(By Old White Truck is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)
There's a recurring theme in American science fiction where the country loses its way, endures some horrible but cleansing disaster, and then rediscovers the blessings of liberty. You'll find it in Robert Heinlein's "Future History" stories, where the Crazy Years -- a period of rapid technological advances, decaying social norms, and mass psychosis -- leads to the backlash of a religious dictatorship. The Prophets regime is eventually toppled by a liberty-loving group dedicated to individual rights. The theme is even more pronounced in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, where a socialist regime puts the country into another Great Depression, only worse. The country's capitalists had gone on a secret strike against the regime, but return in the end to bring the country back to its constitutional roots. A more recent example is John Ringo's Centurion, in which war and rapid global cooling cause Americans to jettison much of the big, stupid government which had failed to deal well with either crisis.
Even popular zombie TV show "The Walking Dead" treads similar ground, as our heroes try to carve out safe spaces where they can be left alone from the predations of the undead and living would-be tyrants.
But then you see headlines like this one -- "70% Of Democrats Say Socialism Would Be Good For America" -- and it makes you wonder how close we are to making science fiction into science fact.
The Daily Caller's writeup continues:
Just 25% of Democrats said some form of socialism would be “a bad thing for the country as a whole,” according to the survey, which Gallup released Monday.Among Republicans, 84% of respondents said that embracing some form of socialism would be bad for the U.S.. A plurality of independents, 48%, said the same.Gallup’s writeup of the survey did not note that it showed 70% of Democrats supporting some form of socialism, which was included in the full results.
The report also notes that "While socialism is popular among Democratic voters, a majority of voters overall, 51%, say embracing it would be bad for the country."
51% is not what anyone would call a comfortable margin. After 50-plus years of the Marxist "long march through the institutions" and the widespread failure of public education to inculcate American values in the Millennial generation (the two issues are deeply intertwined), we've reached a point where we might never be more than an election away from embracing the murderous politics of envy and economic failure.
So perhaps the sci-fi authors had it right, and we're fated to endure some horrible, self-inflicted calamity. But I don't believe in fate. If any country, if any people, can learn and reinvent and avoid the worst... it's this country and this people. And if you want to know the antidote to Millennials' muddle-headed embrace of socialism, I'd like to introduce you to a couple of tough-minded Gen Z kids I'm raising... and millions more, just like them.
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