The blind leading the blind is not just a euphemism but the blunt truth!
Look at it this way. When Mao Zedong took power in China on October 1, 1949, the streets filled with joy. Millions believed a golden age of freedom and prosperity had arrived. They never imagined the decades of terror that followed. Mao’s socialist regime would go on to kill an estimated 60 to 70 million of its own people through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and relentless political purges.
The same blindness gripped Russia. After the Bolshevik Revolution and the founding of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, supporters celebrated the end of the old order. Lenin’s successors, especially Stalin, turned the dream into one of history’s greatest killing fields. Tens of millions died by execution, famine, and the camps. Germans who cheered Hitler’s rise heard him declare, “We are socialists!” Few grasped that their new order would produce industrialized murder on a scale that still defies comprehension.
In every case, the pattern was identical. Ordinary people embraced the promise of equality and justice. They dismissed warnings as exaggeration or propaganda. They were certain their version of socialism would be different—more humane, more rational, more carefully controlled. They never saw the camps, the starvation, the secret police, or the mass graves coming.
American socialists today repeat the same confident claim. Many openly call themselves socialists or democratic socialists. They insist that history’s body count has nothing to do with them. America is exceptional, they say. Our institutions are stronger. Our culture is better.
They claim: “We can adopt economic controls, central planning, wealth redistribution, and expanded state power without sliding into tyranny; it won’t happen here.” That is exactly what the Chinese, Russians, and Germans believed.
Socialism does not merely redistribute wealth. It concentrates power.
Once the state claims the right to decide what is produced, who owns it, and how it is allocated, the logic of control expands. Dissent becomes sabotage. Inequality becomes counter-revolution. The machinery built to deliver justice is easily turned against anyone who stands in the way. History shows no lasting exception.
American socialists have the bloodiest century of socialist experiments laid out before them—China, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Cuba, North Korea—and still insist the outcome will be different this time.
They have forgotten, or chosen to ignore, what socialism actually brings: poverty for the many, privilege for the connected, and coercion for anyone who resists. They believe they can manage the power, limit the damage, and stop short of the abyss. But power, once concentrated, has a record of escaping its handlers.
What if they can’t?
What if the same forces that produced mass death elsewhere operate according to the same logic here? What if the progressive confidence that “this time is different” is simply the latest version of the same fatal naïveté? The people of China, Russia, and Germany never saw it coming either. That did not spare them.
Will America finally learn from history and be spared—or become just another torn page in the scrapbook of failed nations?
What is your answer?