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Bret Stephens on Bernie
Recording the podcast this morning, we asked Bret Stephens what explains the ecstatic support Bernie Sanders is eliciting among the young. I found Bret’s answer so striking — so insightful, and so disheartening — that I made notes. To wit:
I’m now hiring young college graduates who have no living memory of the Cold War. None. Now, they’re smart, and they know what the Soviet Union was. But that’s all they know.
After our victory in the Cold War, we as a country never took the trouble to educate young Americans about what communism and socialism were — not the way we educated Americans about Nazism after World War II. There was never instruction at high schools and colleges explaining why socialism always ends up being autocratic and giving you the kind of economy we’re now seeing in Venezuela.
That’s a large part of the Bernie Sanders story. Twenty-three and 24-year-olds hear the word “socialism” and think it’s cute. It’s not cute. It’s a horror on the same order as fascism, but they don’t know that.
One generation — we’re always just one generation away from losing all we value.
Published in General
So true.
This is why the nature of mankind will ultimately never change. Because each generation or two, it has to relearn the lessons learned by earlier ones.
This is what I’ve said so often. Things went downhill after Carter created the Dept. of Education and the Woodstock hippies started teaching. In “radical chic” circles, it was fashionable to flirt with socialism, and they stopped teaching its evils in school the way they did with us. And now we have several generations of voters who wouldn’t know actual socialism if it walked up and bopped them on the head. Which it might be about to do.
Peter, As you have close ties to Stanford how is this justified where the study of Western Civ has been quashed since the late 60’s ? This fails to pass muster.
Indeed, he nails it. This is a very significant observation.
It’s also our own damn fault. We completely neglected the crucial step of incorporating the postmortem of Cold War Socialism into the college curriculum. And that allowed Socialists, like Howard Zinn, to write the textbooks.
But there’s no reason to give up here; there is still an opportunity to do this.
College-age kids think socialism is cute because the word has been given a glossy marketing makeover. In a recent post I noted how the meaning of the word “Socialism” has drifted from no private ownership of the means of production to the government providing lots of free stuff.
The kid on the right looks familiar …
Hi Peter, slightly inaccurate I think.
Millenials, when you twist their arm, might grudgingly concede Soviet Communism was bad, but they distinguish this as different and unlike the good Swedish Socialism they are really after. I made a long (and frustratingly unbumped) post on the member feed about a month ago http://ricochet.com/teaching-young-people-about-socialism/
The trouble is we don’t advertise the gaping flaws in Swedish Socialism the way we did the Soviet model, even though I believe the Swedish model is having it’s 80s moment right now, probably minus the happy ending.
When the Soviet Union was collapsing I said we’ve cleared away the most important barrier to widespread adoption of marxism, that the marxists are still out there in great numbers and will be free of the embarrassment of Soviet Communism. Some kids have embraced marxism since I was an undergraduate in the 50’s, but then we had fascism and the Soviets as counter arguments, teachers who didn’t embrace it and kids who could argue with other kids. Marxism is perfect for lazy youngsters who understand nothing. One pamphlet explains all economics, all history, all sociology and convinces adolescents they know more than their parents or teachers. Of course this pertains to those who actually read a little Marx, most just absorb it from the culture and don’t even rise to systematic error.
I wrote about this in 2010, for City Journal.
I agree with everything that has been said on this thread. But still – I feel a little uncomfortable getting all self-righteous about the stupid Democrats embracing a socialist candidate when so many on our side are embracing a fascist candidate. I don’t think Bernie would actually succeed in establishing a socialist nation in the US, and I don’t think the Donald would actually succeed in establishing a fascist nation in the US, but I sure don’t like the trend lines among the voters.
I think maybe one part of Sanders’ appeal to the kids is that he’s totally “otherly” to them. They can’t imagine ever being him. He’s Gandalf–no, make that Dumbledore. Whereas the other candidates (even though only marginally younger) all represent images of familiar figures that, at this point in their lives, they fear they might turn into: the schoolmarm. The preacher. The crass, soulless businessman.
