Newsletter -  September 2026

A very important concept: The redistribution of wealth and not the creation of wealth. There is something to always remember in politics. Bad ideas never go away. They keep showing up in some form or other. One of the most enduring ideas is the concept of socialism. Currently, we have democratic socialists running for office.  Let’s take a look at some history.

Lenin was the leader of the Bolsheviks in Russia. In 1917 with very little pushback from the government the Bolsheviks overthrew the czarist government and by the use of propaganda won the hearts and minds of the Russian people. What followed was a great deal of propaganda and retribution. Lenin truly believed that people were so rotten that killing them was progressive. The capitalist system was destroyed. The Party was the replacement.  Along came labor camps. When Lenin died in 1924 Stalin came into power. Under Stalin the gulag came into existence and millions died. The capitalist system was destroyed and the Party was the replacement. 

By 1920, all of these events and actions produced massive famine and a living nightmare for the Russian people. The country was now known as the Soviet Socialist Republic. Socialism rose in other countries and a new international movement was born.

In 1949, Mao Tse Sung took over China and the People’s Republic of China appeared on the world stage. Mao referred to the country as the Iron Rice Bowl. The price for food was submission. By 1957, Mao lead The Great Leap Forward. One half Billion people moved into the People’s Communes. Private property did not exist. The results of these communes was high production costs, inferior products and much human misery.

By the late 1970’s 50% of the world population was under some type of socialism. Ronald Reagan was able to articulate freedom and a democratic system of government. The collapse of the eastern block of socialist nations started in Poland when 99 of 100 seats were won by the Solidarity party. Poland’s actions started the collapse of the eastern block of communist governments. In the western hemisphere, Hugo Chavez became the leader of a socialist government in Venezuela. His government maintained the power and coercion necessary to keep a socialist government in power. 

Currently, in the United States we have a revival of Democratic Socialists. They are running for national office across America. The focus seems to be redistribution of wealth and not the creation of wealth. 

Now, the question. How is it that so many Americans believe that our system is bad and we need to change to a socialist system? A great deal has been written as to how beliefs are changed. 

Yuri Bezmenov was a former KGB propaganda officer who defected to the West in 1970. He described a four-stage process of ideological subversion: demoralization, destabilization, crisis and normalization. He estimated the first stage would require 15 to 20 years which is roughly the time needed to educate one generation inside a corrupt academic framework. He states that by the time that generation reaches influential positions, no quantity of factual information can alter their perception of reality. They have been trained to consider inconvenient truths as hate speech, misinformation or the ravings of extremists. 

Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) came to the same conclusion. Rand identified the foundational error of collectivism as the systematic subordination of the individual to the group, or reason to emotion and of merit to manufactured need. Societies that reward dependence and penalize achievement will produce more of the former and less of the latter.

Socialism has a track record that is not a winner. Every serious experiment in states running the economy has produced the same result: scarcity, corruption and the misery that appears when bureaucrats manage enterprises they do not understand. Adding the word democratic to socialism is roughly equivalent to labeling questionable food health food. Marketing may improve but the product is no better.

Let’s look at today’s Socialists in the United States. They are so similar to the historical figures of socialism. Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez: none of these people came from the working class. They were born into the bourgeoisie they wanted to get rid of. The pattern is the same today. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all grew up in middle-class households. 

Because life in America was not the same as life in Russia or China, Students for a Democratic Society wrote a statement titled the Port Huron statement. Because the old left of Marxist orthodoxy and proletariat rule was dead in the United States and devotion to Moscow didn’t work in the affluent United States there had to be a different approach. The 1962 Port Huron statement called for the emergence of a “new left.” “We are people of this generation bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities. The economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.” 

The commitment to socialism was very clear. “The economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.”

The university and not the factory was the crucible of revolution. The attitude was that intellectually superior people would lead the poor working class inferior people away from the complacency of affluence and into the land of socialism. It has been about 60 years that the “intellectually superior” have become what the 1962 statement envisioned. It is a group of the credentialed leading where the unread refused to tread. This is a life where socialism isn’t built but debated into existence. Failures can simply be argued about. They are never solved.

The socialism of today does not banish capitalism. It does enact heavy taxes on free markets which will fund utopian promises and maintain the affluence that many of our present American socialists regard as their right. A prime example is New York City and Seattle. Study the current group of Democrat Socialist candidates. It will be very interesting to see how closely they adhere to the 1962 statement. 

References: 

Port Huron and Today’s Socialism: J.T. Young  Wall Street Journal

American Thinker: The Long Game to End America – 3/2026