Quotulatiousness

August 20, 2026

The Frankfurt School – The most destructive intellectual project of the 20th Century

Filed under: Books, Education, Europe, Germany, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

People tend to underestimate how influential intellectual movements can be, as they rarely get outside attention until they’re deeply entrenched in the university system. The Frankfurt School‘s damage record is unmatched by any other intellectual movement of the era:

Notable members of the Frankfurt School in Heidelberg, April 1964 at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Max Horkheimer is front left, Theodor W. Adorno front right, and Jürgen Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair. Siegfried Landshut is in the background left.
Photograph by Jeremy J. Shapiro via Wikimedia Commons.

The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century.

The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.

1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.

2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.

3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it. This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.

4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but “in its name”. Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.

5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.

6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.

7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere. The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.

The answer is not another theory. It is the thing the Frankfurt School most feared: the builder who simply builds, the scientist who follows the evidence, the father who transmits what was transmitted to him.

The deconstruction machine runs on the assumption that nothing is worth building.

Prove it wrong.

Tell the truth, have courage, and build.

August 12, 2026

“Hitler’s socialism wasn’t just an internal economic policy – it was the cause of the war”

Filed under: Economics, Germany, Government, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski explains why socialism — of the left (the Soviet Union) and the right (Nazi Germany) — was the economic driver that pushed Europe into war in 1939. German socialism (in one state) could only continue to grow by annexing resources and manufacturing capabilities from neighbouring states, and by August 1939 it was Poland’s turn:

Socialism was at the origin of the war. Not as a coincidence. As a necessity. The socialist economic model generates contradictions it cannot resolve internally – the calculation problem, the misallocation, the stagnation, the mounting failure. War is the exit. It provides the external enemy that explains the internal failure. It justifies the total mobilization the system always wanted. It consumes the surplus population the economy cannot employ. It redirects the resentment outward.

Does this remind you of anything?

The evidence is not subtle. The NSDAP program of 1920 reads like a standard socialist manifesto. The economic reality confirmed it – price controls, industrial planning, state allocation of raw materials, entrepreneurs reduced to government functionaries. Private property in name only. Mises called it Zwangswirtschaft – coercive economy. Hayek dedicated a chapter of The Road to Serfdom to the socialist roots of Nazism. Both writing from observation, not retrospect.

After 1945 the Soviet victors imposed their version and attached the capitalist label to every rival. Western textbooks followed. The lie became the curriculum.

The real divide has never been left versus right. It is collective control versus individual freedom. Once you place National Socialism correctly within the family of collectivisms, the political spectrum becomes legible – and the war becomes explicable.

When the system fails — and it always fails — it needs an enemy. The bigger the failure, the bigger the enemy required.

Imagine being Poland. Squeezed between two socialist systems, both searching for their enemy.

We were it.

August 11, 2026

The surging Democratic Socialists of America

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

J.D. Tuccille on the unlikely rise of the DSA faction within the Democratic party in time for the 2026 midterm elections:

Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary battle is only the latest by candidates affiliated with or adjacent to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Unlike many of the openly socialist officeholders and political hopefuls gaining traction in the Democratic Party, El-Sayed claims to be a capitalist, but his positions are indistinguishable from those of the left-wing figures he campaigns with, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), and podcaster Hasan Piker, who has aligned himself with both the Chinese government and Hamas.

As democratic socialists in general and the DSA in particular take over the Democratic Party, it’s worth examining the positions they take, the enemies they pick, and who supports them to see what they have in store for us as they seek to remake the country.

Young, Credentialed, and Unhappy Recruits

At a time when trust in higher education is sliding among Americans, the socialist surge is largely a project of young college graduates. El-Sayed “eked out his victory by winning young voters and highly educated voters”, finds a Washington Post analysis. That squares with a June Pew Research report that “Democrats who are White, younger or college-educated are more likely to view democratic socialists positively”. Credentialed but relatively low-income people make up the core of DSA recruitment.

Political analyst Nate Silver writes that “the sweet spot for the DSA” is “voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year”. Silver adds that “only 19 percent of Americans with bachelor’s degrees or higher had household incomes of $60K or below. The DSA rate is around twice that.” He puts this in the context of Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction hypothesis which argues that the country’s universities crank out too many credentialed graduates, with student loan debt attached to not-so-useful degrees, to be absorbed into the prestigious positions they believe they’re entitled to. The result is disillusionment and a search for somebody or something to blame.

That blame is falling on capitalism, American and western civilization in general, and Israel and Jews (the line between the people and the only majority-Jewish nation is inherently fuzzy, and “antizionism” has become a cover for bigotry the way the pseudoscientific term “antisemitism” repackaged old-fashioned Jew-hatred in the 19th century).

[…]

Socialists Revive Ancient Bigotry

DSA-aligned figures are not especially fond of the United States and its allies. It’s not difficult to find comments like New York socialist congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier’s quip: “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me”. But as a group, they especially despise the world’s only majority-Jewish state.

