Glenn Reynolds: Socialism not as hot as its spokesman

Socialism is all the rage among America’s youth. Or is it?

The evidence in favor of that proposition is that Bernie Sanders — despite being considerably older than Hillary Clinton, who is herself no spring chicken — is doing vastly better among young voters. Sanders, who has almost always identified as a socialist, is nonetheless running for the Democratic nomination.

(Sanders is, he says, a “democratic socialist.” A socialist is someone who wants politicians to decide who gets what; a “democratic socialist” wants the politicians to at least stand for election first.)

The result has been for many smart people, like Joel Kotkin, to write that Millennials are heeding the ”siren call of socialism.” And socialism does have a siren call — essentially, the promise that if you vote for socialists, they’ll take stuff away from other people and give it to you. Since many people would rather have free stuff given to them in the name of “fairness” than have to work to get their own stuff, it’s never hard to round up votes with that approach. As the saying goes, a government that robs Peter to pay Paul can count on getting Paul’s vote.

Still, it’s concerning, because the history of the 20th century was basically that of the swath of destruction left across the globe by socialist ideas, from the international socialism of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union to the national socialism of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers' Party.

Socialism usually starts with talk of “fairness,” but it generally ends in tyranny and poverty. As Alan Kors wrote back in 2003: “No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: ‘No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into.’”

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Nowadays, of course, the horrors of socialism are largely forgotten. As Nate Silver writes:

"Bernie Sanders proudly describes himself as a 'socialist' (or more commonly, as a 'democratic socialist'). To Americans of a certain age, this is a potential liability. I’m just old enough (38) to have grown up during the Cold War, a time when 'socialist' did not just mean 'far left' but also implied something vaguely un-American. If you’re older than me, you may have even more acutely negative associations with 'socialism' and may see it as a step on the road to communism. If you’re a few years younger than me, however, you may instead associate ‘socialism’ with the social democracies of Northern Europe, which have high taxes and large welfare states. Sweden may not be your cup of tea, but it isn’t scary in the way the USSR was to people a generation ago.

"Indeed, views of socialism are highly correlated with a voter’s age. According to a May 2015 YouGov poll, conducted just before Sanders launched his campaign, a plurality of voters aged 18 to 29 had a favorable view of socialism. But among voters 65 and older, just 15% viewed socialism favorably, to 70% unfavorably."

And even the Nordic democracies resent the term “socialist.” Denmark’s Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen even took exception to Sanders’ characterization of the Danes as socialists, commenting: “I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy." Rasmussen conceded that “the Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens,” but he insisted that it is “a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.” Sweden, too, has become more free-market than it was in the 1960s.

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Want real socialism? Look at Venezuela, an oil-exporting nation that is now dead broke even as the family of its socialist dictator, Hugo Chavez, reportedly somehow inherited billions at his death in 2013. Redistribution of wealth often seems to involve redistributing most of it to the people on top of the socialist pyramid.

But there’s some good news, according to Silver: Even though young Americans say they like socialism, they also say that they don’t like redistribution of wealth. Writes Silver: “It’s possible that Sanders will trigger a shift toward more support for economic redistribution in the future, but there hasn’t been one yet.” The percentage of young Americans who support redistributing wealth is almost the same as it was in 1996.

So since you can’t have socialism without redistribution of wealth (with a large part being retained by the redistributors, of course) then what’s this all about? Silver notes that those young Americans supporting Bernie Sanders have a lot in common with the young Americans who support another older figure with heterodox economic views, libertarian Ron Paul: “What’s distinctive about both the Sanders and Ron Paul coalitions is that they consist mostly of people who do not feel fully at home in the two-party system but are not part of historically underprivileged groups. On the whole, young voters lack political influence. But a young black voter might feel more comfortable within the Democratic coalition, which black political leaders have embraced, while a young evangelical voter might see herself as part of a wave of religious conservatives who long ago found a place within the GOP. A young, secular white voter might not have a natural partisan identity, however, while surrounded by relatively successful peers.”

So at this point, the enthusiasm for Sanders may be as much a search for something different as it is an endorsement of Sanders’ 1930s-era economic views. Given the failure of the two party establishments, it’s not entirely surprising that young people are looking elsewhere. Their votes are up for grabs, for those who are willing and able to offer something different. For the sake of the country, let’s hope those votes are won by people who are able to offer something different, and constructive, at the same time.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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