Evidence that socialism is doomed to fail wherever it is tried occurred long before America became a nation.  In 1607, inhabitants of Jamestown, Virginia were on the verge of starvation, largely because the settlement's communal living arrangement failed to produce enough food.  Among the steps that saved Jamestown from oblivion was doing away with communal sharing in favor of incentive-based farming that rewarded personal initiative.

YouTube screen grab: The Hippies Movement 1960s.

Three and a half centuries later, the same lesson repeated itself in San Francisco and elsewhere, when the utopian "free food" communes of the hip generation went the way of the dinosaurs.  The hippies who provided the food got tired of feeding those whose only contribution was a hearty appetite.  Earlier this year, socialism's empty promise of a honeyed existence for all struck again, this time in Scandinavia, where Finland's socialist government collapsed over the unsustainable cost of passing out free stuff as if it grew on trees.

Having left an unbroken trail of failure in its wake, socialism is doomed to fail wherever it's tried, because it is in eternal mortal conflict with the basic human instinct that those who work hard, pursue advanced education, employ their ingenuity, or risk their capital have an inborn expectation to do significantly better than those who don't.  As 18^th century Scottish economist Adam Smith put it, "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest."  Stated differently, every socialist who works for a living does so not out of altruistic instincts, but to feather his own financial nest.  That, too, will never change.

Socialism: An ideology based on lies

Socialists attempt to subvert free societies via stealth and deceit.  Here are four of the most outlandish lies they tell:

в—Џ "We're not socialists.  We're democratic socialists."

There is no difference in the two.  The word "democratic" is inserted as a Trojan horse to cloak the socialist soldier.

в—Џ "Socialism is about sharing."

This lie projects the absurd notion that socialists are morally superior people worthy of being emulated.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Sharing is a voluntary act based on love; socialism is forced sharing.

в—Џ "Socialism creates fairness and equality for all."

One of the most chilling commands in The Communist Manifesto is this: "The theory of communism can be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property."  In socialist countries, the only people who own high-value assets are the socialist rulers and their loyal cronies.  Because there is little upward mobility under socialism, socialist societies are characterized by two economic levels: a small, immensely wealthy ruling elite at the top, and at the bottom, the low-income masses forced to obey the dictates of their socialist masters.  A large and prosperous middle class like what we have in America does not exist in countries with single-party socialist rule.  Those who doubt that need only ask people who have lived in such places.

в—Џ "Socialism will work if the right people are in charge."

This fallacious assertion is an attempt to explain away socialism's unbroken trail of failure.  The scourge of socialism has never created a single free and prosperous society, but has destroyed every functioning society where it was allowed to metastasize.  One hundred percent of those who think socialism will work if the "right people" are in charge are referred to as useful idiots, a class of gullible citizens duped to believe that the universally failed theories of Marx and Lenin are the answer to wealth and income disparity.

How socialists seize control of free societies

In one of his most revealing quotes, Lenin said, "The goal of socialism is communism."  The idea that creeping socialism should precede communism is an acknowledgment that totalitarian rule is so frightening to people in free nations that it must be quietly slipped into those societies in bits and pieces.  It is through that incremental process that socialism serves as an under-the-radar, transitional gateway to the unrelenting oppression of full-blown communism.

Image courtesy of Stockio.com.

The EAT THE RICH class warfare image above illustrates that gradual subversion -- from capitalism (knife and fork) to creeping socialism (fork and sickle) to outright communism (hammer and sickle).  If done via stealth and deception, free societies can be overthrown from within in a way that goes virtually unnoticed until it's too late.  The means through which that sub rosa conversion is accomplished is called Cultural Marxism.

The Father of Cultural Marxism

One of the leading Marxist thinkers of the 20^th century, the late Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, is known as the Father of Cultural Marxism.  Disillusioned that he and his communist fellow travelers failed to incite a Bolshevik-style revolution in their capitalist country, Gramsci developed a stratagem to peacefully overturn capitalism in Western societies from within.  That stratagem is known as Cultural Marxism, the process of gradually infusing communist doctrine into a society via its culture.

Gramsci theorized that what holds a capitalist society together are the pillars of its culture, the structures and institutions of family, religion, education, politics, law, the arts, and the media, as they provide the social cohesion necessary to a functioning society.  Undermine the principles that these structural institutions embody, and a capitalist society can be subverted from within without firing a shot.  

A prime example of an undermined structural institution in this country is its public education system, which has been heavily infiltrated by progressive teachers and administrators who have, over the last half-century, methodically indoctrinated generations of impressionable young minds with the alleged virtues of socialism.  The ultimate goal of that subversive indoctrination is to supplant the values of the Founders with those of Marx and Lenin.  In many of our public schools, teachers, who traditionally embody socially approved values, are no longer teaching their students to be proud of their country; they're teaching them to be ashamed of their country and its two-party capitalist system. 

In 16th-century Spain, Catholic missionary Saint Francis Xavier is quoted as saying, "Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man."  What children are taught in school today will determine what kind of country we have in the future.  The relentless socialist brainwashing of America's schoolchildren has yielded troubling results.  A recent poll by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that 7 in 10 Millennials surveyed said they would vote for a socialist in the next election.

The stark choice you face in 2020

With Cultural Marxism having penetrated every facet of our society, the tentacles of socialism-cum-communism have quietly seized control of virtually every structural institution in our country, including, most ominously, one of America's major political parties and what has become that party's willing propaganda arm, the journalistically corrupt mainstream media.  A free nation cannot long survive if its press takes sides, so it's not hyperbole to say the great American experiment in representative democracy is staring squarely into the abyss of tyranny.  We the People – our votes, our time, our money — are the only thing standing in the way.  The next election will determine whether our constitutional republic survives or falls from within to the iron hand of single-party socialist rule.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and few pictures better illustrate socialism's lethal threat to America than the one below, which is worth sharing far and wide.

An electrical engineering graduate of Georgia Tech and now retired, John Eidson is a freelance writer in Atlanta.