At the close of the 1973 film Soylent Green, detective Frank Thorn discovers a new class of barbaric corporate corruption. The titular company has claimed its green wafers provide the impoverished population of a future dystopian America with protein derived from ocean plankton. But following a putrid whiff of clues, the dogged Thorn makes his way to the Soylent production site to find — shock, horror! — the main ingredient in the company’s new Soylent Green product is actually people.
I was obliged to recall this film whilst reading Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s recent expose in New York on the rad new group of 20 and 30-something comrades taking over the far-left wing of the Democratic Party. Entitled “Pinkos Have More Fun,” Zuylen-Wood’s article features a bevy of hip New York “kids” who feel really free loving on socialism. They’re loud, they’re proud, they’re pumped to burn Capitalism down.
Well, Socialism is having a moment. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stars in the latest round of headlines, but the stunning rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 Democratic Primary should have made AOC less surprising, more expected. It was clear three years ago that huge swaths of the voting public were done with the Establishment, a fact no one on the Republican side was allowed to miss. It was in part a rejection of D.C. politics-as-usual that gave the country candidate Trump long before he made it to the White House.
And it would appear the traditional wing of the Democratic Party is now coming in for its own Red awakening. What young socialists take issue with, according to Zuylen-Wood’s telling, is everything. They don’t like private companies, they don’t like private health insurance, they are not here for technocratic government maneuvering, they’re not interested in civil discourse. They despise virtue signaling by the powerful, especially from “liberal” voices (Chelsea Clinton gets name-checked specifically). They are even hostile to economic reality as it is understood by the world’s financial systems.
What young socialists take issue with, according to Zuylen-Wood’s telling, is everything.
|
Here’s Zuylen-Wood quoting Will Menaker, host of the podcast Chapo Trap House, as he advises an audience of young socialists on what to say when asked how they’ll pay for their brave new economy: “All the numbers are correct. All this is true about the deficit. But, fuck the deficit because it’s not real and it doesn’t matter.” To quote a more current NY detective, “Cool, cool, cool, cool.”
It is, in fact, Menaker who dropped a reference to the above-mentioned 1973 film in a crowd that may or may not have known precisely what he meant when he suggested billionaires could be transformed into millionaires, or perhaps simply turned into “Soylent.” I’d say it was an example of macabre humor, but maybe I know a little too much about the French Revolution. (Of interest: Jacobin is reportedly a leading publication amongst these fun-loving Pinkos, which may help us understand how the suggestion that “guillotines” take Amazon’s vacated spot in Queens came up during a mock dating game. Looks like these rockin’ socialists are interested in soul mates and 18th-century Gallic execution.)
There is a religious fervency to this kind of political organizing, as Columbia University professor and linguist John McWhorter has aptly categorized it. This type of engagement has ruled on Twitter for several years now. Primarily driven by college-educated, young-ish people, the callout crowd wholly abandons the notion of treating individuals as humans — unanimously fallible, unanimously worthy of some measure of compassion.
The goal of a #cancel campaign is not to promote learning and growth. It is to make an example of the offender. Think of Kevin Hart, the Covington teenagers, the brutal world of YA book marketing and even Instagram knitters. The individual ceases to deserve the benefit of the doubt, or even a modicum of baseline dignity. (Zuylen-Wood notes that after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came under criticism for tweeting a sympathetic message on John McCain’s death, she stayed mum when President George H.W. Bush passed away.)
If you’re a hip young socialist and you’re convinced the United States was built on and for nothing other than oppression and white supremacy, then why not run down anyone who stands in the way of your march towards Utopia? Individual human life becomes cheap and easily replaced, especially compared with the glorious future of shared production and zero bigotry. That world is possible, right? It’s just awaiting a few young, motivated, mostly white, college-educated media savants to raise the hammer and sickle and bring the rest of the ignorant herd into line.
Zuylen-Wood notes that after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came under criticism for tweeting a sympathetic message on John McCain’s death, she stayed mum when President George H.W. Bush passed away.
|
There is, of course, a competing vision of what socialism in action looks like. That vision is based not in the future but in the 20th and 21st centuries past and present, in places where socialism has been given a go. Every country where it’s been implemented — from the eastern European nations of the former U.S.S.R. to China to Cuba to Venezuela — has necessarily involved mass imprisonment of dissidents, reeducation camps, widespread disruption and terror, and in the case of the U.S.S.R. and China, millions upon millions dead from state-sanctioned murder or state-sanctioned starvation.
Today, in China, hundreds of thousands of the Muslim minority are being forced into internment camps and onto mandatory labor lines in Xinjiang. “Dangerous” Muslim ideology can’t be allowed to flourish in a one-party state. Political dissidents are regularly arrested and jailed in Cuba. Venezuela — the wealthiest nation in South America within living memory of my fellow Millennials — is now plagued by hunger, with 90% of households reporting they lack enough money to buy food. Ah, Chavismo. What went wrong?
It’s always struck me as arrogant and, dare I say a tad bit racist, for white Americans to conclude they alone know what Socialism actually means, and they alone will implement it properly. We are to believe these chic Che enthusiasts will avoid the pitfalls of their ideological kin in those aspirational but misguided countries… countries where white people aren’t really around. They’re special here; they won’t need a state police to carry out their vision. Right.
They might argue they’re looking more at Sweden or Canada as models, which would be a fair point and deserves clarification. But Menaker may have given the game away when he mused about churning the bodies of ultra wealthy biz titans into bite-size wafer snacks. I suspect that if your guiding publication is entitled Jacobin, you are vibing more bloody revolution than docile Canadian politesse.
Perhaps the deeper issue is that even in a perfect economic system with an immaculate government to run it, if such a thing could be realized, people would still have problems. There would still be sickness and loss, heartbreak and loneliness, dreams deferred and dreams forever forestalled. That does not seem to have dawned on this latest crop of American socialists. Their fervor is truly of a religious nature, they are aspiring to more than what most actual religions are willing to promise these days. Sassy, white, and assertive, these young adults zealously believe their socialism will bring Heaven to Earth.
It won’t. Then what?