As to why the kids seem to think socialism/communism is so cute: We baby boomers were born into and raised on fear. We knew the last sound we would ever hear would be the emergency broadcast system signal. Nothing could save or reassure us; the grown ups were just as scared! The Cuban Missile Crisis. The Berlin crisis. The mass delusion about “bomb shelters”–even my father, a doctor, who certainly knew the utter futility of trying to burrow underground for a few days (and THEN what?) sat us all down and explained that we were to hole up in the root cellar if the unthinkable happened. And it was the Communist Soviet Union which was the bogeyman.
Although I’m old enough to be the grandma of the kids in the picture, I have a child their age, and I was so happy she didn’t have to grow up with the pervasive dread of the mushroom cloud which haunted my childhood. Look at the picture: these kids are Hansel and Gretel! I now wish 9/11 HAD been used to scare these kids, make ’em recognize an enemy when they see one, but instead, the mantra immediately became “Muslims-are-our-friends”. It’s fear and hate that are BAD, don’t give in to ’em. Check–the kids took it to heart.
As a result:They’re dodo birds, anybody can walk up to ’em and bash their heads in. You can tell ’em a million times that Socialism has failed wherever it was tried, that Communism has caused increasing and widespread misery wherever implemented. Believe me, I HAVE.
But hey–I’m just the schoolmarm.
“in the Cold War, we as a country never took the trouble to educate young Americans about what communism and socialism were — not the way we educated Americans”
Why would their teachers, almost to a man people of the Left, be expected to teach them of the greatest failing of the Left? They certainly wouldn’t learn about it from Hollywood or any other aspect of the culture, again, almost completely dominated by the Left. Marc Steyn is correct, we are doomed to fail if we think winning an occasional election makes a difference in the long run, when we allow the Left to dominate every aspect of our culture.
What? Socialism & Fascism go hand in hand. Socialism requires a government that controls, business, labor, and does not allow opposition. That is the definition of fascism.
Right. That’s what I said.
Incidents such as this only reinforce a long held notion of mine, is it not far past time we call Public Education what it is? This is a jobs program, nothing more. The idea that it has anything to do with educating the youth of America is pure fantasy, when such occurs it is mere good luck, happenstance.
Most parents with the will and the means know this implicitly and work their hardest in order to get their progeny out of public schools and into a forum where they may actually become productive citizens.
Hugh Hewitt has a regimen for new guests who may become regular ones in which one of the questions he asks is “do you think Alger Hiss was a spy?” This is meant to shine a little light on possible Leftist sympathies. Hardcore knuckleheads of a certain age will still ride to Hiss’ defense.
More and more though, the younger ones answer “I don’t know.” A few of these are dissembling, but for an increasing number, they really don’t. A controversy that echoed across decades of America’s collective consciousness, with countless assaults and sallies, has been reduced to less than a footnote of our history.
They don’t know because to bring up Hiss after the revelations of the Venona Project not only would confirm that the anti-Communists were right, but that the useful idiots who were the anti-anti-Communists were being both particularly useful and particularly idiotic.
Chambers was right. Buckley was right. Nixon was right. Goldwater was right. Reagan was right. And all their heroes were wrong.
Their poor little Leftie egos can’t stand up under that. So down the memory hole it goes. Better that future generations be raised in ignorance than certain people face the fact that the Cold War is over and their side lost.
Agreed with DialM. One trouble with equating socialism with communism is that the former exists by degrees while the latter assumes total, undisguised domination of citizens.
Another trouble is that socialism is a beloved term throughout Europe, among our allies and the peoples Americans first look to for close comparisons.
It is a mistake to identify socialism as unnatural, extreme, or obviously wrong because it evidently appeals (at least in part) to various peoples. In fact, phrases like “American exceptionalism” and “the American Experiment” should remind conservatives that the strong preference for individual liberty codified in our Constitution (once upon a time) forces us to swim against the common currents of history.
