United States of Socialism: Who’s Behind It. Why It’s Evil. How to Stop It. by Dinesh D’Souza

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THE INVENTION OF INVENTION
AMERICA AND THE IDEAL OF THE SELF-MADE MAN
Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice; it is
not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
—WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN
America was founded and built on principles antithetical to socialism.
Strangely enough, two people who recognized this were Marx and Engels.
Marx called America a “bourgeois society” and later noted that capitalism
had developed in America “more rapidly and more shamelessly than in any
other country.” Engels stressed the distinctiveness of America, and while he
insisted that “there cannot be any doubt” of the ultimate triumph of the
working class, he admitted “the peculiar difficulties for a steady
development of a workers party” in the United States. Only their
doctrinaire faith in the inevitability of socialism convinced Marx and
Engels that socialism would come to America at all.
In 1906 the economist Werner Sombart published a book titled Why Is
There No Socialism in the United States? Sombart knew that socialism had
been all the rage in Europe. There were socialist movements, socialist
parties, ultimately socialist governments. In other words, socialism was in
the political mainstream. But not in America. Sure, America had socialists,
and soon it would have a socialist candidate, Eugene Debs, running for
president. Yet Sombart recognized, as Marx and Engels did, that socialism
would have trouble gaining an enduring foothold in mainstream American
politics. Sombart’s explanation for this was that the American workingman
has it too good. His stomach is too full for him to become a socialist
agitator. In America, in Sombart’s words, “all socialist utopias have come to
grief on roast beef and apple pie.”
Another man who seems convinced that socialism isn’t coming to
America is Donald Trump. In his 2019 State of the Union, Trump
resoundingly affirmed that “America will never be a socialist country.” He
echoed the same theme in his 2020 address. It has now become a standard
line at his rallies, guaranteed to evoke whoops and cheers. For Trump—
unlike for Marx, Engels and Sombart—this is not a matter of sociological
analysis or historical prophecy. Trump’s point is that he and other
Americans must fight hard to prevent socialism from being established
here.
It’s obvious what Trump is against, but what is he actually for? And the
same question can be asked more broadly of the Trump movement, of the
Republican Party and of conservatives. What do conservatives want to
conserve? We can answer this question by examining Trump’s official 2016
campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Or his unofficial 2020
campaign theme, “Keep America Great.” For me, all of this raises a prior
question: How did America become great in the first place? It would seem
that this quality—the spirit that built America—is what we are trying to
conserve and revive.
As an immigrant, I became interested early on in this question of the
building of America. When I arrived in Arizona in 1978 as an exchange
student from India, I was simply stunned by the opulence of ordinary
American life. Not the life of the “rich and famous” but the lives of
everyday Americans. Like those of my host parents: a small-town
postmaster and his wife; the local pastor and his wife; a rancher and his
second wife; two public schoolteachers. These were ordinary people, yet
they lived so well—a second car, a kitchen “island,” a nice backyard—and
they were all such characters who lived unique and interesting lives.
Shortly after I was settled in the small town of Patagonia, Arizona, just
sixty miles from the Mexican border, my host family proposed to take me
on a sightseeing trip. “We’ll take you to the Grand Canyon,” they said.

United States of Socialism: Who’s Behind It. Why It’s Evil. How to Stop It. by Dinesh D’Souza