Michigan’s El-Sayed says he believes the Israeli government is as evil as the terrorist group Hamas, which launched the October 7 attacks, and calls it guilty of “apartheid” and “genocide”. The DSA last year adopted a resolution denouncing Zionism (the belief that Jews have the right to establish and maintain Israel) as “a racist, imperialist, settler-colonial project” and made belief that “Israel has a right to defend itself” an offense punishable by expulsion from the organization. Hasan Piker claimed and repeated that Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel. Colorado congressional candidate Melat Kiros declined to label as antisemitic a deadly firebombing attack on a Jewish rally in Boulder.

August 9, 2026

The drift toward socialism in the west

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Europe, Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m reminded of that line from Kipling: “And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire”, as most western countries have had plenty of opportunities to observe socialism in the wild, yet there’s always the chorus that it “wasn’t real socialism” and this time it’ll be great:

Socialism survives because it flatters the most powerful human instinct you have: the desire to believe that good intentions produce good outcomes.

The engine is pure motivated reasoning: not ignorance, not stupidity.

Venezuela collapsed from one of Latin America’s wealthiest economies into a country where citizens lost an average of 11 kilograms of body weight in 2017 because food disappeared. The Soviet Union murdered tens of millions in gulags and deliberately starved Ukraine in 1932-33. Cuba turned a middle-income Caribbean nation into a prison island. West and East Germany, North and South Korea. The pattern repeats, and yet the ideology never takes the blame.

Here’s why. Socialism’s defenders always move the goalposts. When the USSR fell, they said it wasn’t “real” socialism. When Venezuela imploded under Chavez and Maduro’s nationalizations, they blamed American sanctions. There is always an excuse, and that excuse always points away from the central planning mechanism itself.

Ludwig von Mises nailed this in 1920 in his essay on economic calculation. Without prices set by voluntary exchange, planners cannot allocate resources rationally. You get shortages and surpluses simultaneously, not because bureaucrats are evil, but because they are operating blind. The information simply does not exist in a form they can use.

Mises’s argument is uncomfortable in a specific way: it says the system cannot work regardless of who runs it. You cannot fix central planning by finding better central planners.

The real villain is the intellectual class, professors and politicians who build careers selling the promise of top-down coordination. They capture universities, media institutions, and government agencies, and they teach each new generation that the solution to failed socialism is more socialism.

Socialism survives because the people promoting it face zero personal cost when it fails. The Venezuelan peasant starves. The tenured professor in Boston gets a book deal.

That gap between who sells the idea and who pays for it is what keeps the whole rotten project alive.

Celina notes that a recent Cato Instutute report shows uncomfortably strong support for both socialism and communism in the youngest groups:

This summer, America celebrated the 250th anniversary of its founding. At the same time, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank whose entire institutional purpose is the defence of free markets, commissioned a survey with Morning Consult of 2,253 American adults. The survey included the usual questions: pride in country, knowledge of what the anniversary commemorated, and belief in the American Dream.

Besides the typical civic questions, the Cato questionnaire also asked Americans their feelings on communism, socialism and capitalism. The responses were quite explosive; the survey’s authors reported that: 21 percent of Americans said they held a favourable view of communism.1

Not socialism but communism. The word itself, which to the older Western mind is attached to the gulag and the Stasi and the Cultural Revolution, the one that American politics spent literally seven decades treating as roughly synonymous with treason.

Among Americans aged 18 to 29, the figure was 38 percent. In that cohort, favourable views of communism (38 percent) ran only seven points behind favourable views of capitalism (45 percent), and the generation was the only age group in which favourable views of communism actually edged out unfavourable ones, 38 to 36. Socialism, meanwhile, outpolled capitalism among the young outright: 53 percent favourable against capitalism’s 45. Also, the generational gradient was almost perfectly linear. Favourability toward communism fell from 38 percent among Gen Z to 29 percent among younger millennials, 19 percent among the middle-aged, 13 percent among those approaching retirement, and just 5 percent among seniors, the Americans old enough to remember duck-and-cover drills, Brezhnev, and the Berlin Wall as a piece of functioning infrastructure.

The 2026 Cato survey was not a fluke, which would be plainly obvious to people with even a slight interest in American politics. We also know this was not a fluke because the year before, in March of 2025, a Cato/YouGov survey of 2,000 adults found 34 percent of under-30s favourable toward communism and 62 percent favourable toward socialism. Cato’s senior editor Michael Chapman recorded roughly 52 million Americans aged 18 to 29, reporting a 34 percent favourability figure implying something on the order of eighteen million young people willing to say a kind word about an ideology that the Black Book of Communism credits with approximately 100 million deaths.

