BS Summary: This article contains 38 faulty reasoning types, including Confirmation Bias, Negativity Bias, and Biased Writer Voice, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 32.7% saturation with 540 hits. Analysis detected 4,862 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,650 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 90.4% and a BS Rank of 94% (1,279 of 21,187 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 94.00% of the article peer group.
Socialism is *au courant* in America today, though in its 21st-century form, it is less a rebellion of the proletariat than a by-product of the capitalist elite.
Through its continued efforts to decrease the returns to human labour and by financing the very groups and ideologies increasingly dedicated to its overthrow, socialism has found fertile ground.
Today, more than one in four Americans waves the red flag.
And no wonder.
The oligarchs have engaged in increasingly brazen spending on themselves – epitomised by Jeff Bezos’s profligacy – while the widely unpopular AI boom they’ve ushered in seems to be leaving everyone else behind.
Amid record profits, Big Tech firms have cut some 240,000 jobs since 2024.
Amazon alone cut 30,000 roles in the past year.
Overall, productivity is rising but wages are not.
A small group of elite tech workers at AI firms just cashed in $14 billion, but that will not be much comfort to those now unemployed.
As economist Gad Levanon notes, ‘Ownership of future profit streams is concentrating far faster than employment, output or people’.
The pattern of rapacity is magnified by the Trump administration capitalising on its power, particularly through its dealings in the Middle East and its cryptocurrency speculation.
The Bidens may have been scummy, but their corruption was of the six-figure kind as opposed to seven, eight or more.
The Big Tech elites tend to back progressives, but their vision of a roboticised future – where work is performed by machines while people are reduced to relying on state handouts – leaves many cold.
Sam Altman, generally a supporter of Democrats, wants AI bots to serve as a ‘super assistant’ for every part of life, supplanting the roles once played by parents, friends, teachers, ministers and neighbours.
Mark Zuckerberg, a longtime donor to Democrats, thinks human contact can be supplanted by the properly customised bots in his Metaverse.
Peter Thiel warns darkly of ‘a deadly race between politics and technology’, with technology deemed superior to democracy.
Thiel, who has funded many on the tech right, embraces the notion that the cognitively gifted should forge the future.
Tech executives, until the socialist insurgency, had little to fear from the Democrats.
With the reformist but free-market-centred politics of JFK, LBJ and Bill Clinton, capitalism worked for most, producing opportunities to start businesses, buy homes, move up in income and secure a decent retirement.
But today, that promise has faded.
There’s much chatter about a rising ‘the upper-middle class’ but many of the ostensible gains, particularly for the young, have faded under the weight of inflation.
The winners are at the commanding heights: the top one per cent of households have increased their share of national income from nine per cent in 1979 to 18 per cent in 2022.
In contrast, the middle orders and poor have fallen back.
The same results seem to transcend parties and administrations.
No wonder that even in a moderately good economy, public dissatisfaction is at historic lows.
Less than 10 per cent of Americans under 30 think the country is heading in a good direction.
Jobs like cleaning the New York subway, with good benefits and steady work, now attract tens of thousands of new applicants.
Fading promise drives successful socialist agitation.
Of course, most Americans – particularly older ones – still embrace the capitalist ethos that worked for so many of them.
The US has produced some 26million millionaires, only slightly less than the rest of the world combined.
Last year, millionaires were made at a rate of nearly 1,200 a day.
Until recently, Americans displayed, as Marx wrote in *Das Capital*, the remarkable ‘versatility’ that could turn ‘The wageworker of today’ into tomorrow’s ‘independent peasant or artisan, working for himself’.
And as Engels noted, Americans are ‘born conservatives’ and ‘purely bourgeois’.
They may detest big corporations but, at the same time, love the notion of ‘free enterprise’.
Only when the spectre of opportunity fades can socialism embed itself in this most individualistic of countries.
Funded by the rich, the left’s key constituency is not in the working class but among young people whose degrees no longer translate into comfy jobs, including in academia.
Forty per cent of recent college graduates are underemployed, notes the New York Fed, meaning that they’re working in jobs that don’t require their degree.
The increasingly socialist-oriented *New Republic* now celebrates ‘the death of the yuppie dream’ and the conversion of the ambitious into pliable comrades.
Universities, not trade unions, provide the footsoldiers for the modern left.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard teacher, and Zohran Mamdani, the son of a famous radical academic, are leftist royalty.
