Why Socialism, and Why Now?

‘Socialist!” is no longer a McCarthyite slur.

Rather, the fresh celebrity “Squad” of newly elected identity-politics congresswomen — Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) — often either claim to be socialists or embrace socialist ideas. A recent Harris poll showed that about half of so-called millennials would like to live in a socialist country.

Five years ago, septuagenarian Senator Bernie Sanders (D., Vt.) was considered an irrelevant lone socialist in the U.S. Senate — Vermont’s trademark contribution to cranky quirkiness.

But in 2016, Sanders’s improbable Democratic primary run almost knocked off front-runner Hillary Clinton, even as socialist governments were either imploding or stagnating the world over.

After Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 general election, Sanders is back, running as a socialist warhorse, promising endless amounts of free stuff, with those promises suddenly being taken seriously.