Socialism Attacks the Family, Just as Its Inventors Intended

Here is Paul Kengor writing at TheStream.org:

Last year, “socialism” was the most looked-up word at Merriam-Webster.com. That is hardly a surprise. It clearly reflects growing interest, especially with the remarkable surge of lifetime socialist Bernie Sanders, who has won a pile of states in pursuing the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He will eventually have earned over 10 million votes nationwide. Many of those voters have only a hazy idea what socialism entails, but most surely know that it gives the government more control over the so-called “means of production” as well as your wallet and your property, but not as much as outright Communists crave.

American interest in socialism was growing well before Bernie Sanders. A telling marker came in 2011, when a major study by the Pew Research Center found that 49% of Americans aged 18-29 have a positive view of socialism, exceeding those with a positive view of capitalism. What those voters might not realize, but which I know for certain, is that socialism undermines marriage and family: I’ve published an entire book on the subject. What I learned from mining the origins of the movement is that this is not an accident: the founders of socialist movements always intended their system to have this effect.

Intended Consequences

Most obviously, socialism undermines the family economically. Socialism is ineffective, unproductive, and impoverishing. It creates not economic prosperity but backwardness, and often genuine deprivation (see Venezuela). In that way alone, socialism adversely affects what sources as diverse as Pope Francis and Ronald Reagan have described as the “fundamental cell” of society: the family.

But surely socialism’s founders didn’t realize that their system just flat-out didn’t work, right? Actually, they believed that it did — and in one sense it does: It weakens families for the benefit of the state, exactly as it creators meant it to.

Read more: The Stream