Dead end: Socialism is 200 years old and is leading the Democrats to doom

Democrats sealed their fate in tying themselves to collectivist ideologies, but now they're joining with some very ominous allies.

Democrats are on a dead end: Socialism is 200 years old and is leading these leftists to doom.

The left sealed its fate in tying itself to collectivist ideologies, but now they're joining with some very ominous allies.

Everything old is 'new' again – with a very ominous novel twist. The rising stars of socialism are bursting forth with brand-new' ideas of buying votes with other people's money.

But these days the left is in dire straits and taking a page from the Iranian revolution in teaming up with Islamists in a desperate bid to win and then sort out the details of who will wield power. For now, they say 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' – even if the Islamists would just as soon throw them off a tall building.

Socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have joined with Zohran Mamdani in the perennial quest for power in offering something for nothing, for the low price of your liberty.

And for the ancient ideas of collectivism that have been tried for the past 400 years and have never worked, we easily found fresh videos that decimate these 'democratic' ideas from the past few days.

With one from Mark Levin: The REAL Reason why Communism Will NEVER Work and from Dad Saves America: Socialism Fails in Theory and Destroys in Practice - Daniel Di Martino happen to be available at the moment.

These collectivist ideologies - whatever the 'ism' of the moment (Excluding that made-up term from the left for economic freedom) – are always doomed to disaster. But they are very analogous to the similar assessments of the very same 'new' ideas from over a century ago.

Because if you ask anyone, how many times socialism (or its other collectivist variants) has been tried, the answers will range from a patently absurd never from leftists to the far more realistic answer that it's been tried in so many different ways and so many different places to the point that it's almost impossible to count them all.

If you then ask when and where it was first tried, the answers get even more interesting, because even getting leftists to define the term is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. Some may actually admit that it was tried in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as well as in many other socialist nations during the last century, but even that answer is way off.

Because leftists are, shall we say – quite creative in coming up with why their 'wonderous' ideology has yet to take hold in the world's imagination as an ever-popular form of a perfect people's Utopia.

Most of these excuses center around the U.S. government attacking these wondrous 'people's republics,' directly or through nefarious means, e.g., the CIA, and ruining them. With all kinds of other excuses for the position, they claim that socialism can actually work on a small scale.

Some leftists will even admit that the book Utopia, published more than 500 years ago in 1516, was the 'first socialist position,' describing a communist Utopia on an island somewhere near the Americas.

We should note that some of the first experiments in collectivism were tried in the first colonies of the American continent 400 years ago in 1607 and 1623; thus, we can say that these 'isms' (we're specifically excluding the leftist-coined term capitalism – that is actually economic freedom or free enterprise) have a long storied 400-year-old record of abject failure.

However, given that the left is wont to play games with words, the focus here is on the word 'socialist,' its first usage in print, and its references to the experiments in collectivism of two centuries ago. Because we've noted something rather interesting about how this is not being covered by the national socialist media.

The first usage of the word 'socialist' was in reference to what were called at the time the 'villages of cooperation' – small communist communes – the first experiments in socialism 200 years ago. There was a frontier mindset of exploration and experimentation in the early decades of the country, and thus, there were a number of pioneers developing 'new' societal norms.

One of these in particular was created by Robert Owen, a Welsh textile manufacturer-turned-philanthropist who, in 1825, purchased a small town on the banks of the Wabash River in Indiana. He renamed the town 'New Harmony.' According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first documented use of ‘socialist’ was in a letter published in the November 1827 edition of The Co-operative Magazine in reference to these 'villages of cooperation', including New Harmony. As you might have guessed, these experiments only lasted a few years and then fell apart, but that didn't stop the socialists from going on and trying to give it a go in multiple other locations. These also failed, as expected.

A century later, many looked back at this abject failure, including former President William Howard Taft in an address in 1914: Taft Shows Why Socialism Fails; It Offers No Substitute for the Reward of Human Effort.

NEW HARMONY, Ind., June 8.-Reasons for the failure of experiments in socialism were discussed by William H. Taft today in an address delivered at the centennial celebration of the founding of New Harmony. ...

"The most notable socialistic experiment, that of Robert Owen, at New Harmony, failed as all socialism must fail," said Mr. Taft, "because it found no substitute for the motive essential to arouse and make constant human effort that is furnished by the institution of private property and the shaping of reward by competition and natural economic adjustment.

A New York Times article from June 9, 1914, on the centennial celebration of the town and former President Taft's exposition on this failure, entitled: Failure of New Harmony. It described how a real socialist community was founded, along with

...similar communities at Yellow Springs, Ohio; at Nashoba, near Memphis; at Haverstraw and Coxsackie, N. Y., and in the Kendal Community at Canton, Ohio, did not suffice to prevent successive failures.

Continuing on to note that:

The value of Mr. TAFT's exposition of the long series of futile experiments consists in its warning to future enthusiasts. Usually, new socialistic communities are founded by leaders who are reckless or know little of previous attempts.

All of this history demonstrates that excuses for leftist failures lack merit, since these socialist projects operated on a small scale, without U.S. government interference and long before agencies like the CIA were created.

As we reach the 200th anniversary of socialism, the left recycles these discredited ideas, passing figures like Mamdani off as pioneers when, in fact, their proposals are outdated.

The latest evolution of this ongoing failure is a new and risky partnership: leftist socialists are once again collaborating with Islamist factions, echoing a strategy seen during the Iranian revolution. There, such an alliance ousted the shah before Islamists seized total control.

This highlights the central lesson—socialism, after 200 years of defeat, now carries a heightened threat by joining with another dangerous ideology, making vigilance and awareness more important than ever.

Originally published on the American Thinker.

Image Credit: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.