In the past week I found myself both denouncing and defending socialism, which is rather absurd if you think about it. Railing for or against socialism seems about as sensible as becoming intensely passionate about the Whig Party or any other half-dead political philosophy.
A friend (or at least I hope she’s still a friend after reading this) invited me to a fundraising keg party to support some Trotskyist socialist group; which seems like a good first step of a proletariat revolution. It seems a like a perfect Saturday night. We could sit around and get wasted while railing against the evils of capitalism. You’ll have to excuse me when I say it sounds a bit daft.
I actually found myself agreeing with hardcore conservative writer, Dinesh D’Souza, when he said that true socialism only exists on college campuses. His thinking is that most countries that were once considered staples of socialism and communism has at the very least evolved into systems of social democracy. And I say evolved because governments have to face political evolution in order to survive, and pure socialism is obviously not the strongest political system because it’s not conducive to growth and progression.
The reason why socialist ideals thrive on campuses is because many fresh minded students get that granule of information and supplant their identity with that revolutionary nugget. And it is revolutionary, but only of the mind. It’s the same for those “revolutionaries” who sport the Che Guevara t-shirts and necklaces. They know all about revolution and government tyranny, but you won’t likely see them doing guerrilla warfare for the sake of some indigenous people because they don’t sell Winstons and Pabst Blue Ribbon in the jungle.
But on the flip side of that I found myself defending aspects of socialism to one of my conservative friends. I don’t really know that he has a beef with socialism, but he argues against the idea of universal healthcare because he says it’s a socialist program. I don’t really know that universal healthcare derives from socialism, but it wouldn’t matter if it did. Just because true socialism isn’t practical doesn’t mean that some aspects can’t work. As Michael Moore points out in his documentary Sicko, we have plenty of institutions that are already run by the government. So if all socialist institutions are bad then I guess the United States has been dealing in evil for many years now. I’ll have to remind myself to look outside tomorrow and see what pinko delivers my mail.
If there were ever a middle ground to the silly argument it would probably be within the realm of democracy. I mean the socialist college kids can still claim to be socialists without the threat of getting shanked with an ice pick like Trotsky did, and the conservatives luck out because they still get to complain about nonsense issues. It’s a win-win situation where we can live our lives without the threat of a government taking away our right to be simple minded and petty.
