What exactly is a socialist????
Socialist (
noun): A devout adherent of the one true faith known as Socialism, a secular religion whose central sacrament is the belief that human nature can be perfected through enough government coercion, wealth redistribution, and the ritual denunciation of "greed" (defined as anyone producing more than they consume under the new rules).
Core tenets include (this list is not all encompassing):
- Eschatological Promise: Heaven on Earth (equality, justice, free everything) is always just one more Five-Year Plan, election, or purge away. Past failures, USSR, Venezuela, Cuba, etc., were never "real" Socialism, much like how every apocalyptic cult reinterprets the failed Rapture.
- Evangelism Through Deception: Public messaging must always emphasize compassionate "democratic" or "progressive" goals like "helping the poor" and "fairness" or even "social justice". Actual objectives (centralized power, elimination of private property incentives, and the administrative state's permanent expansion) are to be obscured with euphemisms, academic jargon, and claims that "this time the right people will be in charge." almost always performed by stating how "democratic" it is, adding Democratic to Socialism ensures that "this time" the "right people" are in charge. Honesty about necessary trade-offs is heresy.
- Infallible Tribal Apologetics: Any policy, statement, or behavior originating from the Sanctified Left is to be defended with messianic fervor, no matter how economically illiterate, culturally deranged, or practically catastrophic. Examples include celebrating inflation as "equity," defending open borders while ignoring wage suppression and crime data, or insisting biological males in women's sports/locker rooms represent "progress" rather than observable absurdity. Criticism of these positions is not evidence-based disagreement, it's "hate," "fascism," or "punching down."
Like any zealous religion, Socialism features saints (Che, modern academics who never met a payroll), martyrs (those "betrayed" by insufficient radicalism), and inquisitors (cancel culture enforcers rooting out deviationism). Its followers exhibit remarkable cognitive immunity to empirical results: mountains of data on incentives, calculation problems (Mises/Hayek), and body counts are met with the theological retort, "But capitalism kills too!" (usually via creative accounting that counts car accidents and poverty under market systems but not gulags or famines under the alternatives).
In practice, the Socialist is less an economist than a moral theologian who has mistaken envy for virtue and state compulsion for charity. They will lecture you about "late-stage capitalism" from their iPhone while defending every excess of their co-religionists, because admitting trade-offs or failures would collapse the faith. The rest of us just live in the results.