If you know a bit about the history of communism in America, you can understand why these numbers landed the way they did. American attitudes toward communism for most of the twentieth century were not just slightly negative; they were extremely so. Anti-communism was one of the few genuinely bipartisan commitments in American life, embraced by Cold War liberals and conservatives alike. Congress quite literally passed the Communist Control Act of 1954, effectively outlawing the Communist Party. Having any public sympathy for communism was politically and professionally fatal, as evidenced by the loyalty oaths, blacklists, and the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). When Gallup asked Americans in 1949 what “socialism” meant to them, the largest share answered on the lines of “government ownership of the means of production”, and they wanted no part of it. Communism, the harder and more explicit term, was too unthinkable during that time to even be asked in the poll.2

    https://www.cato.org/blog/new-poll-nearly-half-americans-dont-know-what-americas-250th-celebrating
    https://news.gallup.com/vault/240749/gallup-vault-americans-views-socialism-1949-1965.aspx

July 23, 2026

DSA: Trump doesn’t respect political norms. Also DSA: Let’s abolish the current system

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Chris Bray attempts to establish what the nascent Democratic Socialists of America actually stand for — and what they stand against:

Democrats are racing left, sprinting faster and faster toward abject authoritarian idiocy. Democratic socialists are defeating old Democrats in Congress and governing our big cities to death, and the DSA now offers an explicitly post-capitalist future in which everything is “free”, the one thing that resources can’t actually ever be:

    You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.

You get as much food, energy, and everything else as you feel that you need, and labor is no longer imposed on anyone. Should work well.

Meanwhile, after years of dire warnings that Evil Trump doesn’t respect our Constitution, here’s an actual headline today from one of the mindless institutions of the Democratic Party’s narrative-making apparatus:

They also propose the replacement of the Supreme Court, the restructuring of the presidency, and the elimination of the Electoral College, but other than that they’re really mad that Trump doesn’t respect our political norms. Trump is very bad, because he’s tearing down our political system, and also we demand the destruction of our political system.

Why are they moving left, moving left, and then moving left some more? Why doesn’t anything ever hold them in check?

Because there’s no anchor on the right to hold the left anywhere near the center. There’s no force in American politics pulling consistently and effectively in the other direction. They’re unopposed and unanchored, so nothing holds them. Mixing metaphors, it’s like gravity ceased to exist, so the moon is floating away. Political centering is the product of a contest. Bad ideas are punished and rejected through debate. And we increasingly don’t have that. Here’s a Republican congressman bragging about getting his measure passed to make home repairs a federally funded giveaway:

Democrats think the federal government should just give you whatever you need as a government handout, while Republicans think the federal government should, how can I put this, just give you whatever you need as a government handout. Your bathroom faucet broke? Don’t worry, that’s a federal program.

Meanwhile, while Democrats demand the abolition of the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and private property, prominent Republicans are theatrically angry at … Donald Trump.

July 21, 2026

Business idea – socialist-themed holiday camp

Filed under: Business, Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This idea is a banger, but it won’t attract the audience who really could benefit from the experience: the camp experience is what they want you to have, not for themselves.

New startup idea: a socialist-themed holiday camp where affluent Westerners pay premium prices to experience the system they keep voting for.

Picture it. You arrive at Camp VS (Virtue Signal) and hand over your passport (you won’t need it, exit visas take eleven years to process). Staff assign you to a concrete panel block, 320 square feet, shared with two other families you’ve never met. The heating works from 6 to 8 a.m. The elevator works never. Authentic Khrushchyovka construction, guaranteed.

Your daily itinerary: Wake at 5 a.m. Stand in the bread line until noon in minus 15 Celsius. The bread runs out at 11:40, but the queuing builds character, and character is the only thing not in shortage. Afternoon activities include a second line for toilet paper (there is no toilet paper) and a mandatory lecture on how the shortages prove capitalism sabotaged the harvest.

For guests seeking the deluxe package, we offer the Gulag Experience: rock-busting in a quarry under armed supervision, with optional whipping for anyone who fulfills less than 110 percent of quota. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote 1,800 pages about this amenity. Rave reviews, in a sense.

Every fourth guest works as an informant. You won’t know which one. Complaining about the food earns you a midnight interview with camp security, and the food gives you plenty to complain about: it’s cabbage. All of it. Abolish market prices and you abolish economic calculation, so nobody can know what to produce, in what quantity, or for whom. The planners guess. The planners guess cabbage.

Checkout is where the theme really lands. You can’t. The wall around the camp faces inward, and East Germany shot 140 people at theirs between 1961 and 1989 to keep paying customers from leaving the workers’ paradise.

The irony here is that this business would only survive under capitalism, because it needs voluntary customers, market prices, and profit signals to exist at all. Run it as an actual socialist enterprise and within a year the camp has no bread, no rocks, and no guests. Just like the original.

July 15, 2026

QotD: First up against the wall, come the revolution

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

An important lesson from history is that people living in relatively stable and functional societies seldom understand how rapidly things can deteriorate and plunge into catastrophe, violence, and mass murder.

A real-life individual named Savva Morozov (1862–1905) was one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary Russia.

He was a textile magnate, a patron of the arts, and a genuine philanthropist. His Moscow mansion was said to be the most expensive in the city. He and his wife, Zinaida, hosted famous writers, composers, and scientists. Morozov also worked to improve conditions for workers in his factories. He gave pregnant women paid leave. He funded scholarships for students. He built a hospital and a theater for his workers. He pushed for constitutional reform: freedom of the press, freedom of association, workers’ rights to organize and strike, and public oversight of the state budget.

