Socialism, as Democrats and other leftist world leaders practice it, is a self-contradictory and self-satirizing ideology that is both elitist and illogical.
From the climate alarmists who say we must give up gas stoves and cars to save the planet while they fly around in private jets to the politicians who have private armed security while enacting gun-grabbing legislation, leftist socialists constantly demonstrate their hypocrisy. But that hypocrisy is, in fact, inherent in socialist ideology.
One of the major logical flaws of socialism is that it argues (in practice, if not always in word) that men cannot be trusted with freedom, while simultaneously arguing that those handful of elites in charge of the government are exempt from this untrustworthiness and should be in control of everyone’s freedom. This is an inherent contradiction which Frederic Bastiat pointed out centuries ago:
There are too many ‘great’ men in the world—legislators, organizers, do-gooders, leaders of the people, fathers of nations, and so on, and so on. Too many persons place themselves above mankind; they make a career of organizing it, patronizing it, and riling it.
It would seem that Bastiat does not refer to men’s moral greatness in this passage but rather to that artificial and external “greatness” which comes from having wealth, political power, and social status, regardless of merit. That is the sort of “greatness” that aristocrats, monarchs, and socialist dictators have. It is that false idea of “greatness” which makes the senile Joe Biden, the decrepit Nancy Pelosi, the perpetually wrong Al Gore, and the criminal Ilhan Omar so incredibly arrogant and entitled.
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Bastiat clarified further:
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
Of course not. As Shakespeare has his Henry V say humbly, “I think the king is but a man as I am … His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man.” Or, put another way, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, “Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors.”
Perfect material equality is not achievable in this fallen world, but the Founding Fathers (who admired Seneca) had a vision for a nation where every man might be free, where every man might be equal before the law. They understood that while not every man can be president, no man should be considered inherently inferior because he is not president. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” the Founders declared.
That is the brilliant American worldview that socialism rejects, which is why the Democrats, who always were the party of anti-American elitism, very naturally became socialist when that ideology began seeping into our institutions. Democrats have never quite recovered from losing their slaves and their plantations, and they have been trying to establish an aristocratic society ever since. But they are made of the same clay as any other man, and we must continue to vote them out of power so that our freedom remains intact.
