Have Your Say

I came across this somewhat-long article on another site, and although it is aimed at American audiences and specifically refers to those individuals who describe themselves politically as being ‘Democrat’, on reading it, the NZ Labour Party, the NZ Gweens and TPM came to mind, so thought I’d post it here.

Hopefully it will be of interest.

‘Modern progressive Democrats are not really communists—at least not in the doctrinaire, Leninist sense of the word.
They don’t have the stomach for the real thing. They don’t want to seize the factories, collectivize agriculture, or impose the grim ration-card equality that characterizes actual communist societies. What they prefer is the aesthetic of revolution without any of the physical or intellectual risk. It is cosplay radicalism. They want the moral thrill of declaring themselves on “the right side of history” while enjoying DoorDash, iPhones, 5 Gig Internet, and the spiritual satisfaction of condemning capitalism while living comfortably on its surplus.
The result is a double imitation of communism: a knockoff of an ideology that was itself a disastrous imitation of economic science. It’s like attending a Star Wars convention dressed as a bargain-bin Stormtrooper while eating imitation krab salad in the convention center cafeteria—synthetic idealism layered atop synthetic theatrics. The performance matters more than principle; the vibe substitutes for the outcome; and the appearance of virtue stands in for the discipline, rigor, and sacrifice required to achieve anything substantive.
Setting aside the theater kid performances of people like Zohran Mamdani, this stylized pseudo-communism has real consequences. Don’t get me wrong, I believe Zohran is as committed to his role as Brad Pitt was to his role as Tristan in Legends of the Fall – but Pitt didn’t actually fight a Grizzly bear and Zohran isn’t going to end capitalism.
Commitment only gets an actor so far.
While progressives may lack the fortitude to implement true communism, they excel at three things: inventing unworkable policies, emotionally extorting the political system into rescuing them when those policies inevitably implode, and denying the wreckage left behind.
Take any major progressive initiative of the past decade—housing, education, homelessness, health care, energy, criminal justice—and you see the pattern. They begin with grand promises, dripping with emotional appeal and moral urgency, and a near-theological conviction that intention is equivalent to execution. If the policy’s design is naive, if its assumptions are wildly optimistic, if basic incentives are ignored, no matter. The moral fervor is what counts. Bureaucracies swell, pilot programs metastasize, tax dollars cascade into the chosen crusade.
And then—like the law of gravity—the physical world asserts itself.
As Snidely Whiplash used to say, “Curses, foiled again!”
Homelessness initiatives premised on “housing first” deliver neither treatment nor safety. Bail reform experiments crafted on ideological abstractions release violent offenders who promptly create new victims. Renewable-only energy schemes produce shortages, blackouts, and skyrocketing costs. Education reforms fixate on equity rhetoric while student outcomes crater. The failures pile up as predictably as a Soviet five-year plan.
And yet—and this is the key point—progressives never accept responsibility. Having cosplayed as revolutionaries, they now perform a different role: the anguished moral witness. The collapse of their policies is never the fault of their flawed design or ideological rigidity. It is always the fault of “underfunding,” “right-wing obstruction,” “systemic forces,” or “bad actors” who failed to behave in accordance with progressive expectations.
This is where the emotional blackmail comes in. When the program underdelivers, the solution is not to revise or retire it; the solution is more money, more support, more commitment. The taxpayer becomes the designated fixer of progressive failures. Every failed initiative becomes a justification for expanding the initiative. Every unintended consequence becomes proof that deeper transformation is needed. The perpetual bailout structure is baked into the ideology.
True communists believed—wrongly, disastrously—that coerced central planning could produce social harmony. Progressive Democrats believe that good intentions, expressed loudly and frequently enough, can override economics, incentives, and human behavior. Both visions are detached from reality, but progressives lack the ideological courage or consistency of their spirit animals. They want the righteousness of revolution without the ration lines, the social prestige of moral fervor without the accountability of the results, which, as history proves, involves a whole lot of death.
And so, their version of “soft communism” persists: theatrical, emotionally manipulative, structurally self-justifying, and endlessly costly—both financially and in terms of human life.
It is a politics of imitation—imitating conviction, imitating competence, imitating solutions. But the bill is very real, and it always lands on the same doorstep: the American taxpayer, who is forced to subsidize not only failed programs, but the self-regarding fantasies that produced them’.

H/T Michael Smith.