According to a recent Gallup poll, the majority of Democrats have a positive view of socialism. With the rise of Bernie Sanders as the clear and obvious front runner for the Democratic nomination, it seems Americans are starting to warm to the idea of a more socialist America. But America must never become socialist, lest we abandon what makes our country awful.
If America embraces “Venezuelan-style” socialism, a term we all know the meaning of that I will refuse to explain, make no mistake — America will no longer be the land of the free that all of us wealthy white people know and love. Just take a second and think about it: healthcare that woefully lags behind the rest of the world, crumbling infrastructure, a corrupt and incompetent electoral process. And now, stop thinking about America, and start thinking about what it’s like in Venezuela. Under socialism, Americans might have to ration their medicine — and not just their insulin, like we currently do. Americans will be forced to spend hours waiting in long lines at the hospital, instead of spending that time with your family, huddled around the phone with a Kaiser Permanente customer service rep, as you try to understand why you were billed three grand for an x-ray.
Americans need to understand that a socialist government, while sounding good in theory, would ultimately result in totalitarianism. A socialist government could use its power to spy on its citizens, listening to their phone conversations, reading their email, even watching them through their laptop cameras. In America, our intelligence agencies can only do those things if they lie to Congress about it first. Our Founding Fathers created this illusion of checks and balances to keep every facet of our government equally unaccountable. If that feels undemocratic or authoritarian to you, know that capitalism allows for private tech companies, like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, to sell you the home assistants that make our surveillance state function. A socialist government would merely invade your privacy, forgoing all that juicy profit! The American free-market creates competition, and competition pushes these tax-dodging corporations to be better, so they can do worse by you, the public. And as we all know, private industry is far better at infringing upon your rights than the government.
A socialist government just can’t effectively govern — one only needs to look to Venezuela, the only socialist country I can think of. In socialist Venezuela, there is a question about who the rightful president is — is it the man the people elected, or is it the puppet our government is desperately trying to install? Who can tell? It’s total chaos brought on by decades of American imperialism down in socialist Venezuela. Luckily, in America, we know exactly who our president is — it’s the man who was just declared innocent in a sham trial with no witnesses and a jury predisposed toward acquittal. No confusion, no instability — the president is the rapist reality TV show host. And yes, while it may be concerning that Trump is in lockstep with the legislative branch that was intended to limit his power, he is not a king. The ever-expanding scope of the executive branch ensures he has far more power than any 18th-century monarch could ever dream of — exactly as our Founding Fathers intended.
You will not find freedom in a socialist country, and it’s our freedoms that make America great. By no rational account, we are the freest country in history, and we have armies all over the world losing wars every day to defend those freedoms. The freedom for your landlord to charge you whatever they want. The freedom to pay back your exorbitant student loans over however many decades you decide. The freedom to walk into a grocery store and select one of the hundred different brands of cereal made by one of two global conglomerates. The freedom to vote for whichever candidate the DNC wants you to, if the iPhone app their idiot stepson designed somehow manages to function. And it’s that last freedom, the right to participate in our democracy, that’s the most important. In America, we believe that anyone with money can participate in our corrupt political process. One billion dollars equals one vote, no matter who you are.
So young people, people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, the working class, and anyone else in the overwhelming majority who are considering voting for Bernie Sanders — mark my words. America is not, and never will be, a socialist country. We will become Nazis before we ever allow that.