In the poll, which was done by Fox News August 7-10, a whopping 59% of registered Democratic voters said they hold a favorable view of socialism. In the same poll, 44% of Democrats said they hold an unfavorable view of capitalism itself.
Socialism by definition is a political and economic system in which a centralized government confiscates private property, farms, businesses, and industry, then redistributes everything from food to property among the population. Wherever that theory has become reality, it also comes with gun barrels and firing squads for those who oppose the "collective" good, but it has been romanticized for a century by Far Left intellectuals in the West, from Hollywood screenwriters to Manhattan Project scientists.
“I think if you talked to a lot of people who took this poll, and you asked them about Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels, and you start talking about the Communist Manifesto,” David Closson, of the Family Research Center, says, “I think they would have no idea what you're talking about.”
Campus Reform, the education watchdog, has demonstrated that claim on college campuses, where naïve students tell the interviewer they support socialism but fail, again and again, to define it.
“I think people kinda throw that word around to try to scare you,” one student told Campus Reform,” but if helping people is socialism, then I’m for it.”
Yet “helping people” is not socialism. Sharing some of your garden vegetables with a hungry neighbor is helping people, not a government bureaucrat confiscating your garden, your seeds, and your tractor, then telling you what to plant and taking it all when it's ready.
Cuban-Americans for generations, for example, have witnessed the Left romanticize Communist leader Fidel Castro as a larger-than-life figure, and unquestionably parrot his claims that his starving, suffering population enjoyed free health care and quality public education.
“Across the developing world,” award-winning journalist Amy Goodman said days after his death in 2016, “Fidel Castro is viewed as a hero who stood up to the United States and assisted Marxist guerrillas and revolutionary governments around the world.”
According to Closson, during the last 18 months of the virus pandemic, Americans have been conditioned to get “free things” such as stimulus checks at the very same time their own government has clamped down on their individual freedoms to attend church and to operate a business. Those few who stood up to lockdowns were denounced as selfish and uncaring. They have also suffered consequences, such as the now-shuttered San Francisco salon that exposed Nancy Pelosi, like a nail hit by a hammer.
One more recent example is the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which declared, in the name of public safety, that millions of home renters and apartment renters can remain while millions of property owners are not allowed to demand the monthly rent that is used, in many cases, to pay the property mortgage and to pay for repairs and upkeep.
Mirroring the Fox News poll, a combined 75% of Democrats told polling firm Morning Consult they “strongly support” or “somewhat support” the CDC’s decision to extend the moratorium through October.
Another 57% of Democrats said the CDC, a federal health agency, has the authority to ban evictions.
In the same poll, 76% of Republicans said the CDC does not have the authority to do so.
Pointing to the Fox News poll, Closson predicts a Marxist-based society is creeping up on American society because another society, which dates back to the country’s founding, is shrinking more and more.
“As the biblical worldview is recessing and decreasing,” he says, “other worldviews are going to take its place.”
That has certainly been demonstrated in numerous countries, where the churches are closed and the pastors are jailed, but historian Lee Edwards points out in a 2019 story that Marxist intellectuals must ignore a history of atrocities, and a starving population, to insist "true" socialism has never been tried.
