A compelled political or economic ideology is not an ideology at all. Either it is voluntary or it is a cult.
Authentic belief cannot be forced; force creates compliance, not conviction. A system that requires legal or authoritative coercion to survive is not proving its strength, it is exposing its fragility. Compliance is the fuel of tyrants and totalitarian regimes.
Understanding this helps one recognize that democratic socialism requires voters to consistently choose policies that erode rights and destroy prosperity. That’s the sleight of hand baked into the name itself: democratic socialism is a misnomer.
If I had a dime for every socialist who says “socialism is not communism!!”, I could retire. But the architects of socialism never bothered with the euphemism:
“The goal of socialism is communism.” ~ Vladimir Lenin
“Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
“Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.” ~ Mao Zedong
“Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity — in short, of tyranny — and it is committed to making tyranny universal.” ~ Adlai Stevenson
“It [socialism] survived long enough to show what was in it: tyranny, namely, and that new perfection of tyranny, the totalitarian state.” ~ Max Eastman
The people who built these systems and the people who watched them up close all said the same thing in different words. Only the people cheering from the sidelines today insist it’s different this time.
As for myself, I choose unequal wealth over equal poverty.
Equal poverty, equal starvation, equal lack, and ever-present paranoia and suspicion is all communism has ever been able to provide to anyone. While the “leaders” of that fantasy reality bathe in exquisite luxury far from the proles prying eyes.
Capitalism, on the other hand, has provided resources, technology, discovery, focus, passion, and entrepreneurial spirit beyond what any bureaucrat, administrator, or middle manager could ever dream of controlling or steering.
People who don’t understand capitalism’s definition are in the worst possible position. Unable to comprehend definitions and the state of things as they truly are.
Alas, there are two types of people in the world: Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data…
Who Actually Builds Things
Let’s put the rhetoric side by side with the goal.
Elon Musk is a prolific entrepreneur who has founded, co-founded, invested in, acquired, and actively managed companies across software, payments, space exploration, electric vehicles, neurotechnology, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and social media.
Mamdani, Sánchez, and Bernie Sanders, despite their differences, all share the same end goal: fewer Musks, not more. Their platforms don’t call for building competing enterprises; they call for nationalizing, taxing into submission, or regulating out of existence the ones that already exist. The goal was never to out-build the entrepreneur. It was always to replace him with government bureaucracy.
These men have spent their careers attempting to redistribute what someone else built. Musk spent his building things to distribute to the people at a competitive price.
An amazing observation was made about the Mormon attempt at living socialism in the 1800s:
“The habits of an acquisitive society were too strongly forged to be broken without the utmost devotion and selflessness to the cause, and rugged individualism triumphed over the abortive attempt at communal ownership and communal living here.” ~ Historian Andrew Karl Larson
That this “rugged individualism” has also been the main push against all forms of tyranny throughout history is lost on the socialists as well.
Like Ahab in Moby Dick, socialists miss the point that the whale embodies the freedom and liberty of the individual. Melville envisioned Ahab as a rebuke of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” a warning about where rugged individualism leads. But read through an individualist lens, Melville’s execution fails: Ahab reads not as the danger of individualism but as its casualty; raging, hunted, and destroyed by his own obsessive need for collective control over nature itself. The intent collapses into its opposite.
Weaponized Empathy
The performative moralizing and pathological altruism here is exactly why socialism is disastrous. No concept or clue about the unintended consequences of their self-righteous, weaponized empathy. On the other hand, perhaps they are fully aware of their deceptive impression management. Worth noting.
Watching the left tear itself apart over the failings of their ideology is… delicious in a way. Watching them continue to attack the “exploitations of capitalism” is even more so revealing. They attack their own, meanwhile clinging to a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes and forms human action.
Selling Rebellion at Retail Price
I encountered the perfect poster-child for this ubiquitous self-own as I walked into a knock-off of Hot Topic in Riga, Latvia last summer. Everything “woke” and “identity politics” related is on display as blatantly capitalistic, branded, targeted, and highly manipulated marketing to the 12–30 year-old scene-kid / influencer target. It’s as obvious as the nose on your face to those who pay attention. Anyway. Down with capitalism! Eat the rich! Whatever.
There’s an animistic element to what the “woke” ideology is all about. There is no concrete evidence to any of their socio/scientific claims.
“Animistic thinking consists essentially in trying by some sort of hocus-pocus to transfer your own wishes into the external world, and so get them realized. It is emotional and ceremonial and soon becomes institutionalized…” ~ Max Eastman
We see what happens when you allow this kind of thinking to become “official.”
Democratic Socialism: The Endgame
Democratic socialism’s endgame isn’t just economic meddling: it’s electoral sabotage, whether via Bolshevik-era propaganda, Hegelian compromise, or performative pearl-clutching. This version of the Dialectic continues its death march toward absolute collectivism: thesis (capitalist excess), antithesis (socialist push-back), synthesis (collectivist colossus).
Despite what may be the democratic socialist’s best intentions, this “ideal” is a deadly misnomer. A totalitarian’s wet dream.
