The Fear of Cancel Culture Led to the Socialism's New Trendiness

In my latest Federalist piece I look at the comeback of the murderous ideology of Socialism or Communism. It's titled "How Cancel Culture Laid the Groundwork for the Left's Socialist Lurch."

Socialism and Communism have always amounted to the same thing throughout history: totalitarianism, or total control over your personal life. Those who are pushing these ideologies – under the banner of “Democratic Socialists of America” today – aim to control everything you can own or earn or where you may live. Worse, that control extends to what you are permitted to say whom you’re allowed to talk to.

We know that communism took the lives of over 100 million people in the 20th century alone. So why would anyone revisit it, especially in America?

Soviet Communist General Secretary Josef Stalin (Left) with three of his communist comrades, all of whom he later had executed.

As I note in my book, The Weaponization of Loneliness, in order to control people to that extent, you must atomize them. You must cultivate in them the fear of social rejection.  That has been the work of political correctness and cancel culture over the past many decades.  When people are afraid to speak because of the fear of being socially rejected, people more often tell pollsters the politically correct narrative rather than what they really believe.  This false narrative becomes an “opinion cascade,” and can gain ground until it takes over public policy. Ignorant youth are especially susceptible. And that’s where we are.

We need to remember the famous quote:  “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” (Variously attributed to Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, and others.)  This also means that good men say nothing. 

Here’s an excerpt from my piece:

We tend to comply with malicious orders and stupid ideas if we view the alternative as being ostracized. I wrote a book about it because I believe this process shapes just about everything in human affairs. It’s a social contagion that affects what we say, what we think, what we do, and with whom we associate. If we give in to this fear too much, we eventually allow the slavery of socialism to gain power over us.