America as it was founded is the extreme position. The natural state of Man is to be ruled. To be free in the political sense requires constant battle. Peace was never an option.
This is why I wanted to put together a volume like The Great Lie. One of the epigraphs for the book is from Waldemar Gurian and goes like this: “A living lie–and that is the tragedy of human life–is superior, as force, to a dead truth.”
I might quote this in a sermon, Aaron.
So what books would best go into an anti-socialist curriculum? Is there a book of sufficient academic rigor that would help me explain to my pro-Swedish socialist friends how it always ends in failure?
‘Chambers was right. Buckley was right. Nixon was right. Goldwater was right. Reagan was right. And all their heroes were wrong.’
THAT is the answer to the question as to why there was no victory lap. The media with the N.Y Times in the lead realized thier side had lost. They immediately began to warn G.H.W. Bush, no gloating , no ball spiking etc. and he dutifully obeyed, not that it was in his nature anyway. To the Times it was equivalent to the death of a friend.
Not only do the younger generations have no living memory of the Cold War, the bulk of what they have has been dominated by the politics of the bald-faced Marxist presently occupying the White House. America not only hasn’t educated it’s younger generations against Socialism, to an objective outsider, it has embraced it.
Bernie people are just following along on the path of the good little SJW that has been laid out for them by the leftist social order they’ve learned from our system of public education.
Ah, yes, but why does the Left dominate every aspect of our culture? How do they maintain that dominance decade after decade?
Why have today’s conservatives proved themselves over years and years to be incapable of dislodging the Left from any of the commanding heights it has seized, other than from political institutions?
And why, even when conservatives have political power, do they fail to do the things they said they were going to do?
To return to the words of Mark Steyn (and John Derbyshire), why are we such pansies?
I guess that everyone on this thread who is explaining and defining socialism and communism has forgotten that neither Chris Matthews nor Debbie Wasserman Test nor Hillary Clinton was able to distinguish “socialism” from Democratic Party progressive liberalism.
Which is because there is no difference. Socialism has evolved.
Socialism and liberalism are understood today as exactly the same 2 things in the US and in Europe:
“A nice agenda for nice people.”
“Anti-racist.”
Think about this: almost 25 years ago in 1989 the Berlin Wall came down. Now I was barely aware of the political world then but I knew it was important. Go back 25 years before that and you are in 1964 and the Johnson-Goldwater election well before the worst parts of the Vietnam War and the Hippie movement where you had large numbers of young people becoming sympathetic with brutal Communist regimes in North Vietnam and China. If Boomers can sympathize with Communist and socialist regimes while much closer to them, why shouldn’t Millennials?
Socialism is attractive to youth because it is in their self-interest. They haven’t accumulated property yet so taking the property of others and redistributing it can only benefit them. It is selfishness pure and simple.
No what worries me about the Millennial generation more is their trust in institutions to enforce social behavior. They would rather trust authorities to censor others in the name of PC rather than engage with detractors and win the argument.
In part, I think it’s because we’ve become much more a culture of feeling and doing what makes the individual feel good rather than a culture of responsibility and doing something because it’s the right thing to do.
How many classic WW2 and Nazi movies have been made? How many pro-American cold war movies have been made?
We live in a strange time. On the one hand, the culture at large has no respect for its history. This doesn’t mean the worship of the past, but a healthy appreciation for what decisions people made and what the consequences were, for good or ill. Instead we live in a world where “that was so five minutes ago” is a pejorative and I’m sure that phase is probably “so five minutes ago” itself.
On the other hand, we live in a time where we seem to be in retreat politically. It is no coincidence to me that the major players in this election are over 60. Hillary Clinton is running implicitly on taking us back to the 1990s. Trump to the 1950s and Sanders to the 1930s. People want effects without understanding either causes or consequences, like cargo cultists.
Cruz or Kasich?
You left out McCarthy.He was right too….
You’re right, of course, but I had to stop somewhere and I’d already hit five.