Morozov also bankrolled the Bolsheviks.

Reports from this period suggest he gave hundreds of thousands of rubles to the revolutionary cause. He personally financed an underground newspaper of the banned social-democratic party that would eventually become the Russian Communist Party.

Morozov’s goal was almost certainly not to ignite a civil war or hand power to a dictatorship. He likely saw the radicals as useful pressure on the tsar, a way to force real reforms from a regime that would not move on its own.

When revolution came in January 1905, the violence shocked him.

He had set forces in motion that he could not control.

He suffered a nervous breakdown and fell into depression. His doctors and family sent him to the French Riviera to recover. He checked into a hotel in Cannes. There, he apparently shot himself, though rumors persisted for years that he had been murdered and the suicide had been staged.

His wife Zinaida returned to Russia and continued living off the enormous fortune her husband had left behind. Then came 1917. The Bolsheviks seized everything. She survived by selling off the few pieces of jewelry she had managed to keep.

The lavish country estate she and her husband owned later became the personal residence of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the communist revolution. Today it is a museum called Lenin’s Gorki, filled with the possessions and mementos of the first leader of the Soviet Union.

In his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, Peter Turchin points out that in most cases of societal collapse and state breakdown, “the overwhelming majority of precrisis elites … were clueless about the catastrophe that was about to engulf them. They shook the foundations of the state and then were surprised when the state crumbled.”

Rob Henderson, “Dark Shadows Fall, One Upon The Other”, Rob Henderson’s Newsletter, 2026-03-22.

July 14, 2026

The problem is the state

Filed under: Europe, France, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Brivael Le Pogram explains that acceptance of mediocrity is key to the decline of most western societies … meek acceptance that we are lesser people living in the ruins of a just-passed but rapidly receding Golden Age:

An SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) Duplex DASYE (moteur asynchrone, nouvelle generation de duplex) train at Figueres-Vilafant station, May 2011.
Photo by eldelinux via Wikimedia Commons.

I’m on a “air-conditioned” train where it’s 26 degrees. The WiFi doesn’t work. No one says a word.

And that’s what fascinates me the most: not the breakdown, but the collective acceptance.

The socialist state has pulled off a psychological feat. It’s made us internalize that a mediocre service, paid for at exorbitant cost, is normal. That it’s even what “public service” means.

The same service in a free market would cost a fraction of the price. And if the AC broke down, you’d be refunded within the hour, because a competitor is waiting right next door for you to switch shops.

Make a list of everything the state touches:

    Education: plummeting standards, teachers burning out, PISA rankings in freefall.
    Healthcare: months-long waits, hallways full of gurneys, caregivers fleeing.
    Transport: delays, breakdowns, strikes, prices exploding.
    Justice: years for a judgment.
    Police: overwhelmed, demoralized.
    Colossal budgets.
    Record-high tax takes in Europe.
    Result: everything’s rotten.

Why?

Because two things are missing that only the market provides: skin in the game and prices.

Skin in the game first. An entrepreneur who delivers a lousy service goes bankrupt. He loses HIS money, HIS reputation, HIS years of work. A bureaucrat who mismanages a public service loses nothing. He’ll get promoted, transferred, or at worst he’ll coast to retirement. Failure has no personal consequences. So failure repeats, indefinitely.

Prices next. Hayek showed it: market prices are an information system. Every price aggregates millions of individual decisions and signals where to allocate resources. When the state sets prices or subsidizes at a loss, it destroys that signal. No one knows anymore what anything is worth. We sprinkle money at random, we waste, and we call it “public investment”.

That’s why the bureaucrat is the worst possible steward of your taxes: he spends other people’s money, on other people. No incentive to save, no incentive to serve well. Milton Friedman summed it up in one sentence: it’s the worst of the four ways to spend money.

The problem isn’t this minister, that government, this reform. The problem is structural. A monopoly without competition, without prices, without skin in the game, will ALWAYS produce mediocrity. No matter who’s running it. No matter the budget.

If you’ve grasped that, you’ve grasped 90% of political economy.

So do one simple thing: explain it to your loved ones. Next delayed train, next emergency room wait, ask the question: “Who loses money when this service sucks?” Answer: no one. That’s the problem.

The information will eventually spread. And one day, collectively, we’ll stop swallowing it.

The problem is the state. Always.

Auto-translated from the original French by X.

Update, 15 July: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

July 9, 2026

QotD: The labels “capitalism” and “socialism”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Before identifying why they were wrong, we need to acknowledge what Marx and his disciples were right about. Inequality did increase as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Between 1780 and 1830 output per laborer in the United Kingdom grew over 25 percent but wages rose barely 5 percent. The proportion of national income going to the top percentile of the population rose from 25 percent in 1801 to 35 percent in 1848. In Paris in 1820, around 9 percent of the population was classified as “proprietors and rentiers” (living from their investments) and owned 41 percent of recorded wealth. By 1911 their share had risen to 52 percent. In Prussia, the share of income going to the top 5 percent rose from 21 percent in 1854 to 27 percent in 1896 and to 43 percent in 1913. Industrial societies, it seems clear, grew more unequal over the course of the nineteenth century. This had predictable consequences. In the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892, for example, the mortality rate for individuals with an income of less than 800 marks a year was thirteen times higher than that for individuals earning over 50,000 marks.

