Socialism for the Rich

John Steinbeck had us pegged decades ago:

“Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?’ Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.”I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”

The same people shrieking that AOC wants to turn America into Venezuela *love* that rich people receive tons of freebies from the state and, in their gratitude for this redistribution of wealth, cheat on their taxes.  They love it.  They admire it.  Under the opium mind fog of Libertarianism, they have convinced themselves that it is an act of patriotism, as well as being “wise as a serpent”. And they do not mind that they themselves are being robbed when men like Trump do this to them.  Because, as the temporarily embarrassed capitalists they imagine themselves to be, they aspire to join the ranks of the those who benefit from socialism for the rich.

Of course, at some level, they are also aware that what they aspire to is immoral and a violation of “You shall not steal”. So, as people with guilty consciences do, they turn to those poorer and less powerful than themselves and scold them for piddly uses of welfare. They subject them to drug tests. They cut their kids off CHIP and health care. They fret that some desperate refugee might get a “free’ vaccination, thereby ruining our economy. They live out the truth of Lyndon Johnson’s observation: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”