Socialism’s False Prophets Eat the Liberal Democratic Mind.
Posted by Ed Folsom, August 30, 2026.
My last post discussed Ryzard Legutko’s observations, in The Demon in Democracy – Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, of parallel totalitarian tendencies in Marxism and liberal democracy.
Even granting liberal democracy’s totalitarian tendencies, how did we get to socialism?
But why should those tendencies in liberal democracy lead some liberal-democrats to eagerly embrace socialism? After all, during the entire Cold War, liberal-democracy was said to be superior to communism largely because it relied on the free market, not on a centrally planned command economy and the shortages that come with it.
Some liberal-democrats must now conclude that our economic system is another area of human activity that requires a deep level of state control for human emancipation. “People are being oppressed and exploited by the capitalist class and need to be emancipated – Socialism!” And unlike Marxism/communism, which is based exclusively on building a socialist economic system, liberal-democratic doctrine is not necessarily wedded to capitalism. It would be possible for liberal democracy to embrace socialism and remain doctrinally intact, except for the freedom part. But, as Rousseau’s idea of forced freedom demonstrates, liberal democracy has the capacity to invert the freedom part completely.
Liberal democracy’s adherents might be led to conclude that humankind can’t be emancipated unless the state reforms human consciousness to eliminate “divisive” non-liberal-democratic thoughts from everyone’s minds. It should be no surprise if its adherents also conclude that human emancipation requires state control of all aspects of the economic system, beginning with who owns the means of production. But how would a campaign to lead liberal-democrats to this conclusion be conducted? What would cause them to flip from the Cold-War position on free markets and human freedom to the opposite position, that socialism represents emancipation? We have seen the campaign.
The first step is to rhetorically place free market capitalism outside liberal democracy, to make people believe that capitalism is antithetical to liberal democracy’s ideals. Remember, like Marxists, liberal-democrats believe in reforming thought by controlling language. And people who believe that all of reality is a construct typically want to be the ones who construct it.
Clearly, liberal democracy claims to stand against oppression and exploitation (originally from overbearing rulers, kings). If greedy capitalists and capitalism are exploiting and oppressing the masses, that makes capitalists and capitalism liberal democracy’s enemies. A relentless rhetorical campaign must be mounted against “systemic capitalist oppression.” If the oppression is systemic, the system itself is the problem. Mere adjustments and tweaks won’t do.
Also, there are wealth disparities inherent in capitalism. Capitalism relies on large pools of collected capital, and capitalism respects private property. Where large pools of capital exist, there are individuals who own large pools of wealth. No matter that capitalism has raised the wealth of entire societies to a level where the poor are vastly better off than ever before. Wealth disparities are unequal, which is undemocratic. Capitalism produces wealth inequality, and nothing is more sacred in liberal democracy than equality.
Now we should see capitalism as systemically undemocratic; as oppression, exploitation, and inequality manifest. The problem is capitalism itself. It must be destroyed.
But why socialism? Because the rhetorical campaign for socialism always presents a binary choice. We can have capitalism, an anti-democratic system that is systemically oppressive, exploitative and unequal, or we can have socialism, with its true democracy that is anti-oppression, anti-exploitation, and anti-inequality.
In this construction, capitalism is anti-liberal democracy. It stands against liberal democracy’s main tenets. The rhetorical inversion is complete and the righteous path unquestionable — Because not capitalism, socialism!
The only thing left is for the masses to internalize it.
This is not inevitable.
The United States of America operates in accordance with liberal democratic principles. At this point, most Americans have not bought into the totalitarian tendencies of liberal democracy discussed by Ryszard Legutko and my last post, or into the growing trend that demonizes capitalism and praises socialism. Totalitarian tendencies don’t have to mean totalitarian destiny.
Most Americans are still in favor of a capitalist, free market economy. They reject the interference in their lives that liberal democracy’s totalitarian leanings bring. But a disturbing level of totalitarian-tendency-buy-in is occurring among registered Democrats, 58% of whom have a favorable or very favorable view of socialism and 50% of whom view capitalism either unfavorably or very unfavorably according to recent polling. That’s a lot of people.
Liberal democracy’s totalitarian tendencies are experiencing growing, although not yet majority, support among Americans as a whole. There’s still hope for us to kill the totalitarian socialist beast. But if a majority of Americans were ever to succeed in bringing socialism here, we would face the same problems every country has ever faced where private property was seized and ownership of the means of production was placed in public hands.
Why are the college-educated young so drawn to socialism?
Without a free marketplace with producers pursuing private profit, workers deciding what wage they are willing to work for, and prices set in line with buyers’ decisions about what they need to buy, what they want to buy, and what they are willing to pay, all of it has to be determined by someone else. Planners must decide. And there are not now and will never be a group of planners who can know enough to effectively replace those functions of the free market. Still, someone would be called upon to do it. Who?
Fans of socialism might believe they are the ones who will be called upon, because of their level of education. How ego-flattering that would be, especially to those who believe that capitalism isn’t giving them what they deserve, to imagine themselves calling the shots as architects of a new regime or even staffing its bureaucracy using the enlightened views they gained earning the college degrees that they believe capitalism undervalues. Plus, socialism promises to take what the “greedy capitalists” have stolen and give it back to them.
Leftmost liberal democracy flatters the egos of the educated class, who tend to believe they know what must be known to achieve an equitable, democratic, just society, in which capitalism is abolished, and educated, expert planners and bureaucrats design and run an equitable socialist economy. This idea of socialism elevates its adherents to a level above the un-knowing. It confers both a sense of personal virtue and of guilt-free privilege. Even though we will all be equal in socialism, some, as George Orwell put it, will be “more equal than others,” in privilege as in ability and need.
And this, I suspect, explains the disproportionate popularity of liberal democracy’s leftmost totalitarian tendencies among the college educated young. Many believe they are the right ones to do socialism right: the ones the world has been waiting for (plus all the free stuff). This time it won’t be like it was in the U.S.S.R., or the Eastern European people’s democracies, or China, or North Korea, or Cuba, or Kampuchea. As someone who popped up recently on my LinkedIn feed put it, in an advocacy piece for socialism:
“We know more now. We know more about patriarchy, racism, colonialism, disability, queer liberation, ecological collapse, government abuse, and corporate power. So the question isn’t whether we should recreate somebody else’s revolution exactly as they imagined it 150 years ago. The question is whether we’re finally ready to build something better with everything humanity has learned since then.”
Was that written by a Marxist advocating socialism or a liberal-democrat advocating socialism? No matter: it all comes to the same thing. The economic system of socialism cannot exist unless all aspects of life are controlled by the political system that is necessary to run a socialist economy. It’s inherently totalitarian. The problem is systemic.
The founders of this great nation were liberal-democrats, but they were anti-totalitarian liberal-democrats. They instituted a republican form of government designed to promote the flourishing of individuals largely by minimizing government interference in people’s lives. “No kings” for real, not in the hyper-performative street theater sense.
Convincing people that restraining government from deep intermeddling in the lives of individuals is oppressive, because it protects greedy capitalist systems of oppression, is a neat trick. It’s a trick that asks us to give power to government to intermeddle in everything, because, this time, the show will be run by a superior and noble breed, with the superior know-how to do it right. We only need to hand them the political power.
But humans are not a noble species, and the promoters of socialism are not a noble breed. There are no selfless, magnanimous humanists seeking political power solely to rescue you from your oppressors.
Beware of these false prophets.
