Life, Liberty, Property #156: The (Current) Limit on Democratic Socialists’ Political Appeal
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- The (Current) Limit on Democratic Socialists’ Political Appeal
- Video of the Week: Why Socialism Fails – In The Tank #548
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The (Current) Limit on Democratic Socialists’ Political Appeal
The defeat of Democratic Socialists of America member Francesca Hong in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for the upcoming state governor’s race arrives as good news for the vast majority of Americans who are not among the DSA’s 120,000 members. It was, however, a very close race. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who was endorsed by Gov. Tony Evers (a fellow Democrat), received 39.8 percent of the vote, to Hong’s 39.3 percent.
Hong was a weak candidate and a poor standard bearer for the DSA agenda, possessing none of the charisma and political talent of fellow DSA endorsees New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, my Heartland Institute colleague Christopher Talgo argues at RedState:
“Hong’s monotone speaking style, absence of a constant beaming smile, and deficiency in quick wit on the stump was a stark contrast to Mamdani and El-Sayed.
“Whereas Mamdani and El-Sayed are social media superstars, Hong was ham-handed and ho-hum.”
Hong’s charisma shortage limited her appeal to voters and led to the refusal of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14), “the kingmakers of the DSA,” to endorse her, Talgo argues.
Talgo is certainly right about those factors, and the missing endorsements were probably dispositive in such a close race. I think, however that Hong’s failure to get past the post in this Democrat primary illustrates a greater problem for the collectivist “democratic socialist” movement.
Writing at his “Bad Cattitude” Substack, the pseudonymous political analyst El Gato Malo (EGM) argues that the democratic socialist agenda is based on an appeal to “suicidal empathy” and that the latter has the same psychological source as explicit Communism:
the other day, i spoke about communism being a failure of second order thinking and that basically anyone capable of asking the question “but if we do that, it creates a certain set of incentives and won’t those incentives then lead to X?” does not become a communist. (apart from the select few who know exactly what it will do and see it as a path to personal power. more on them in a minute.)
well, how is “suicidal empathy” not functionally the exact same thing? you see someone “in need” and say “we should give them free stuff/preferencing/whatever.” never does the thought of “but what incentives does that create and where would such incentives lead?” intrude and then everyone acts surprised when you get overrun and taken for a ride and then goes into the denial ritual of “not happening, no big deal, actually good, you are evil for noticing.”
People with a thirst for power take advantage of people’s inability to perform second-order thinking, EGM observes:
but turn this frame and put yourself in the seat of the “select few” mentioned above. your goal is power. to get and keep it you need a movement behind you, folks who do as you say and hold ranks. and the world is full of idiots. so how do you make them useful?
consider the situation one is in if one can play on 3 and 5 move look ahead against people only capable of playing 1: all you have to do is figure out which second and third order effect[s] you want and then work backward to “what first order perception must i produce in order to lead people there?” and the lemmings will rush unwittingly toward your cliff of choice without any idea what the real game is. [Emphasis added.]
Here’s how it works. Step 1 involves identifying a policy that sounds appealing but will inevitably backfire and cause great harm to the people you are supposedly trying to help:
you need something that sounds great on a first order basis but that is actually awful on second and third order outcomes.
this selector is actually critically important, and the “awful” is not optional. when running this screen, it’s a feature, not a bug.
Step 2 transfers blame for the disaster away from the people who implemented the policy on to those who oppose the collectivist agenda:
you also need something that feels good and gives license for bad people to do bad things and call themselves good. lots of people have base, cluster B desires and tendencies. what holds them in check is the need to feel like they are the good guy. we’re all the star of our own movie, the one in the white hat. and you need a story that keeps it from going black. groupthink and external validation is a great way to do that.
the process is opposite to what many suppose:
you do not kill him for being an infidel. you call him an infidel so that you can kill him. [Emphasis added.]
