Lewis Carroll’s fantasy novels about Alice’s adventures have many virtues; one such virtue is that they regularly help explain the Trump administration. Indeed, one episode in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass — his sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — illuminates an important aspect of politics and human nature.
Here’s what happens: As Alice is walking through a deep forest, she suddenly realizes that she cannot recall the proper name of anything. She cannot recall that a tree is called a tree; she cannot even recall her own name. She then encounters a fawn and places an arm lovingly around it, and the two of them walk through the forest together as they talk about how they can no longer recall any names at all. Then they step out of the woods into an open field; at that moment, they remember who they are. The fawn remembers that it is a fawn — and that fawns must fear humans — and runs away in fright.
In a press conference last week, our vice president displayed such forgetfulness. In J.D. Vance’s discussion of new restrictions on H‑1B eligibility, he was asked what he understood “socialism” to be. He responded:
“It’s honestly a hard term to define these days. Classically, you would think socialism is about prioritizing workers. And yet in reality, most of the self-described socialists running across the United States of America are going to howl about this announcement today, which is prioritizing American workers over foreign workers. So I don’t know what the term means anymore. I think in reality, what it actually means in the American context is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls’ sports. That’s what united the socialists that I see running across the United States of America today.”
Vance was playing at forgetfulness here: Of course, socialism has little or nothing to do with immigration or gender. But many of us have not forgotten what socialism is: those who want to know “what it actually means in the American context” could look at “Workers Deserve More!” a recent platform statement of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — or at my colleague Alex Nowrasteh’s recent analysis of it.
There are cosmetic aspects of the DSA’s platform that some will find seductive. Much of its rhetorical appeal rests on the consequences it promises, such as a lower cost of living. But as Nowrasteh notes, the DSA’s policies would not actually lower those costs at all. Enacting the DSA’s recommendations would only obscure or reassign those costs – and almost certainly raise them substantially.
More broadly, many of the DSA’s recommendations target political and legal institutions that are central to a free society — the ability to offer, bargain about, and make agreements concerning prices; the right to petition the government; the institution of private property; and a government composed of competing branches and separated powers — for elimination. The DSA platform treats them as hindrances, but these institutions serve as political solutions to basic problems of political life.
For example, a government that makes bad decisions can be petitioned by people who want it to change its ways; separation of powers ameliorates the problem of government capture by factions because that separation makes it harder for factional influences in government to expand. The elimination of these institutions would lead to innumerable problems, but it seems the DSA platform treats such institutions as problems in themselves.
Ultimately, the central idea of socialism is the doctrine that individuals cannot be trusted to make important decisions about themselves; under socialism, such decisions must instead be made by a central, unitary authority.
But that is all very abstract: let me explain.
The DSA’s sleight of hand regarding the cost of living is most evident in the platform’s introductory section, which asks the reader to “imagine taking a day off from work in a future without capitalism.” In this future, you will “work as much as you are able and no more than needed, and you will control your own labor and see it going to good use. It’s not just a job to pay the bills. Speaking of bills, you don’t really have them anymore.” You won’t have to pay the rent or the mortgage anymore, “because comfortable housing is a human right.” Similarly, you won’t have to pay for expenses like food in the same way, either; necessities like food won’t be furnished by “for-profit businesses,” but will instead be “common goods and utilities.” The goal is to “labor for our common good instead of private profit.”
The DSA’s platform promises that, under such a system, you won’t have to worry about costs at all — you won’t “have to think about paying rent or loans at the end of the month, or saving for college, or affording groceries.”
But that language is euphemistic. I guess it is technically true that, under the system that the DSA proposes, you won’t have to work to pay your own bills anymore, and perhaps it is even true (if, again, only technically) that you won’t have to think about paying your own bills anymore.
Notably, however, there is no promise that you won’t have to work — and the problem with the system the DSA advocates is that you’ll have to work enough to pay everyone’s bills. Otherwise, how exactly will entitlements – like the DSA’s universal guarantee of “comfortable housing” – be paid for?
Similarly, turning grocery stores into public utilities won’t make groceries costless; there will still be grocery bills — they’ll just be charged against everyone in a different way. If sufficient food, comfortable housing, and so forth haven’t been produced, then insufficient production becomes everyone’s problem — and so everyone’s needs will dictate the work that must be done. Because the promise that each of us will work “no more than needed” rests on satisfying everyone’s needs, the promised land starts to look much less pleasant – because it looks as if decisions about how much you have to work will no longer be left up to you. Indeed, the DSA’s promises of freedom and equality are in some tension with its prediction that “When we labor for our common good instead of private profit, we can all have a secure and dignified life, and use our time and talents how we wish.”
