â€˜Bubblegum Socialismâ€™ is no laughing matter

By Bob Barr

There is a video of Bernie Sanders and his wife on their 1988 honeymoon in the USSR, in which a shirtless Bernie is shown singing â€œThis Land Is Your Landâ€ with a bunch of drunk communists. It is a vignette apparently welcomed nowadays by the Senator from Vermont, who proudly represents true, â€œold schoolâ€ socialism.

Sandersâ€™ doctrine is a far cry from the â€œbubblegum socialismâ€ eagerly embraced by many 21st century Millennials, including the Congresswoman from New Yorkâ€™s 14th congressional district; but it must be taken just as seriously, if not more so. Todayâ€™s socialism is no laughing matter.

Socialism is socialism; and in whatever form is completely at odds with free political and economic enterprise that are at the core of our system of government. This holds true whether one considers the dry and pedantic old-school variety hawked by Sanders, or the bouncy, bubble-gum iteration gleefully spouted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

And while it is easy to dismiss the latter, with its inane talk of â€œfarting cowsâ€ or â€œgarbageâ€ capitalism, we do so at our peril; for the appeal of such nonsense is finding an easy mark in much of todayâ€™s American youth.

With socialist Venezuela visibly dying under the burden of a dictatorial socialist government, we might properly expect that â€œsocialismâ€ should be getting trounced in public opinion polls; yet the concept continues to draw voters to its siren song, especially younger ones.

At the most basic level, this phenomenon is actually not difficult to comprehend. For more than two generations, Americans have come of age being told that government is the solution to every one of societyâ€™s ills (real or perceived). The process of turning to government to solve every problem faced by the citizenry has created the fertile breeding ground in which todayâ€™s Millennials embrace precisely what this is — socialism.

Dismissing the antics of Ocasio-Cortez with snarky rebuttals or superficial jokes misses this key point. She is not the problem. She is merely the face of the far deeper malady infecting American culture and Western civilization generally. It is a cultural problem an inch deep but a thousand miles wide.

Notions of socialism now reach far into our political system and the American business sector; its tentacles have entwined the entertainment industry, and it has sucked the lifeblood from our once-outstanding educational system.

Dealing effectively with socialist tropes like â€œcapitalism is irredeemableâ€ or that incremental change to the status quo is simply shifting around â€œgarbage,â€ requires far more than the superficial sound bites many in the GOP throw back at socialismâ€™s minions like Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Kamala Harris (who claims not to be a â€œdemocratic socialistâ€ but refuses to define even what that means to her).