To illustrate the process, EGM discusses the 35-year-old hard-left political video streamer Hasan Piker, who supports the Democrat Socialists of America platform, including wealth taxes, rent control, confiscating “empty” houses to give to the homeless, Medicare for all, opposition to Israel, and the like, and has notoriously said the United States “deserved 9/11.”
A side note for those who are (blessedly) unfamiliar with this multimillionaire lefty born into a wealthy family who rose to fame on “The Young Turks,” a hard-left news commentary site created by his uncle, Cenk Uygur: I watched a YouTube video of a live television debate between Piker and conservative radio luminary Larry Elder, and Piker was absolutely awful. His rhetorical dodges were so obviously uninformed and openly fantastic, and his reasoning so blatantly sophistical, that Elder disposed of him instantly and danced upon Piker’s arguments with hobnailed boots.
Although Piker has absolutely no talent for logical argument, his inability to reason or express a coherent line of thought or even stay on topic has proven to be no obstacle to enormous influence on today’s left. In fact, Piker’s role in the contemporary political discussion has nothing to do with reason, logic, or intellectual persuasion. His function is permission-granting, Step 2 of the collectivist strategy.
Thus, Piker unleashes Cluster B leftists against everyone they meet, EGM writes:
hasan is not an intellectual. he’s an embarrassment to submidwittery. listen to him speak. he’s actually, legitimately stupid.
but being a leading light is not his role.
piker is a permission giver. he says wild, accusatory, hateful things and brands out-groups as evil.
people follow him not because he’s smart, they follow him because he gives them justification to hate while casting it (at least in their own minds) as justice and tolerance. it allows them to view some people as less than human. this belief unlocks permission to act beastly toward others and call it virtue.
his entire product is “feel good about being a bad person, feel good about being a coercive crybully taker instead of a builder or a maker.”
he sells license. and a lot of badly adjusted cluster B jerks are lined up out the door to buy.
The hatred that Piker and other collectivists stir up creates an ever-widening chasm between their followers’ beliefs and their self-images, which soon resolves into a conviction that anyone who disagrees with them deserves maximum punishment. This is the assertion that Piker regularly makes against his political opponents (when they are not in the same room with him):
many will know the expression that “those who can be made to believe absurdities can be made to commit atrocities.”
well, once you commit an atrocity (or create any sort of problem or failure), now you have a problem of your own: you made the world worse. but most, especially those with highly external identities, cannot or will not admit this to themselves. in fact, they will go to great lengths not to.
and this creates a new set of complexity that forms a feedback loop:
when you treat someone badly, you need a story about why[,] and if that story is not going to include the idea of “because i am a jerk and should apologize” then it pretty much needs to shift to “because the other person is a jerk and deserved it.”
Describing this condition as “the counter intuitive part of cognitive dissonance,” EGM shows how it inexorably creates a demonization spiral that leads people to support increasingly shameful horrors:
you think you are helping. then it fails and things get worse/go wrong/people get hurt.
you beli[e]ved an absurdity, you assisted in calamity, and now, you have to cho[o]se:
are you the bad guy or is the other guy?
and every time you pick “the other guy” the very fact that you harmed them becomes a reason that you hate them and therefore makes it ever easier to blame them the next time and project your own bad actions onto them.
it’s a deepening spiral into excusing ever worse actions by dehumanizing the “others.”
This social and psychological process explains “why collectivism is always some power hungry, triple machiavellian nefarious svengalis at the top leading an army of the low morals mindwiped at the bottom and whipped into shape by the cluster B cadres who really never cared about the cause but just wanted to be the whip hand in a place where whipping is going on,” EGM argues:
you get a sort of grotesque parfait with the worst of the power hungry schemers on top, the sea of useful idiocy at the bottom desperate to believe what it is told and feel purposeful without having purpose[,] egged on and slapped into line by narcissists and sociopaths who were happy to join whatever team would set them loose.
it generates a sort of edge-lord aspect where becky from vassar and zander from oberlin feel positively tame hating landlords and demanding free housing for immigrants in comparison to this diatribe and where their second order incapabilities prevent them from asking questions about just whose visages the leopards eating people’s faces party will be salivating over next.
