History has clearly shown us that socialism isn’t the cure

Multiple forms of socialism, from hard Stalinism to European redistribution, continue to fail.

Russia and China are still struggling with the legacy of genocidal communism. Eastern Europe still suffers after decades of Soviet-imposed socialist chaos.

Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea and Venezuela are unfree, poor and failed states. Baathism — a synonym for pan-Arabic socialism — ruined the postwar Middle East.

The soft-socialist European Union countries are stagnant and mostly dependent on the U.S. military for their protection.

In contrast, current American deregulation, tax cuts and incentives have produced the strongest economy in the world.

So why, then, are two of the top three Democratic presidential contenders — Bernie Sanders and ElizabethWarren — either overtly or implicitly running on socialist agendas? Why are the heartthrobs of American progressives — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, D-N.Y., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., — calling for socialist redistributionist schemes?

Why do polls show that a majority of American millennials have a favorable view of socialism?

There are lots of catalysts for the new socialism.

Massive immigration is changing the demography of the United States. Some 27% of California residents were born outside of America. Many take for granted that government will provide them an array of social services and they become supportive of progressive socialism.

Then there’s the strange leftward drift of the very wealthy in Silicon Valley, corporate America and onWall Street. Some feel guilty about their unprecedented wealth so they champion redistribution. Yet higher taxes hardly affected the influential and monied classes. Instead, redistributionist taxation hurts the struggling middle classes.

In California, it’s become hip for wealthy leftists to promote socialism from their Malibu, Menlo Park or Mill Valley enclaves, while still living as privileged capitalists. Meanwhile, it proved nearly impossible for the middle classes of Stockton and Bakersfield to cope with the reality of crushing taxes and terrible social services.

Barack Obama, as a candidate and then as president, used all sorts of cool socialist slogans, from “spread the wealth around” and “now is not the time to profit” to “you didn’t build that” and “at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

Universities bear some blame too. Their manipulation of the federal government to guarantee student loans empowered them to jack up college costs without any accountability.

More than 45 million borrowers now struggle with nearly $1.6 trillion in collective student debt, with climbing interest. A generation of mostly urban youth feels cheated that their high-priced degrees didn’t earn them competitive salaries. They will never be able to pay off what they owe, and want some entity to pay off their debts.

In paradoxical fashion, teenagers considered mature enough to take on gargantuan loans were warned that the world outside their campus sanctuaries was downright mean, sexist, racist, homophobic and unfair.

Finally, doctrinaire Republicans for decades mouthed orthodoxies of free rather than fair trade. They embraced the idea of creative destruction of industries, but without worrying about the real- life consequences for the unemployed in the hollowed out red-state interior.

Add up a lost generation of woke and broke college graduates, waves of impoverished immigrants without much knowledge of American economic traditions, wealthy advocates of boutique socialism and asleep-at-the-wheel Republicans, and it becomes clear why historically destructive socialism is suddenly seen as cool.

Regrettably, sometimes the naive and disaffected must relearn that their pie-in-the sky socialist medicine is far worse than the perceived malady of inequality.

And unfortunately, when socialists gain power, they don’t destroy just themselves. They usually take everyone else down with them as well.