Feel the Bern? A lot of Millenials are at the moment without really understanding what socialism is all about, so Jonah Goldberg takes a swing at an explanation that seems plausible.
Goldberg says that Millenials are with the Bern because of a romantic, utopian impulse:
Writing in The Federalist, Emily Ekins and Joy Pullmann note that many of these young people think socialism is federally mandated niceness. A 2014 Reason-Rupe survey asked millennials to define socialism. They had in mind a more generous safety net, more kindness and, as one put it, more "being together."
Well there you have it! Never mind the failure of socialism wherever it has been tried, typically accompanied by the death of millions of people, and the self-evident inability of government to do pretty much anything quickly or well (even Millenials did not favor the government running Uber), it's just so, so about togetherness.
But in Goldberg reminds us that the roots of socialism were not in the relentless and cynical minds of dark Germans like Karl Marx but in French and English (Fabian socialism) romantics who were rebelling against the impersonal market forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution:
The first socialists were not economists or technocrats. They were romantics and nostalgists. They loathed the relentless logic of the market and its reward of merit and efficiency as judged by the marketplace.
They wanted to return to the imagined Eden of the noble savage and the state of nature. They wanted to live in a world of tribal brotherhood and mutual love. Long before the math of "scientific socialism" there were the emotions of socialism, both light and dark: egalitarianism and envy.