With all this in mind, it becomes clear that the real reason the DSA bigwigs refused to support Hong’s candidacy was her tendency to give the game away with her reckless candor. Here’s how Talgo describes Hong:
Fourth, and this should not be minimized, Hong has inserted her foot into her mouth too many times and has an awful history of berating the people of Wisconsin and even Culver’s fast food restaurant[s].
In 2019, Hong described a trip to Culver’s in which she had to leave after experiencing an “anxiety attack” over the number of “old, white people” in the restaurant!
It seems undeniable that the DSA and its political sympathizers agree with Hong on the issues. Where they differ deeply is on the politically viability of their policies when honestly presented.
“The lesson here is simple,” Talgo writes. “If you consistently demonize white people, who account for exactly 84.7 percent of Wisconsin residents, you might not win some of their votes when you run for statewide office.”
In sum, Hong is a Stage 2 simpleton who was put on this Earth to be led by Stage 1 edgelords. She is not sufficiently Machiavellian and shrewd to be entrusted with the governor’s office, according to the DSA power-elite Svengalis.
Hong’s strong showing in the primary suggests the DSA agenda is surprisingly popular and politically appealing, especially to young voters, Talgo says:
Incredibly, despite all these shortcomings, Francesca Hong and her dubious DSA policies still almost won the Democrat Party’s gubernatorial nomination in a swing state that President Donald Trump carried in the 2024 election.
With socialism surging among young Americans, I worry that Hong’s close loss portends that the Midwest could fall to socialism in the foreseeable future.
That seems possible. As I indicated above, however, I think Hong’s shortcomings expose the fundamental weakness of the DSA agenda. Hong erred by revealing and openly celebrating the real goal: the destruction of targeted enemies of the proposed totalitarian regime.
This phenomenon is common among less-sophisticated aspirants to leadership of the nascent totalitarian mass movement. Trapped in their own fantasies of self-adoration and belief in their personal virtue, and generally safe within far-left constituencies, they fail to see any merit in others’ objections to their dreams of the collectivist utopia over which they plan to sit in rule.
Blind to objections and drunk on fantasies of personal virtue and in fact moral perfection, people such as Hong often cannot resist opening their big, fat mouths and spilling the beans about the coming destruction of the great majority of the population as a foundation for their envisioned collectivist utopia.
We might well ask, then, what the second- and further-order effects of such individuals’ presence and indeed prominence in today’s left are.
The obvious answer is that these more-impatient militants within an already openly radical movement fatally expose its real aims. In fact, they gleefully publicize the harm the movement’s leaders intend. “Watch out, white people!” the fanatics shout, as Hong has done, with similar admonitions toward the “wealthy,” Christians, Jews, MAGA, Baby Boomers, supporters of single-sex sports leagues, and a wide variety of other outlaws.
Exposure of those inconvenient truths could reduce the DSA’s appeal significantly below its already-outlier status.
That is why canny aspiring totalitarians such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez refused to endorse Hong.
These leaders’ reluctance to embrace the truth about the collectivist agenda may indicate a natural limit on the appeal of the Democratic Socialists’ goal of imposing communism through ostensibly democratic means. It would certainly seem to be the case, with young people’s significantly higher-than-average professed support for communism having developed in a time when the nation’s schools and media have strongly suppressed knowledge of what that ideology involves.
If communism is so appealing, these institutions and the democratic socialist movement would welcome attention to the history of communism instead of trying so hard to keep it quiet.
This reluctance to acknowledge the movement’s real aims illustrates why hard-socialist and communist regimes always attain power through force or fraud. Widespread election fraud in the United States would fit this pattern if shown to be true, which explains why all the leaders of the march toward totalitarianism are so intent on dismissing, without any investigation, any claims of voter fraud in the United States and deride such concerns by monotonously invoking the openly absurd assertion that the 2020 election was the most secure in U.S. history.