It was not necessary to be an intellectual to be dismayed by the inequality of industrial society. The Welsh-born factory owner Robert Owen envisaged an alternative economic model based on cooperative production and utopian villages like the ones he founded at Orbiston in Scotland and New Harmony, Indiana. It was in a letter to Owen, written by Edward Cowper in 1822, that the word “socialism” in its modern sense first appears. An unidentified woman was, Cowper thought, “well adapted to become what my friend Jo. Applegath calls a Socialist”. Five years later, Owen himself argued that “the chief question … between the modern … Political Economists, and the Communionists or Socialists, is whether it is more beneficial that this capital should be individual or in common”. The term “capitalism” made its debut in an English periodical in April 1833 — in the London newspaper the Standard — in the phrase “tyranny of capitalism”, part of an article on “the ill consequences of that greatest curse that can exist amongst men, too much money-power in too few hands”. Fifteen years later, the Caledonian Mercury referred with similar aversion to “that sweeping tide of capitalism and money-loving which threatens our country with the horrors of a plutocracy”.

Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.

July 7, 2026

The Democratic Socialists of America

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Cynical Publius sounds the warning about the impending takeover of the Democratic party by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA):

Logo of the Democratic Socialists of America

Since 2023, I have kept the same pinned post because I feel that post (the one discussing “my side of history”) is the most important sentiment I have ever posted on this platform.

For the short-term future, however, I am changing that pinned post to this one, because it is of such crucial importance to our nation’s survival.

Here goes.

The Democrat Party is in the process of being taken over by the Democrat Socialists of America (the “DSA”).

The DSA is an explicitly Marxist organization.

Marxism has impoverished more people and genocidally murdered more of humanity than all other ideologies ever to exist in human history combined.

It is a grotesque form of evil that is wholly incompatible with the Constitution of the United States of America.

Marxism in all its forms must be reviled and publicly treated with the same disdain with which intelligent adults view Naziism, pedophilia, serial murderers and cannibalism.

Do not back down. Each and every time you encounter Marxism in any of its forms, please call it out for the evil that it is. It is a rapidly metastasizing cancer that can only be defeated by public awareness.

Thank you.

Tom Knighton reacts to another self-identified Democratic Socialist’s criticisms of America:

… when I see someone like this, I have to think this should be automatically disqualifying for office.

    Pennsylvania state and socialist Chris Rabb, the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District, has joined the growing chorus of Democrats denouncing the founding documents and core institutions in the country on our 250th anniversary. The Democratic socialist is running unopposed for Congress and will almost certainly be a member of Congress after November.

    Rabb spoke at an event billed as “America at 250 — Trump Fascism, Historical Erasure, and the Battle Over Truth” at People’s Plaza on Independence Mall in Philadelphia.

    He denounced the country as based on “stolen land and stolen labor.” He lashed out at the Declaration of Independence:

    Those screeds that were very lofty but were notoriously catering to a performative aspect of collective genius that purposely erased indigenous and black peoples … It created distance from an empire to help very privileged people continue that privilege and ultimately institutionalize that through the U.S. Constitution many years later. But it certainly did not provide independence to indigenous and black peoples. And we cannot talk about anything today without acknowledging that this is a nation born on stolen land & stolen labor.

Actually, I think the Declaration did provide independence to American Indians and black people. It just took way too long to be recognized.

Lincoln cites the concepts of the Declaration in the Gettysburg Address, and there’s little doubt that many of those who worked to end slavery did so because our nation was founded on the principle that all men were created equal.

It should have been a given, granted, and I have no problem with anyone taking issue with the imperfect application of that concept, because that’s legitimate. The thing is, we fought an entire war to end slavery once and for all. As many as 750,000 Americans lost their lives in that war, and it was ultimately worth it to end that particular scourge.

Yet I find it disgusting that while socialists like Rabb will cite that imperfect application of natural rights as an evil, they completely ignore the blood price this country paid to end that scourge.

[…]

How can someone like this want to serve a nation they despise? He’s not really looking to make it better; he’s looking to destroy the nation it is in favor of something it was never meant to be. It’s not about improving it. It’s about overturning it.

I’m still flabbergasted that “Democratic Socialism” is taking hold as strongly as it has, especially considering socialism’s track record in the 20th Century, and while I believe Rabb has the right to say whatever retarded thing he wants, I also believe the voters of this country should see that kind of rhetoric as disqualifying for public office.

Yes, that includes the Democrats.

Unfortunately, they nominated him, and he’s far from the only DSA nutball who has won their primary this election cycle.

Remember, boys and girls: You can vote yourself into socialism, but you’ll have to shoot your way out.

