Marian Tupy writes for National Review Online about the need to revisit some fundamental political facts.
The novelist Tom Wolfe gave us the phrase in a 1987 essay about the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, who decided that hygiene, monogamy, and other rules of polite society were bourgeois inventions. They threw them out, moved into communes, and were visited by afflictions that modern medicine had not seen in generations. Doctors at the free clinics started teaching sanitation lessons that Victorian housewives once took for granted. Wolfe called that the Great Relearning: Civilization that discards its hard-won knowledge does not leap ahead to utopia but is dragged back to the starting line.
We are living through a Great Relearning of our own.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a set of propositions seemed settled beyond dispute. Central planning had impoverished half of Europe while markets enriched the other half. Prices were not arbitrary impositions but signals carrying more information than any ministry could gather. The right to own a business, to keep the fruits of one’s labor, and to trade freely across borders had lifted more human beings out of poverty than every charity in history combined. They were the conclusions of an experiment run across a continent, with a control group on either side of a barbed wire line.
A generation later, those conclusions have been forgotten. Voters in wealthy democracies, and the young above all, are electing self-described democratic socialists who promise to repeal economics by decree. In New York, a democratic socialist won the mayoralty in November on a platform of frozen rents, city-owned grocery stores, and an expropriation of someone else’s wealth. The voters in Washington, D.C., are all but certain to elect a similar candidate. The 20th-century socialists buried hecatombs of corpses. Yet it is the intellectual corpse of socialism that is being revived.
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