Dem's were the most successful when they appealed to our instinctual affinity for underdogs and the downtrodden. But if we look at something like Maslow's hierarchy, we can't manage to find contentment or worry about higher order thoughts when our basic needs aren't being met. As in, not being able to afford our food or shelter will always win over helping someone else, which is how they are losing whites, men, and a bunch of other formerly "guaranteed" voters.
Socialism, and all their versions of it, require the population to already be rich and prosperous to be able and willing to "share" with one another and not be envious and angry about it. Something that might have been true years ago, but really doesn't feel so right now.
Yeah, this is similar to Nietzsche's critique of Christianity that promotes a slave morality which invites the parasitism of Leftism to infest it.
You're fundamentally right, Socialism requires prosperity to start because it is, really, a bourgeois luxury belief system of the upper-class, striving to become the new elite.
However, Socialism doesn't die when the society becomes poorer, because it embeds itself with dependency and tribalism; so poverty no longer because a revolutionary force against a socialist state.
I understand that argument, but I don't fully agree with it. The expansion of military debt certainly hurt the USSR, but it wouldn't cause a collapse. If that were true, the "Bomber Gap" issue in the 1950's should have destroyed them because they could never have competed with the US's insane 24/7 nuclear bomber patrol.
The real problem is that the food situation in the USSR was becoming totally unsustainable. If Gorbechev didn't liberalize agriculture from what it was, there'd be a famine and he didn't want what happened to China. He believed that he could manage liberalization in the Soviet Union to a degree that would keep it alive. Unfortunately, he couldn't. Nationalist movements in Ukraine, Poland, East Germany, Checkslovakia, and Estonia seized the opportunity to basically publicly expose the corruption and incompetence of their local Communist parties, followed by the stupidity of the communist party generally.
After Poland's move to break-away and the revolution in Romania, the thing that fully undermined the confidence in the Soviet Union was the discovery of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by the Estonians. One of their nationalist leaders was in the US and discovered it's existence in a museum. They'd never actually heard that the USSR and NSDAP were allies, and were always told that the Soviet Union pushed into Estonia to save it from a Nazi invasion. He certainly never knew that this was simply common knowledge in the west, and that the entire justification of Estonia's membership in the USSR was a lie to support the Nazis.
The Estonians absolutely lost their shit. And the next Comintern, they made an issue out of it, and basically lambasted the Communist party, wanted to argue that they should leave the union, and stop using the Ruble. At that point, there was very clearly blood in the water and the Communists, really for the first time since the Nazis, started really panicking.
The USSR was never going to be defeated by economics alone, see North Korea. In fact, it's hard to argue the USSR ever recovered from WW1. But the combination of pressures from strong nationalist movements, potential famines from mismanagement, and political illegitimacy is what really did the whole project in.
Wealthy societies become decadent, one symptom of decadence is rank stupidity. Look how thick the average person is today and the kind of slop the average person believes or falls for on the daily basis.
They are appealing to The New Socialist Man.
Dem's were the most successful when they appealed to our instinctual affinity for underdogs and the downtrodden. But if we look at something like Maslow's hierarchy, we can't manage to find contentment or worry about higher order thoughts when our basic needs aren't being met. As in, not being able to afford our food or shelter will always win over helping someone else, which is how they are losing whites, men, and a bunch of other formerly "guaranteed" voters.
Socialism, and all their versions of it, require the population to already be rich and prosperous to be able and willing to "share" with one another and not be envious and angry about it. Something that might have been true years ago, but really doesn't feel so right now.
Socialism always runs out of other people's money.
Yeah, this is similar to Nietzsche's critique of Christianity that promotes a slave morality which invites the parasitism of Leftism to infest it.
You're fundamentally right, Socialism requires prosperity to start because it is, really, a bourgeois luxury belief system of the upper-class, striving to become the new elite.
However, Socialism doesn't die when the society becomes poorer, because it embeds itself with dependency and tribalism; so poverty no longer because a revolutionary force against a socialist state.
That just means that Socialisms limps along until there is no longer enough food or money to pay the military and secret police.
Ronald Reagan was insightful enough to cause acceleration of military spending of the USSR, which hastened their inevitable economic collapse.
Socialism turns a successful country into a third world tin-pot dictatorship run by warlords. Some of these are very stable.
I understand that argument, but I don't fully agree with it. The expansion of military debt certainly hurt the USSR, but it wouldn't cause a collapse. If that were true, the "Bomber Gap" issue in the 1950's should have destroyed them because they could never have competed with the US's insane 24/7 nuclear bomber patrol.
The real problem is that the food situation in the USSR was becoming totally unsustainable. If Gorbechev didn't liberalize agriculture from what it was, there'd be a famine and he didn't want what happened to China. He believed that he could manage liberalization in the Soviet Union to a degree that would keep it alive. Unfortunately, he couldn't. Nationalist movements in Ukraine, Poland, East Germany, Checkslovakia, and Estonia seized the opportunity to basically publicly expose the corruption and incompetence of their local Communist parties, followed by the stupidity of the communist party generally.
After Poland's move to break-away and the revolution in Romania, the thing that fully undermined the confidence in the Soviet Union was the discovery of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by the Estonians. One of their nationalist leaders was in the US and discovered it's existence in a museum. They'd never actually heard that the USSR and NSDAP were allies, and were always told that the Soviet Union pushed into Estonia to save it from a Nazi invasion. He certainly never knew that this was simply common knowledge in the west, and that the entire justification of Estonia's membership in the USSR was a lie to support the Nazis.
The Estonians absolutely lost their shit. And the next Comintern, they made an issue out of it, and basically lambasted the Communist party, wanted to argue that they should leave the union, and stop using the Ruble. At that point, there was very clearly blood in the water and the Communists, really for the first time since the Nazis, started really panicking.
The USSR was never going to be defeated by economics alone, see North Korea. In fact, it's hard to argue the USSR ever recovered from WW1. But the combination of pressures from strong nationalist movements, potential famines from mismanagement, and political illegitimacy is what really did the whole project in.
Wealthy societies become decadent, one symptom of decadence is rank stupidity. Look how thick the average person is today and the kind of slop the average person believes or falls for on the daily basis.