To satisfy everyone’s needs, the DSA’s plan requires someone – or some entity – to determine how much in labor and how much in taxes will have to be extracted from all of us. Some kind of centralized government will have to determine how much food everyone needs, what kind of comfortable housing everyone is entitled to, how much work will be demanded from everyone, and so forth. That is presumably one reason why the DSA’s proposal to “draft a new Constitution” is necessary for its goal: namely, the creation of “a democratic socialist republic.” When the DSA calls for the toppling of “the entire anti-democratic structure of society,” perhaps what that means is not quite clear – but what we do know is the DSA’s prediction that “complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up.”
Notably, the DSA appears to regard many institutions that respect local, individual choice and allow people to make decisions outside the locus of centralized control as “anti-democratic”; apparently, the DSA wants to put such institutions on the chopping block. These institutions protect individual decision-making that is not made collectively or democratically, but the DSA’s doctrine threatens to remove most such life decisions from private actors. That is ultimately the upshot of a doctrine that guarantees, e.g., comfortable housing for everyone, “universal rent control” and the “right to counsel for all tenants.”
The likely consequence of guaranteeing such legal rights is that a centralized authority would ultimately have to make all final decisions about when, where, and why to build housing — and all related management decisions about how housing must be repaired, used, and maintained. Such programs inevitably draft the judiciary into service as bureaucratic managers; they will acquire new duties to ensure that the standards imposed by the DSA’s vision are being met on a continuing basis.
As Nowrasteh notes, many of the DSA’s proposals rest on a misconception. The misconception is that we can replace the problem-solving capacities of individual choice with those of good management — with managers who can make decisions about the distribution of resources in much the same way that the price system now does. The piñata of goods that the DSA platform promises is remarkable — free college education! Free medical training! A 32-hour work week with full pay and benefits! Universal healthcare at no cost! Government-provided “fair compensation,” even including compensation for “care work”! Reparations! But providing such goods requires more than bursting a piñata.
As Nowrasteh notes, the difficulty in making sound economic decisions is not a problem that “good management” can solve; command-and-control economies run right into agent-principal problems. A business investor who makes bad decisions has skin in the game — he or she will pay the costs of wasted capital, and with enough bad decisions, the business will have to close its doors. A government manager has no skin in the game; there is no real punishment for wasteful decisions. History is replete with schemes that attempt to solve the problem of the missing information that is conventionally conveyed by prices by assuming that it is possible to productively and efficiently manage complex economies primarily through centralized and bureaucratic decision-making: these attempts have an extensive history of failure.
Similarly, the DSA’s platform calls for the nation to “get rid of lobbyists, dark money, and Citizens United,” while demanding public financing for all elections. Such proposals make a great deal of sense if it is true that the government already knows what is best for us and can be trusted to act on that knowledge. If that is true, the government needs no additional advice or public comment; if that is true, then any energy that is consumed by petitioning the government or engaging in electoral advocacy is a waste of valuable resources.
But such assumptions are controversial: In fact, ignorance is prevalent (even in government), knowledge is not free, and the information that is produced when people petition the government is incredibly valuable. The institutions that allow for petitioning the government and participating in public debate have a valuable function — they create all sorts of pressures that lead to better government. Again, if socialists had all the answers to how to make society better, further discussion of how to do it would be a waste of time. In the real world, our knowledge of how to make the world a better place is quite imperfect, and so the institutions we have that allow us to discover possible solutions should be defended and preserved.
Other parts of the DSA’s platform are more direct about the goal of abolishing institutions that stand in the way of centralized government control: The DSA advocates replacing the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary “chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” The Congress that manages the rest of the federal government would be much less complex — because another one of the DSA’s proposals is to “abolish the Senate.” Once again: The constitutional changes that the DSA advocates illuminate its vision of how a socialist society works. In that vision, there is no need to learn anything from the diverse perspectives that emerge from conversations and agreements among people, and there is no need for the arrangements and compromises that evolve from cooperation among multiple, independent branches of government.
Of course, it makes sense that J. D. Vance might forget — or might want to forget — what socialism really is and the extraordinary dangers that centralized decision-making poses to a free society: The president regularly encourages the spread of new kinds of centralized economic decision-making — such as the government’s acquisition of “golden shares,” and its attempts to regulate trade through tariffs and to regulate speech through federal agencies — even while criticizing socialism.
Perhaps someday Vance will do a better job of remembering; perhaps someday he will recall why centralized social control is dangerous and appropriately criticize its advances. I can only hope that the rest of us will do better in remembering the names, and the nature, of things — and reject the invitations that our politicians regularly offer to walk in the forest of forgetfulness.