Andrew Sullivan is also concerned with the DSA consuming the rest of the Democratic party:

I’d say the DSA is to the Democrats in the 2020s what the John Birch Society was to the GOP in the 1950s. But the Dems won’t expel or cauterize them, so dozens of DSA candidates are surging to victory this year, from Colorado to New York State, with a big boost from Mayor Mamdani and Hasan Piker.

The DSA backs Hamas terrorism, the Maduro regime in Venezuela, and the Castro tyranny in Cuba. Its new platform — to be voted on next month — supports “scrapping the U.S. Senate, ‘abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state’, defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and ‘replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress’.”

Jon Chait has a good rundown of the the group’s darker undercurrents. Last year, they amended their founding documents to allow members of communist cells to join. The DSA “Red Star Caucus” brags:

    We in Red Star are communists who believe that DSA is the most effective place to serve the socialist movement … We call on all communists in the United States to join us in the democratic struggle within DSA … as we continue to improve the democratic structures of DSA, and as communists contest for and win hegemony within the organization, we continue to move toward a revolutionary horizon.

When Donald Trump calls someone a commie, it’s a good rule to ignore him. This time, he’s right. Lenin-fan Darializa Avila Chevalier showed up to a pro-Hamas rally on October 8, as bodies still lay on the ground at a music festival — yes, that’s how deep the Israel-hatred runs. She supports abolishing all prisons, police, and national borders. Her now-deleted Twitter discourse is a 2020 fever dream: “Yes, literally, abolish the border”, “Seize the means of production”, “ALL PIGS EVERYWHERE ARE HARAM”. She also converted to Islam. Check out her answer to the simple question, “What should happen to somebody who has killed somebody else?” It’ll take a while.

Claire Valdez, another primary winner, pledges to abolish ICE and nationalize the airline industry. Melat Kiros, who defeated a staunch progressive in Denver, is more rooted in opposition to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and “genocide” in Gaza. She refused to condemn as antisemitic the fatal firebombing of a solidarity walk for Israeli hostages. It was merely “anti-Zionist.” Israel is increasingly the dominant fixation among the activist left — just ask Scott Wiener.

After this wave of extremism, you might expect some Democratic pushback. And some came: a new group of 13 House Dems signed a “Promise to America”, rejecting socialism. “We disagree with MAGA. We disagree with socialists”, Congressman Tom Suozzi said. “We don’t want this extremism. We want mainstream.” But 13 signatures are not much against a growing and organized machine. And the pressure more broadly is on the critics: “You are creating the antagonistic dynamic that we do not need”, AOC said. “These are two young, talented, intelligent women that got elected against all odds, against millions of dollars. Perhaps there is something we can learn from them.” There is: communism.

July 6, 2026

“The Road to Hell is Always Paved with Good Intentions”

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam expresses his frustration with young people’s recent affection for more socialism, despite all the evidence of history:

When I see the younger generation demanding more and more Marxism, more socialism, more State, more “planning” to fix a world they’ve been taught to hate — I don’t feel like snickering. I feel like screaming.

Because I recognize the opening chapter of a story whose final page I know all too well.

That story, a man wrote in 1944, under the bombs. Friedrich Hayek. The book: The Road to Serfdom. And he dedicated it — read carefully — “to the socialists of all parties”. Not out of contempt. Out of affection. Out of urgency. Because he had seen, with his own eyes, an entire Europe tip over the edge.

Remember this, it’s the heart of it all: totalitarianism never starts with monsters. It starts with good people.

It starts with idealists who want the common good. Generous young people who can’t stand injustice anymore. Soft, consensus-driven parties that promise to fix everything if you just give them a little more power. The problem isn’t their intentions. The problem is the mechanism they set in motion.

Here’s that mechanism. Follow it, it’s relentless.

To plan an economy, you need a single decision where there were once millions of free choices. So you have to concentrate power. But no society ever agrees on a single plan — everyone has their own ends, their dreams, their priorities. The planner then hits a wall: disagreement. And disagreement becomes an obstacle to eliminate. You start by persuading. Then by coercing. Then by silencing. Not out of sadism — out of logical necessity. The plan demands that you crush what resists it.

And then comes Hayek’s most chilling chapter: “Why the Worst Get on Top”. In a system that demands total power, it’s not the best who win. It’s those who are ready for anything. The scrupulous man hesitates; the man without scruples acts. The collectivist machine, whatever its colors, mechanically selects the brutes.

Look at Germany. You’ve been told Hitler fell from the sky, an anomaly, an accident of evil. That’s false, and it’s dangerous to believe it. What Hayek understood was that Germany had spent half a century abandoning classical liberalism — the individual, rights, the market — in favor of the cult of organization, the collective, the State that knows better than you. The left and the right already shared the same premise: the individual must submit to the nation’s plan. Hitler didn’t have to build that machine. He found it already assembled, warmed up, ready. He just had to grab the wheel.

