As I listen to the Democratic presidential clowndidates ratchet up their talk about the merits of wealth redistribution, I find myself wondering just how much the average liberal voter knows about socialism.  I suspect that a lot of low-information folks have an innocuous view of socialism as nothing more than a compromise between communism and capitalism.

This is precisely what the Radical Left wants voters to believe, but it’s an absolute lie.  Karl Marx referred to socialism as “a transitional stage of society between capitalism and communism.”  In other words, he saw socialism only as a temporary, intermediate step, with communism as the long-term goal.

Make no mistake about it, communism is the real goal of most Democrats, but they realize they can’t come right out and admit it.  Even a radical subversive like Barack Obama figured out that his only hope for getting elected was to lie about his intentions.  And it worked.  But because of his laziness, lack of intelligence, and overall incompetence, he failed in his goal to fundamentally transform America into a socialist/communist country.

Socialism (a word I will used hereafter to include its extreme form, communism) goes hand in hand with class warfare, which has been a fact of life throughout recorded history.  The sad truth is that there is an inherent desire in human beings to prosper without effort, and it is the repression of this desire that makes for a civilized society.

It’s when the repressive factors are eased, or completely removed, that the emotions that fan the embers of class warfare — guilt, envy, and covetousness — are unleashed.  At its worst, this has resulted in bloody uprisings like the French and Bolshevik Revolutions.

As Tocqueville noted, “There exists … in the human heart a depraved taste for equality which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.”  Simply put, many people, believing they can never hope to achieve the level of success they see others enjoying, find comfort in seeing the possessions and achievements of others destroyed.

Enter socialism, an ideological system that promises nirvana but in reality delivers nothing but misery to the masses.  Taking advantage of the basest instincts of human nature, socialism appeals to the desire of people who yearn to drag those who are successful down to their own level of misery.

Ignoramuses, from a childlike AOC to an old fogie like Bernie Sanders, either do not understand the realities of socialism or are so overwhelmed by their own envy and anger that they cannot resist its lure.  As a result, they tout socialism as the great social-justice equalizer, which sounds almost too good to be true to the hopelessly naïve, the lazy, and the pathologically envious.

The problem is that socialism conflicts with the reality that Nature separates human beings into strata according to such characteristics as ability, ambition, intelligence, and determination.  This is why Nature defeats all schemes intended to equalize results.  No matter how many laws the Supreme Court overturns, no matter how many unconstitutional laws are passed, and no matter how willing the government is to use force to get people to do things that are contrary to their moral beliefs, in the end human nature prevails.

Even though socialism does not work for the masses, it works exceptionally well for the ruling elites who promote it, because they are not bound by the rules they impose on others.  Stalin did not live in poverty.  Castro did not live in poverty.  And even today, Maduro does not live in poverty.  Some animals really are more equal than others.

Through one left-wing revolution after another, history has recorded little change in the lives of the proletariat.  The only two things that change for them are the power holders who control their lives and the systems used to wield that control.  In the words of Benjamin the donkey in George Orwell’s classic, Animal Farm:  “Windmill or no windmill … life would go on as it had always gone on — that is, badly.”

Meaning that if the Radical Left ever succeeds in implementing true socialism in America, millions of morally challenged, uninformed voters will be angrily disappointed when they discover they are far worse off under socialism than they were under capitalism.

And even if one were to argue that some people at the lowest end of the income ladder are better off after so‑called socialist revolutions, the reality is that such people give up virtually all freedom in exchange for guarantees of a cheap roof over their heads and a few crumbs of food each day.  Visit Cuba and Venezuela if you doubt this.

Nevertheless, millions of voters still support the concept of wealth redistribution, because they naively believe they are net beneficiaries of the system.  As Frederic Bastiat put it, “The State is the great fictitious entity by which everyone expects to live at the expense of everyone else.”

How can people actually believe such a canard when a cursory study of human history makes it clear that socialism always ends in poverty, misery, and a loss of freedom for the masses?  Thomas Sowell succinctly answered this question when he said, “Everything is new if you are ignorant of history.  That is why ideas that have failed repeatedly in centuries past reappear again, under the banner of ‘change,’ to dazzle people and sweep them off their feet.”

In the unlikely event the Dirty Dem clowndidate who wins his party’s nomination beats Donald Trump in 2020, it will mean we have passed the tipping point where the number of bedazzled, low-information voters is at last sufficient to implement full-blown socialism in America.  And if that happens, woe unto those same voters when they come to realize, far too late, that socialism is nothing more than a scorched-earth philosophy of destruction that always brings with it a brutal dictatorship and total loss of liberty.