Interestingly in this regard, Hong’s defeat in the Wisconsin primary hinged on a late-night “discovery” of thousands of supposedly misplaced votes from Milwaukee County, which is, by the oddest of coincidences, winner Crowley’s home base. Hong had a big lead in opinion polls of likely voters before primary day.
Clearly, the Democrat Party saw itself as likely to benefit from Hong’s defeat, as concealment of the movement’s aims is far more important to them than the very small policy distance between Hong and Crowley.
Suppression of the truth about democratic socialism is also the reason behind Ocasio-Cortez’s recent attempts to pretend she now believes “Woke One was crazy,” as she stated on ABC News series This Week. The interviewer, ABC “journalist” Jonathan Karl, assisted with this attempted whitewashing of the American left’s record by saying, “You briefly supported the idea of defunding the police,” in reference to her ballyhooing of that policy throughout her entire political life until just now.
It’s all part of a strategic move back to Step 1, not any change of policy, ideology, or the targets of their ire. The collectivists are trying to deflect attention from their true, Step 2 goal, the total elimination of their enemies, by deploying deceptive language, meaning lies, instead of questioning the wisdom of their policies and the assumptions behind them.
This is evidence of a true crisis on the left, writes Chris Bray of The Federalist:
The social and cultural madness is still greatly in evidence, while woke politicians are laughing it off as something that was waaaaaay back in the past and just a huge accident. They’re [simultaneously] arguing for a pandemic amnesty [for what they did] in 2022: Same policy, same behaviors, but you forgive them and forget about it before they actually stop.
“Woke one was crazy!” is a sign of someone who has just enough polling-induced self-awareness from consultant briefings to know that she’s done bad things, but not enough character to stop or to want to stop. It’s the performance of a prophylactic simulation of confession, familiar to anyone who’s dated a sociopath: If I say I’m sorry for hitting you, will you stop whining about it so we can go to dinner?
Leftists vaguely perceive the fact of their epistemic crisis. They know they’ve stranded themselves behind the wall of a performative language that keeps them from touching anything real. And so they’re trying to use the tools of performative language to escape the prison of performative language.
The lesson of all this is simple. There is a path these movements invariably travel if not defeated along the way:
- fraud
- force
- blood
- oceans of blood.
We are at the “fraud” stage of a communist takeover, where the United States has been for several decades. During the pandemic we were at the “force” stage, though we have receded somewhat from that position since the 2024 elections.
That is a recession we might welcome. Unfortunately, we have entered the “blood” stage, with the murders of Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, multiple assassination attempts on Donald Trump, attempted murders of immigration enforcement officers, dozens of politically motivated physical attacks on MAGA supporters, very specialized attacks such as the high-profile assaults by professional women’s basketball players against players insufficiently supportive of the league’s longstanding far-left agenda, and much more.
Can the United States turn back from Stage 3 of the communist takeover process, as we have partially done with Stage 2? The answer to that question will decide whether this nation survives as a democratic republic with the ostensible overall purpose of protecting the rights of the people.
A degeneration into full anarcho-tyranny, where we were rapidly heading during the Biden presidency, remains a distinct possibility.
Sources: RedState; Bad Cattitude (Substack); ABC News; Tell Me How This Ends (Substack); Issues & Insights
Video of the Week
Conservatives often point at socialism and more or less leave the argument at “these guys are crazy!” — But the DSA do point to some real problems, like the cost of medical care, how big companies can run roughshod over ordinary Americans, and that public infrastructure is failing in our cities as well as rural communities. But socialist solutions from Medicare for All to eating the rich will only exacerbate those problems, not solve them. We talk about actual solutions, and why socialism fails.
Meanwhile, inflation is falling, which is good, but how long can it last? What should the government do (if anything) to keep inflation down?
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