Excusing the intellectuals

As the Bernie Sanders campaign has revealed, an astonishingly high percentage of young people believe that socialism is a good thing. Commentators on the right, and even in the center, respond with the refrain, “They’re too young to have seen Soviet Russia and all the other failed cases of socialism.”

Hearing this, I have tended to nod in agreement, but there was something about it I didn’t like. Today I realized that this “too young to remember” refrain lets the intellectuals off the hook. You don’t need to “remember” an historical event in order to draw conclusions from it. Why haven’t they been taught about the greatest, and bloodiest, social experiment of the 20th century? And remember, they have been indoctrinated since the first grade with many false historical narratives–America as based on crimes against the savages (“Native Americans”), the Declaration and Constitution as the institutionalization of white-male “privilege,” the 19th century as a time when capitalism fed off slavery, when young children were seized and thrust into dirty, dangerous factories, when robber barons sucked the country dry.

I”d bet the millennials can recite a litany of such “facts” about the history of capitalism. But what do they know about the history of socialism? Nothing–unless some good “fact” about it has been fabricated for the teachers to feed them.

So those “too young” to remember the events of 1989 are somehow not too young to remember the myths about 1789 and 1889.

And it’s not restricted to history, anyway. What do they know of North Korea? Of Cuba? Nothing. At least nothing true or relevant.

Aside from historical and current practice: why have our young people not been told what socialism is? This is the intellectual’s huge evasion.

Even 20 years ago, when John Ridpath and I debated “Capitalism vs. Socialism–Which is the Moral System,” the debates on the pro-socialism side would never ever define socialism. In fact, when I defined it for them (in a debate at Harvard’s Kennedy Center), the other side flatly denied my (quite standard) definition. I defined socialism as: “Government ownership of the means of production.” Interestingly, and disgustingly, while denying that definition, the socialist debaters given no specific reasons and offered no counter-definition.

So the pro-socialism of the young cannot be blamed on Father Time. It is due to the ingrained socialist commitments of the educational establishment. And, as a consequence, of the media. (On the media’s leftism: future historians will marvel over the fact that while there are thousands of films featuring sadistic Nazi villains, there are almost none–I can’t recall any–with equivalent Soviet villains.)

Bernie scores high with those who have been educated by pro-socialists. It’s as simple as that.

Where it gets a little less simple, is why the overwhelming majority of educators are pro-socialist. As Objectivists, we know that the root poison is altruism. Socialism simply attempts to put into practice the sacrifice of ability to need.

Someday, that is what the young will be taught.