The ‘Right’ View by Francis P. Sempa

Young Americans’ Attraction to Socialism is a Failure of Our Educational System

Recent polls indicate that younger and liberal Americans are increasingly receptive to socialism. A Cato Institute survey from last year showed that 62 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 have a favorable view of socialism, and 34 percent of that same group has a favorable view of communism. Equally troubling is the survey’s conclusion that 43 percent of all Americans polled have a favorable view of socialism. These are worrisome trends as America prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, and they point inevitably to historical ignorance and a massive failure of America’s educational system. They are the results of the Left’s infiltration of American institutions since the late 1960s.

In 1964, the great political philosopher James Burnham in his book “Suicide of the West” called liberalism “the ideology of Western suicide.” Burnham did not blame liberalism for the West’s decline (he blamed the “decay of religion…and excess of material luxury…and getting tired and worn out, as all things temporal do”), instead he showed how liberalism and liberal ideas motivate, justify, and reconcile the West to its fate. “The influence of liberalism on public opinion and governmental policy,” he explained, “has become—by obscuring realities, corrupting will and confounding action—a major obstacle to…arresting, and reversing, the decline.” Liberalism, Burnham wrote, is unequipped to defend Western civilization because those on the ideological Left no longer believe in the superiority of Western civilization.

Burnham’s analysis was written in 1964—before the Far Left in this country infiltrated and took control of important institutions, such as the media, elementary schools, universities and colleges, school boards, publishing houses, and professional schools and associations. As the late David Horowitz often remarked, the radicals who took over the streets and often promoted violent revolution in the 1960s became the university professors, elementary school educators, television news anchors, school board members, book publishers, law school professors, editors, columnists, and overall opinion leaders. Sometimes they became political leaders—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and many in Congress emerged from the Far Left of the ideological spectrum (some in the 60s, some later) to attain positions of power and influence. President Obama, you may recall, got his start in Chicago politics at the behest of former radical Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, and after being elected president he pledged to “fundamentally transform” America.

When you control education, you shape the future. Those 62 percent of young Americans who have a favorable view of socialism, and the 34 percent who have a favorable view of communism most likely were never taught about socialism’s record in power. When Lenin seized power in Russia in the fall of 1917, he declared: “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.” Lenin’s socialist order included a secret police, slave labor camps, state control of the economy, the rise to power of a political nomenklatura who enjoyed power and privileges denied to ordinary citizens. Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, perfected the socialist order that ruled Russia and the Soviet Empire until 1991. Today, China’s Communist leader Xi Jinping has done Stalin one better, establishing what Stein Ringen describes as “The Perfect Dictatorship.”

In China, Mao Zedong constructed the socialist order in 1949—which still governs China today. China’s socialist order is responsible for at least 60 million Chinese deaths (and that doesn’t count the tens of millions of forced abortions carried out under the socialist order in China). Other socialist orders sprang up in North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, and the satellite states of Eastern Europe. The death toll for all of these socialist orders exceeds 100 million souls.

Socialism’s record is not a secret. You can find out the horrid details in “The Black Book of Communism” (1999) and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s website at victimsofcommunism.org. Perhaps if our schools and universities introduced students to the works of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Whittaker Chambers, F.A. Hayek, Richard Pipes, Frank Dikotter, Robert Conquest, James Burnham and others who have told the truth about socialism in power, America’s young students would not be so enamored of socialism. In the end, socialism’s popularity is a result of the failure of America’s educational system.

Francis P. Sempa is the author of the books “Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century” and “America’s Global Role.” He is a contributing editor to “The American Spectator” and writes a regular column for “Real Clear Defense.”

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT NECESSARILY THE VIEW OF ALLOTSEGO AND ITS AFFILIATES.