Daniel Shuchman
WSJ, Aug. 5, 2025
“Mr. Kors’s warnings about education have proved, if anything, understated. No wonder free rent and profitless prosperity resonate with a generation that knows little of collectivist calamities, or of what made unprecedented social and economic progress in capitalistic societies possible.”
Why has socialism remained resilient as a political ideal? How can a socialist candidate be the front-runner in the race for mayor of America’s largest and ostensibly most capitalist city? Other candidates across the country have embraced the label, often softened by a soothing “democratic” prefix. What was once a disqualifying ideological association in the U.S. can make a candidate seem cool to many voters, especially young ones.
More than two decades ago, a historian of political thought predicted that, notwithstanding the triumph of free enterprise, “it will not be difficult . . . for socialism to change its now quaint name a bit” and revive government economic control into a newly compelling “political, economic, and ultimately cultural agenda.”
Since American children and college students weren’t being taught what happened under actual socialist regimes, it was only a matter of time before simplistic slogans attacking private property, billionaires and “profits before people,” would be successfully revived by a smooth-talking demagogue.
In a 2002 paper and a 2003 speech for the Atlas Society, Alan Charles Kors, now an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania, foretold how and why this could happen. ….SOURCE