy a 70% tax on the rich. Polls also show Democrats consistently view socialism as favorable to capitalism.

America is closer to socialism than many on the right believe.

While all this might paint a dim picture for the future of “capitalism” in America, it gets dimmer still when we consider the demographic changes remaking this country.

An America populated by Americans would never become a socialist country.

But an America populated by foreigners will inevitably become a socialist country.

WRONG! If you don't build a wall & deport illegals, we'll be a socialist country in about 5 years. Nice words though.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) February 6, 2019

Look at our largest immigrant groups today:

Most of them come from socialist countries.

Mexico is a socialist country. In fact, most countries south of our border are socialist.

China is a socialist country, as is much of Asia.

If we import hordes of “new Americans” from socialist countries, they are going to make our country more like their old one.

History is not filled with examples of invading hordes assimilating and adopting to the cultures and ways of the places they invade. It’s filled with examples of the opposite: when masses of foreign people move into another place, they will take it over, rather than assimilate.

And that’s what’s happening to America in the era of “globalization”: it’s not so much immigration as it is invasion.

True immigration is small-scale, tightly-controlled and places the highest emphasis on assimilation. Our current immigration policy prioritizes none of those things, and in fact represents their polar opposite: “immigration” today is large-scale, out of control and if you demand immigrants assimilate, you’re a RAAACIST.

Do you think non-assimilated foreign immigrants will hesitate to support socialism because this country spent half a century in a Cold War against the Red Menace? They don’t care: that history–our history–is not their history. It doesn’t shape their worldview.

“Pro-business” Republicans love to tell us that immigrants fleeing socialist hellholes have seen first-hand how horrible socialism is, and so they’re natural fits for the GOP. The immigrants leaving socialist hellholes will make this country less socialist, they say.

If that’s the case, then why do roughly 7 in 10 immigrants vote for the socialist party here in America, the Democrats?

President Trump is not blind to the reality of this country. In fact, more than any other candidate in recent history, he is uniquely attuned to the problems and hardships millions of regular Americans face. That’s why he was elected in the first place.

But he cannot take for granted that because this country has been robustly capitalist and anti-socialist for centuries that it always will be.

And he cannot say, on one hand, that America will never be a socialist country, and then, on the other hand, that he “wants [foreign] people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever.” The two statements are mutually exclusive.

Welcome in socialist invaders, get socialist politicians.

America is being demographically transformed precisely because the Democrats want to turn it into a socialist hellhole which they can then rule over with unchecked power.

Build the wall, deport all the illegals, dramatically cut legal immigration for at least a generation or two, and, of course, reverse the Uniparty’s globalist, “pro-business” policies that have utterly decimated the middle class over the past several decades, or else this country will go socialist.