“How do you define socialism ... and why do you think socialist candidates are popping up everywhere across the country?” A reporter asked Vice President JD Vance that question the other day. It was the kind of fastball hanging over the plate that a slugger like Vance ought to knock into the left-field bleachers.
But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty JD has struck out.
“Oh man,” he began. “You know, I, I guess...” he trailed off, shaking his head. “It’s honestly, it’s a hard term to define these days,” he went on. “Classically, you would think socialism is about prioritizing workers,” he said, but Democrats don’t like Trump administration policies about workers. “So, I don’t know what the term means anymore,” he added. “I think in reality, what it actually means in the American context is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls’ sports.”
Steeeriiiiike!
Perhaps I’m being too hard on Vance. The press conference was meant to address visas for foreign workers, and Vance really wanted to convey that Team Trump prefers American workers. He tried to make the answer fit his narrative.
But as bad as the gender cult is, it’s not the problem with Communist China, the Soviet Union, or any number of other communist/socialist states. Socialism also never actually prioritizes workers, who are little more than expendable cogs in the machinery of the state. The problem is that socialism uses human envy and greed to fuel government tyranny.
If you’re going to fight socialism effectively, you darn well better be able to define it.
Merriam-Webster says socialism is “any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.”
That sounds almost nice, but it’s technically accurate. In practice, of course, socialism is anything but nice. Tyranny never is.
Unfortunately, Vance whiffed on defining socialism and also the opportunity to rebut a popular left-wing slur for conservatives: “fascist.” As I wrote last year, fascism is a kissing cousin of communism because both Marxist ideologies rely on the brutal force of the state to achieve their totalitarian ends. Because no part of the economy or civil life is outside government authority, anyone who steps out of line will be punished, perhaps with death.
At the risk of oversimplifying it, the reason the Nazis hated the Communists, and vice versa, is that the Nazis advocated national socialism and the Communists prized international socialism. The Germans wanted to run the world because they thought the Aryan race was superior. The Soviets wanted to run the world because they thought the proletariat was superior.
What is a socialist? Not all that different from a fascist.
“You don’t stop socialism by throwing slogans at people about the free market,” Vance said over the summer. “You stop socialism by making people’s lives better.”
The free market does make people’s lives better. All those socialists on college campuses are communicating on smart phones via internet and cell service that capitalists created. They use energy that companies extracted from the ground.
They’re not benefiting from government control.
Unfortunately, the American government, including under Team Trump, which hasn’t been nearly as economically conservative the second time, has taken stakes in dozens of private companies. As economic analyst Veronique de Rugy wrote recently, “Federal ownership of private companies has become routine, and it is happening on the right even as members busily point fingers at the left for its socialism.”
National Review’s Phil Klein was harsher: “Vance has to redefine socialism as ‘things I oppose’ because if he defined it in terms of its actual economic philosophy, he’d agree with much of it.”
Vance may have gotten the answer to the socialism question perplexingly wrong, but he’s a populist, not a socialist. Democrats are the ones embracing socialism. The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America has been alarming to watch because the DSA platform is full of Marxism. Democrats who espouse it aim to control an ever-increasing part of the economy and our lives.
As our Gregory Lyakhov recently put it, “The disagreement between socialism and the American founding therefore begins long before arguments about the Electoral College or the structure of Congress. It begins with a much more fundamental question: How much of a person’s life belongs to the individual, and how much should be subject to collective political control?”
Those advocating socialism want the government to run your life, cradle to grave. Free-enterprise conservatives trust each of us to do a better job of that than anyone in government ever could. Vance and every Republican should realize — immediately — that defining socialism is part of fighting it.