The parents of Katie Wilson, Seattle’s new socialist mayor, were both professors.
Nithya Raman, who could be LA’s next mayor, holds a graduate degree from MIT.
Socialist candidates Melat Kiros, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez are all graduate students.
In contrast, widespread prosperity and upward mobility constitute the neo-socialists’ biggest adversary.
Economic stagnation and loss of jobs are their feedstock.
They do best in places where the American dream is being comprehensively extinguished – places, in particular, with the largest surpluses of unengaged workers.
California alone has 500,000 surplus workers, while much of the South, Texas and the Plains are actually short of labour.
Despite this, the DSA is not focussed on growing the economy.
Mamdani filled 40 positions for an office of ‘mass engagement’ but has been slow to appoint an economic-development director.
Unlike traditional social democrats, the new socialists have little interest in expanding opportunities for workers and entrepreneurs, focussing instead on redistributing wealth and bolstering publicly funded employment.
Some of this reluctance stems from their links to oligarch-funded greens.
Many now embrace the new red party line embraced by the likes of Thomas Piketty and Immanuel Saez, author of the controversial wealth-tax proposal in California.
The basic idea is that the West should suck it up and have the state distribute goodies to the increasingly redundant working class.
This approach – along with university-honed views on such things as policing, transgenderism and homeownership – won’t appeal to much of the population.
The socialists’ lesser-known positions on such things like controlling the means of production, abolishing the Senate, neutering the Supreme Court, and eliminating both the police and the border will not stir most people in suburbs, exurbs or small towns.
Only now are the oligarchs beginning to understand the threat posed by the DSA to their basic interests.
New York state’s ban on data centres, a move pushed by the DSA but complied with by the supposedly moderate governor Kathy Hochul, has been a big wake-up call.
Yet, as of now, the tech bros seem to have no real strategy to make their case – it’s as if the public is just an abstraction that can be contained by the right algorithm.
Although the far left’s base is only about eight per cent of the electorate, it has followed a far better political strategy.
The socialists target low-turnout elections in deep blue states.
Sometimes it takes less than 10 per cent of the total electorate, relying on superior get-out-the-vote operations in areas where the downwardly mobile class is clustered.
The world the DSA and its allies want to create would be one where capitalism is deemed a failure.
The future for the ambitious, as is the case in many countries, will be working for the state, particularly in the largely government-funded health sector.
This would provide a vast voter contribution and activist base.
As for the taxpayers and private-sector workers, they will become the new kulaks.
Right now, the only thing that can stop the socialist takeover of the Democratic Party will be for more traditional liberals to stand up to the left’s increasingly authoritarian sentiments.
But figures like New York governor Kathy Hochul, California’s Gavin Newsom, former VP Kamala Harris, as well as the likely next House speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, have decided instead to genuflect in their direction.
Ron Klain, after his disastrous turn as Joe Biden’s vizier, appears to be backing Ro Khanna, one of the most openly opportunistic of potential DSA-backed presidential candidates.
With exceptions of Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman and New York’s Tom Suozzi, few Democrats seem ready to revive the party’s traditional focus on boosting wages, improving working conditions and providing opportunities for ownership.
Left-wing populism shouldn’t be shunned entirely, however, given that most Americans believe that workers and small business owners should have more power, as opposed to tech executives, bankers and lawyers.
Even Republican voters support higher taxes on the ultra-rich.
The Democrats can take steps to prevent DSA ‘parasites’ from inexorably seizing control.
James Carville, the mastermind of Bill Clinton’s campaign, advocates ‘a firewall’ against DSA candidates, whose extreme positions on capitalism, Israel and race are simply beyond the pale for most voters.
It is clear that many voters, now alienated by MAGA’s failures, feel the Dems have moved too far left – although as Nate Silver notes, this is less the case with Democratic primary votes.
The problem is that the party has no Bill Clinton to challenge their new Bolshevik factions, although perhaps Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro or even former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel could fill the bill.
If the socialists march on unchallenged, then Americans may opt for the current Republican regime, however tainted it may be.
Given America’s capitalist DNA and barring a financial collapse, the DSA’s appeal will remain a minority one, particularly outside the coasts.
A party that sounds ever more socialist and culturally out of touch could well accomplish something: the presidency of JD Vance or Marco Rubio.
Not exactly what blue state politicians dream about.
Joel Kotkin is a *spiked* columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.
Find him on Substack here.
Analysis
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