That’s the warning. Totalitarianism isn’t an ideology. It’s a structure. You can fill it with red, brown, any generous color you like. Once you’ve accepted that the individual must bend to the collective, that property is just a revocable privilege, that the freedom to trade, to speak, to innovate stops where “the common good” decreed from above begins — you’ve laid the tracks. The train, it’ll come on its own.

And it always comes with the world’s best intentions. Every step toward the abyss is justified, reasonable, compassionate. One more tax for the poor. One more control against the bad guys. One less freedom, but “just that one”. No one chooses servitude. You slide into it, one good intention after another.

So I’m tossing this bottle into the sea. To you who are twenty and on fire with passion. Your revolt against injustice is beautiful — keep it. But for the love of God, learn history. Read Hayek. Read what the 20th century really was, not the caricature they’re feeding you. The tens of millions of deaths it left behind weren’t killed by sadists from another world, but by systems built, at the outset, on dreams of justice.

Freedom isn’t the problem to fix. It’s the treasure they’re convincing you to sell off cheap.

Wake up.

Auto-translated from the original French by X.

July 4, 2026

“The fact that [Canadians] cannot define our values should concern every one of us”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

While our American neighbours are busy celebrating their 250th anniversary, Canadians are still left wondering why we can’t seem to define what our own values are except in opposition to those of the United States. Eva Chipiuk discusses this briefly here:

In writing my book, Reconnect to Canada, the most difficult part was not recounting our history or explaining our political and legal systems. It was answering a simple question:

What does it mean to be Canadian?

Over the last few years, I have asked that question repeatedly.

It was clear that something fundamental had shifted, but I could never quite articulate what it was.

The responses to that question were revealing, and most telling was that there was no common answer at all.

Some said hockey. Some said healthcare. Others said diversity or simply that Canadians are “nice”.

The fact that we cannot define our values should concern every one of us.

Then I came across this article, and it put things into perspective:

    Socialism, in its depraved but effective way, appeals to people’s worst instincts and impulses. It presents the world as a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers. It pits groups of people against each other based on arbitrary measures. For the narrow-minded, it makes sense.

    It embodies most of the seven deadly sins.

    Pride: Socialists have zero humility because they reject the fallibility of humanity. They can micromanage an entire society. They can create a centralized, one-size-fits-all, command-and-control utopia. They know all and know best.

    Envy: Taking one’s property because they have too much to give to others who have less is not noble; it is theft. Stealing with state-sanctioned approval is unjust. The sheer resentment that some have more, better, or bigger material possessions is the driving force of socialist ideology.

    Wrath: Socialist doctrine fuels anger, rage, violence, and a desire for vengeance against the so-called oppressors. Instead of mimicking the successful, the people turn their ire toward them.

    Sloth: Because socialism is about passing the buck and the blame, it excuses idleness and promotes laziness. It allows one to shirk personal duties and retards personal growth.

The uncomfortable truth is that Canada increasingly reflects these traits, yet we refuse to acknowledge it.

We insist we are compassionate while shaming and disparaging those who hold different opinions.

We claim to value equality while encouraging envy.

We preach inclusion while dividing Canadians into competing groups.

We speak of unity while constantly finding new reasons to divide ourselves.

We demand accountability from everyone except the government.

We expect government to solve problems that citizens, families, communities, and free people once solved themselves.

Worst of all, we have become experts at pretending none of this is happening.

We congratulate ourselves on being tolerant, generous, and virtuous while our institutions fail, productivity declines, public debt explodes, trust evaporates, and Canadians become more divided than they have been in decades.

That is not something to celebrate.

It is something to confront.

If Canadians can no longer articulate what it means to be Canadian, perhaps it is because we have abandoned the principles that once defined us: freedom, personal responsibility, hard work, accountability, respect for the rule of law, and service to one another rather than dependence on the state.

You do not need to take my word for it.

Just open your eyes. Look around!

A country does not lose its identity overnight. It loses it one abandoned principle at a time.

A nation without shared values eventually becomes little more than a collection of people living within arbitrary borders.

So if we are going to celebrate Canada today, let us celebrate the principles that made this country worth celebrating in the first place and commit ourselves to restoring them where they have been lost.

July 3, 2026

QotD: Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The catalyst for this negative view of American entrepreneurs was historian Matthew Josephson, who wrote a landmark book, The Robber Barons. Josephson, the son of a Jewish banker, grew up in New York and graduated from Columbia University, where he was inspired in the classroom by Charles Beard, America’s foremost progressive historian — and a man sympathetic to socialism. “Beard was nothing less than a spellbinder”, Josephson recalled, and Beard’s lectures helped guide him on a path to radical politics.

During the 1920s, after graduation, Josephson became a journalist, an expatriate to France, and, after his return, a part of New York’s literary elite. He and Beard reconnected in 1930, and the mentor urged his student to write a book denouncing the men who had launched America’s industrial power. “Oh! those respectable ones”, Beard said of America’s capitalists, “oh! their temples of respectability — how I detest them, how I would love to pull them all down!” Happily for Beard, Josephson was handy to do the job for him. Josephson dedicated The Robber Barons to Beard, the historian most responsible for the book’s contents.

