https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/what-to-do-about-rebirth-of-socialism/Where it came from and how to stop it.
‘The most important political event of the twentieth century,” wrote Irving Kristol in 1976, “is not the crisis of capitalism but the death of socialism.” Plenty of self-described Marxist and socialist regimes existed throughout the world, Kristol recognized. It was rather the ideas behind such regimes that had reached a moral and intellectual endpoint. Nor was this passing away entirely to be cheered. “For with the passing of the socialist ideal,” Kristol went on, “there is removed from the political horizon the one alternative to capitalism that was rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in the Western civilization which emerged from that tradition.”
The inheritors of the socialist ideal were totalitarian states on one hand and stagnant social democracies on the other. By the end of the twentieth century, these too had passed. China (and later Vietnam) decided that to get rich is glorious, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact states collapsed into squabbling nationalities and kleptocracies, the socialist autocracies that had depended on Moscow for support receded into irrelevance. What Kristol called “a dwindling band of socialist fideists” remained behind, the last remnant of a dwindling faith. “People who persist in calling themselves socialist, while decrying the three quarters of the world that has proclaimed itself socialist, and who can find a socialist country nowhere but in their imaginings — such people are anachronisms.”
Not anymore. If the death of the socialist idea was the most important political event of the last century, then the rebirth of this ideal must rank high in significance in the current one. Just as nationalism has reasserted itself on the political right, socialism has grown in force on the left. In the 21st century, the two ideologies are estranged and antagonistic twins, paired in Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The Democratic victory in 2018 has elevated socialism to a height it has not reached in the United States in more than a century. Only in recent weeks, however, have defenders of democratic capitalism become aware of how great the socialist challenge really is. Only now are we beginning to formulate a response.
