To answer the question of where socialist ideas come from, we need to turn to the schools and universities. It is here where many of the journalists, reporters, pundits, and politicians received their worldview.

Academics have many fashionable theories as to how things should work in society and the world, many of them utopian, but ultimately they are incorrect. The late William F. Buckley, Jr., famously wrote: “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” He went on to explain why:

Not, heaven knows, because I hold lightly the brainpower or knowledge or generosity or even the affability of the Harvard faculty: but because I greatly fear intellectual arrogance, and that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise. In the deliberations of two thousand citizens of Boston I think one would discern a respect for the laws of God and for the wisdom of our ancestors which does not characterize the thought of Harvard professors-who, to the extent that they believe in God at all, tend to believe He made some terrible mistakes which they would undertake to rectify; and, when they are paying homage to the wisdom of our ancestors, tend to do so with a kind of condescension toward those whose accomplishments we long since surpassed.

There are a couple of reasons why I think the academic elite are at odds with the common man. It could be due to the fact that they work day to day in an environment that is very different from most folks. By that I mean, those outside the education system have jobs where they can be fired for poor performance or other unacceptable behavior. Whereas those working in academia have tenure and cannot be fired except in the most extreme situations. They also hold doctorate degrees, which elevates them educationally (at least in a narrow field of study) above the average person. This gives them a sense of superiority, that their opinions, even on topics outside their field, should be granted greater weight. Modern liberal doctrine also makes the claim repeatedly that it has a monopoly on compassion. We constantly hear from the left how mean and uncaring conservatives are. When you combine those two elements — the semi utopian world of permanent employment with perpetual paychecks, along with feelings of intellectual and moral superiority — you get someone who believes they can, and has a right, to reshape society to conform to their ‘enlightened’ worldview. Invariably that worldview has a postmodernist foundation.

One can go back as far as ancient Greece for the beginnings of socialistic ideas. The earliest theoretically formulations of socialism can be found in the writings of Plato. In The Laws, Plato envisioned the abolition of private property and the communal sharing of all things, including wives.

However, the origins of modern liberal thought can be found in the writings of German and French philosophers and academics such as Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Marcuse, Heidegger, Fichte, et al. Most people have heard of Karl Marx as the founder of communism or socialism (although it was Friedrich Engels who did the original work that Marx later expanded on), but the other names are a little less well known to the general public. All of these people contributed in varying degrees to postmodernism. Their battle was to reshape the world in much the same way that the Enlightenment changed the world.

The dominant ideas that emerged from this anti-enlightenment movement are as follows: There are no objective truths capable of being discovered; all interpretations are equally valid. Individuality is an illusion; your idea of self is a social construct and malleable. “Reality” is constructed by language and those in power. “Reason” is a Eurocentric tool of oppression. Values are socially subjective.

Yet, when you point out the logical contradictions in modern liberalism, they merely brush them aside dismissively. They proclaim there is no truth, yet they have the only truth (postmodernism). They say all values are subjective, yet racism, sexism, and homophobia are all bad. Tolerance is sacrosanct until the left gets power, then they institute political correctness. All cultures are equal, but the West is especially deserving of criticism and contempt. So the left is irrational and contradictory, yet this is considered acceptable precisely because it is illogical. Logic and reason are part of the old ways of modernist thinking and therefore rejected by postmodernists.

Another aspect of academics having been so influenced by European authors and philosophers, especially the French, is their disrespect of American revolutionary principles. They believed in ideas such as free will, truth, reason and natural rights. They were against government with unlimited powers because of the corrupting influence of too much power in too few hands. Government, while a necessary evil, must be kept small and in check. They believed that a people needed to be virtuous and moral in order to maintain a free republican form of government.

By contrast, the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau were the foundation of the French Revolution. Rousseau believed that human nature is essentially good and that society corrupts people. Nature has no inherent laws or constraints. He emphasized feelings, passion and instinct over reason. Rousseau thought mankind could be just and good without virtue or effort. Rousseau was against private property and believed that most material possessions should be state controlled. He believed the individual does not matter, only the idea of a general will (not necessarily the same as a majority). This ‘general will’ is a political creature with a life of its own, to direct the people by force if necessary.

Rousseau required people to surrender their individual rights to a collective body. This shows the foundational differences between modern liberals and conservatives in America. It explains why liberals have contempt for America’s founding principles, and identify with the French Revolution. In essence, the American left chose the wrong revolution. They rejected the American experiment in liberty and individualism, and chose Rousseau’s fantasy of social equality by force of government. It is a deep rooted and fundamental difference in worldviews. Liberals, in the words of Tocqueville, would prefer equality in slavery to inequality in freedom.

The vast majority of those teaching in our colleges and universities subscribe to the philosophy and theories of these postmodernists. So is it any wonder why students indoctrinated with such ideas come out of school marching in lockstep for socialism.

Students are taught that capitalism is evil and doomed to fail because of corruption and greed (as if there is no greed or corruption in socialist societies). But did countries create better conditions for their people when socialist policies were put into practice?

It is alleged that socialism is for the people; that it puts ‘need’ ahead of ‘greed’. Aside from the fact they don’t tell you who gets to decide what the needs are and who has to pay for it, this is a myth. The left knows that the poor in capitalist countries are far better off both in material possessions and opportunity to improve their lives compared to socialist nations. In fact, socialism creates more poverty, while an elite privileged class of intellectuals and bureaucrats lives in luxury and gives the orders. All of the big names who contributed to the various postmodern and socialist theories were people from solidly upper middle to upper class backgrounds. Karl Marx never held a real job and was mostly subsidized by his wealthy friend Engels or borrowed money from family. In fact, Marx’s own mother once complained that she wished her son spent more time making capital rather than writing about it (i.e. Das Kapital).

Socialism is supposed to be morally superior to capitalism because of its alleged altruistic focus on helping people. We are told socialist leaders are concerned primarily with the wellbeing of the citizenry. However, there are countless examples in history that refutes this. Stalin had millions of his own people tortured, murdered, subjected to starvation and other deprivations, or sent to Siberian slave labor camps. The German National Socialists (Nazis) killed around 10-12 million people between 1933-1945. In China there were 30 million deaths between 1959-1961. All in all, from 1900-1987, totalitarian governments murdered approximately 110 million of their own people. When Cuba became a communist nation it saw a drastic decline in its standard of living, mostly due to the best-educated and enterprising Cubans emigrating to the United States. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Fidel Castro had urged the Soviet Union to make a preemptive nuclear strike on America, being prepared to sacrifice Cuba for the victory of worldwide socialism. In many ways it is the academic elite, to a great degree, who are responsible for the mass slaughter of millions of innocent human beings.

It is not true that socialism is inevitable for this or any country. The people did not decide without influence to destroy their freedoms and economic prosperity. It is the academics that are shaping public opinion, for the average person did not read nor popularize the esoteric writings of dialectical materialism.

Socialism is philosophically grounded in the irrational assumptions of postmodernism, and therefore doomed to failure. Unfortunately, many people trust the ideas of sheltered academics in ivory towers, who inject the poison which destroys liberty and Western civilization.