Josephson began research for his book in 1932, the nadir of the Great Depression. Businessmen were a handy scapegoat for that crisis, and Josephson embraced a Marxist view that the Great Depression was perhaps the last phase in the fall of capitalism and the triumph of communism. In a written interview for Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, Josephson said he enjoyed watching “the breakdown of our cult of business success and optimism”. He added, “The freedom of the U.S.S.R. from our cycles of insanity is the strongest argument in the world for the reconstruction of our society in a new form that is as highly centralized as Russia’s …”

Though not a member of the Communist Party, Josephson co-authored an open letter of support for the Communist Party candidates for President of the United States in 1932. “We believe”, the letter said, “that the only effective way to protest against the chaos, the appalling wastefulness, and the indescribable misery inherent in the present economic system is to vote for the Communist candidates”.

Josephson traced the troubled capitalist system of the 1930s back to the entrepreneurs of the late 1800s. Thus, by explaining what he thought was the wasteful, greedy, and corrupt development of steel, oil, and other industries under capitalism, Josephson was explaining to readers why the Great Depression was occurring. “I am not a complete Marxist”, Josephson insisted, “But what I took to heart for my own project was his theory of the process of industrial concentration, in Vol. 1 of [Marx’s] Capital, which underlay my book”.

Josephson never intended to write an objective view of American economic life in the Gilded Age. He did little research and mainly used secondary sources that supported his Marxist viewpoint. As he had written in the New Republic, “Far from shunning propaganda, we must use it more nobly, more skillfully than our predecessors, and speak through it in the local language and slogans.” Thus he wrote The Robber Barons with dramatic stories, anecdotes, and innuendos that demeaned corporate America and made the case for massive government intervention.

Burton W. Folsum, “How the Myth of the ‘Robber Barons’ Began — and Why It Persists”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2018-09-21.

June 14, 2026

QotD: Some of H.G. Wells’ more awkward views

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I was researching my biography of H.G. Wells in the early 1990s what shocked me, apart from his habitual and extreme selfishness, was the man’s life-long support for social engineering and eugenics. Put simply, his socialism embraced the idea that for the bulk of humanity to be free, prosperous, and happy a sizeable minority had to simply disappear. For Wells this included the disabled, the “perverse”, and even perhaps many who were non-white. What became apparent very quickly was that such an approach wasn’t confined to the author of The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man, but was extraordinarily common on the intellectual left. Many in the Fabian Society and Labour Party shared these ideas, as did mainstream socialist thinkers in Europe and North America.

This was, of course, before the genocidal policies of the Nazis were implemented, and while many of these grand men and women of the left had died before the camps were liberated and the horrors known, others certainly lived on. Some were contrite, others not. Either way, it hardly forgives them their ideology and influence – naiveté and ignorance simply isn’t a viable defence in such circumstances.

Michael Coren, “Eugenics and the intellectual left”, The Critic, 2020-09-16.

Update, 15 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

May 11, 2026

Were the Nazis socialists?

Filed under: Germany, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

If you’re ever bored and want to kick off an argument online, you can take either side of this statement and watch the signal-to-noise ratio drop precipitously. The NSDAP, the Nazis, began as one of the many, many groups of angry young Germans in the days after the end of the First World War. The full name of the party — the National Socialist German Worker’s Party — indicates who the original party founders thought would be the engine of their political rise. They were explicitly anti-communist, as the spectre of the Russian Revolution terrified many Germans, but German socialism was still within the Overton Window of political debate.

Lots of arguments about this one.

Many people assume Nazis could not have been socialists, despite all the time and energy they devoted to jumping up and down screaming “We are socialists!”, because they were “right-wing” and socialism is supposed to be “left-wing”.

Except “right-wing” and “left-wing” don’t have rigid definitions outside the context of the French revolution. In any other context, they’re just a metaphor.

So why did the NATIONAL Socialist German Workers’ Party and the INTERNATIONAL Marxist-Leninist Socialist Workers’ Movement hate each other so much?

It’s pretty obvious when you look at the names.

National.

International.

To Nazis, the race and culture of a people are everything. They are what the state is supposed to represent. Ein Volk, as they would say. The purpose of Nazi socialism is to control capital assets, subordinating them to the will and welfare of the ethnostate.

But Marxist-Leninists seek to abolish all ethnostates. They are a globalist movement, seeking to place all capital assets under the control of a universal proletariat in theory, which is in practice represented by one world government.

Thus, Nazis sought to use socialist policies for the welfare of the German people and Marxist-Leninists seek to abolish “German” as a meaningful distinction, along with all other cultures.

The antipathy between Nazis and communists was a sectarian struggle within socialism. Same methods, but different sacred groups.

Since the defeat of National Socialism by International Socialism in WW2, all modern socialism is pretty much of the international variety.

This does, however, suggest that there is a contrast between National Capitalism and International Capitalism as well.

Which is the source of the current sectarian struggle between elements of the American right wing.

Update, 12 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

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