his is
Victor Davis Hanson writing about why so many of America’s youth are increasing embracing socialism. The system of organisation that delivers equality of poverty at the point of a gun and has already led the the
death of over 100 million; not counting the latest from Venezuela.
While this is about America, the parallels are not too far from Australia:
One force multiplier of socialist unrest has been an absence of upward mobility, coupled with a
superficial sense of being educated. Today’s college graduate may feel that while his education has led to few marketable skills, it has at least taught him the innate inequalities of American capitalism which, in his eyes, explain better than his poor choices why he is degreed but otherwise poor and in debt. College-educated Americans collectively owe an estimated $1.5 trillion in unpaid student loans, and
many despair of ever repaying the huge sums spent to collect noncompetitive degrees.
and:
Many young people claim to be socialists but are instead simply angry that they were unable to afford a home, a new car, or other nice things, or start a family in their “woke” urban neighborhoods during a decade of muted economic growth (2008–17) and high unemployment. In college, they were not warned about the dangers of statism and collectivism, nor given the skills to look at the world empirically.
The combination of nonmarketable degrees and skills with burdensome debt helped alter an entire generation’s customs, habits, and thinking.One more:
Popular culture and contemporary politics have more or less
institutionalized a model of citizenship quite unlike previous visions that were based on the autonomous family. The new
American archetype apparently is a single, urban youth, presumably well-educated and glib but dependent on government subsidies and suffering from arrested development. His environment stresses the attractions of government dependency and the alleged lack of upward mobility through the private sector. This view is expansively depicted as the liberation of an everywoman or
everyman through cradle-to-grave government reliance—a person thus in little need of marriage, religion, or community and family support.
And finally:
Socialist revolutions do not
sprout organically in so-called good times. Instead they are the children of wars, depressions, and natural and manmade upheavals. They are facilitated by “never let a crisis go to waste” opportunism—turmoil during which socialist activists emerge as prophets to condemn systems of free enterprise and constitutional government.
Leaders like Fidel Castro, Vladimir Lenin, or Leon Trotsky rarely rise from among the poor. They often have just enough education to connect their own unhappiness with cosmic forces but not enough to explain their own unhappiness in ways that transcend their own self-obsessions.
