The phrase “simplistic socialists” has been bouncing around the internet. It has no established definition yet, but generally refers to the kind of people (think of the Oakland City Council) whom we call “woke.” They believe in Big Government—confiscatory taxes to redistribute money to poor people, and sketchy schemes that generally are totally untransparent to the public—but they have no idea of the consequences of their actions.
The phrase was introduced by the blogger Matt Yglesias, whose politics are mildly liberal. In an online post analyzing the impact of social media, he wrote:“hard-core identity politics and simplistic socialism [have] performed incredibly well on Facebook.” This was his explanation for why Zuckerberg deliberately steered Facebook toward “posts that created outrage.” Outraged people click more than those who aren’t; they boost Facebook’s advertising and have made Zuckerberg one of the richest men on earth. (And Twitter, under Musk, is even worse.)
Yglesias’s post created a minor furor. What is the role of social media? How culpable are people like Zuckerberg for getting us into the mess that produced Donald Trump? But I don’t intend to rehash that conversation, as important as it is. Instead, I was struck by the phrase “simplistic socialists” because it aptly describes the mindset of the kind of people who are behind wokeism.
One example of simplistic socialists or simplistic socialism is the belief, common in Oakland, that homelessness can be done away with if “the government” would simply build cheap housing for everyone. You hear this all the time from simplistic socialists. Any candidate who promises to “build housing for everyone” is likely to get elected, even though the promise is a lie.
The reason this position is “simplistic” is because the idea is preposterously unmoored from reality. The people who say “Oakland should build housing for everyone” never stop to ask, Where will the money come from? That’s a very simple question; it doesn’t take an Einstein to understand that somebody has to pay the workers who construct the housing, and buy the materials it’s built of. Another example of simplistic socialism is when wokes demand that the police department be defunded or abolished and the money “reimagined” elsewhere. In their fever dream of a police-less city, they never get around to explaining how their plan, if enacted, would deal with the mass criminality that surely would overwhelm Oakland were the police department significantly reduced.
“Simplistic socialism,” in other words, implies that the people espousing it are intellectually challenged. They’re like children who engage in magical thinking. Yet we see simplistic socialism coming from the City Council and Mayor’s office on a daily basis. Whether it’s funding for MACRO (a pathetic waste of money), or anti-violence programs that don’t work, or Carroll Fife’s “Black New Deal”—none of these things can work. If they’re not outrightly unconstitutional, they go against the grain of human nature, and are certainly contrary to our American belief in equality. And they are divisive, pitting various groups against each other. No government may deliberately favor a particular class of people based on skin color, religion, ethnic background, sexual orientation or anything else. People who advance such programs are simplistic socialists.
Yet these people have convinced themselves they’re on to the truth, that those of us who disagree with them are racists; and they spend their political careers trying to win elections and then impose their ideology on everybody. If you look at a Fife, or a Pamela Price, you can see this self-righteousness in full plumage. Now that the Thao recall is underway (and may it prosper!), we’re seeing the early signs of a counter-revolution: We, the people, have had enough of this woke nonsense, and are rising up to get rid of it. I will tell you this: If we can recall both Price and Thao, Oakland will have fired a shot heard around the world, with repercussions that can barely be imagined.
Steve Heimoff