World Cup vs. Democratic Socialism
The 2026 World Cup is introducing soccer fans to the miracle of free enterprise. Yet as we speak, democratic socialists are about to overwhelm the few remaining centrists within the Democratic Party.
“Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev.”
In 1989, Boris Yeltsin — a Moscow Communist apparatchik whose star was on the rise within the Supreme Soviet and would eventually become the first president of the Russian Federation — took an unexpected detour to an American supermarket in Houston. Yeltsin was astonished and initially believed the supermarket to be a product of some sort of propaganda effort. His aides quickly began touring other supermarkets and discovered that Yeltsin’s experience was not uncommon.
Facing food shortages and bread lines back in Moscow, the visit to this tiny miracle of American free enterprise rattled Yeltsin so badly that on the flight to his next visit in Miami, Yeltsin abandoned his longstanding socialist beliefs and became a capitalist, repeating over and over to his Soviet entourage: “What have they done to our people?”
When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.
"Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice,” remarked Yeltsin. “Not even Mr. Gorbachev."
The supermarket Yeltsin toured in Houston, Texas had over 30,000 products on its shelves. Consider that for a moment — 30,000 products in an era where Big Food hadn’t consolidated every option, from thousands of producers and distributors, on hundreds of trucks, with dozens of employees stocking and restocking, providing American consumers the cheapest and best quality options in a single location that is both a miracle of free enterprise and logistics.
Yeltsin was amazed that such a place could exist outside of New York (believing the Big Apple to be the near peer of Moscow or St. Petersburg). The revelation that every major town — forget city — had something of this quality? The Soviet propaganda simply did not match the experience.
Roughly two years later, Boris Yeltsin would be standing on a tank outside the Russian Duma as Soviet hardliners attempted to oust then-Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991 by means of force.
Yeltsin wanted for Russia what free enterprise had done for America.
The World Cup: Falling In Love with America
It has been 35 years since the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the triumph of American consumerism, free markets, and globalization. Quite literally billions of people have been lifted out of poverty by these miracles. The Pax Americana — the post Second World War peace that has existed since 1945 — protects the sea lanes and a stable world order.
Since the collapse of socialism, we have seen the number of small wars radically decline, and the GDP of the Russian Federation itself — shorn of the Baltic States, Ukraine, and the collection of Central Asian successor states — far higher than the former Soviet Union exercising total control of all of the former 15 Soviet republics in 1991 combined.
If you want to fall in love with America, visit America — so goes the saying.
If you want to hate America, read the newspapers. This is no stain on the honor of the fourth estate, but rather its consumers. Yet beyond the consumerism are a series of modern miracles created by American logistics, cheap energy, and the economic growth.
The videos of World Cup tourists discovering a Buc-ees’ or discovering that chips and salsa (and free ice water) is complimentary rather than expensed should shock us just as much as it shocks our guests. Air conditioning? Somewhere between 43,700 and 175,000 Europeans die from heat related illnesses according to the World Health Organization — compared to 1,200 to 2,300 deaths in the United States from heat each year and on the higher end two times the number of suicides, firearm deaths, and car accidents in the United States combined. Food portions? Americans eat well indeed whether it is steak, seafood, or pizza.
In short, World Cup tourism is reminding America just how good we have it compared to everywhere else in the world. What we take for granted is what the rest of the world admires and why the land of the free still is the home of the brave.
…and unfortunately, the entitled.
It Can Happen Here: Democratic Socialism and American Entitlement
Americans aren’t just born on third base. We are born on third base with a running start toward home plate and the baseball is still ascending into the bleachers like it was smacked by Babe Ruth in his prime.
Yet since the failure of socialism in Eastern Europe we have seen a militant return of what Winston Churchill aptly called “the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery” return to the mainstream of American politics — first in our suburbs, then in our cities.
Forget for a moment the rise of AOC and Mamdani in New York. The creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy have permeated the institutions themselves, right up to the point where in Virginia, the state budget is being used as a piggy bank in ways the media would never tolerate from any Republican governor in the effort to spur economic growth. Grand gestures of cash are given to pacify the masses and keep the Democratic coalition together. Instead of USAID, we get VAAID.
Democratic Socialists, of course, will wrankle at the very idea that they are communists at core. Pinks rather than reds, one might say. Yet the end remains the same — revolution through means peaceful or violent to overthrow the existing order. From Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto:
Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things….Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Kierkegaard argues that the worst sort of tyrant are those who do things on principle, because you can justify a litany of horribles if one on principle.
Democratic socialism and communism differ only in the means, but not the ends or their objectives — and as we have seen in instances where the progressive left holds total sway in power, they are more than happy to use coercion and peer pressure to impose their will upon those who disagree.
To wit, the Wall Street Journal is openly discussing the rise of democratic socialism within the Democratic Party and the helplessness of the “radical centrists” to stem the rising tide of undergraduates who are taking their education and employing it in their politics:
The party’s centrists are alarmed. “The left, the DSA, and the right, the MAGA movement, they’re both very well organized, and those of us that oppose those policies are talking to each other at cocktail parties and wringing our hands,” said Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Long Island Democrat. “But we got to get organized.”
“I agree that people’s economic anxiety is real and we have to address it—I just happen to disagree with their solutions,” Suozzi said.
Precisely what are the solutions of the DSA? Punishing success.
The definitions of freedom remain in place, provided you express the allowed opinions, the permitted liberties, the authorized Second Amendment rights, the admissible religious convictions — whether sacred or secular.
Yet all of it revolves around what Churchill diagnoses as the “gospel of envy” as if the opportunity to achieve is somehow synonymous with achievement in and of itself. Instead of educations, we hand out diplomas. One in three Americans haven’t read a book in the past year. Minimum wages are up and prices correspondingly match. Anyone else tired of paying $10 for a cup of coffee while being asked for a $5 tip when a bag of ground coffee costs the same and lasts two weeks? Or how’s about $20 for lunch when you could make the sandwich at home for $2.50? Don’t get anyone started on starting salaries coming fresh out of college, or the expectation that all of the other ancillaries of life should be paid by their parents until the age of 26 or 30.
Such is the mindset of an all-too-sizeable portion of the upcoming generation, welded together by the unreasonable expectations of Baby Boomers who will gift the most entitled generation ever over $84 trillion dollars through the year 2045. And this incredible wealth is doomed to be taxed by a generation more ready to consume than create? In an America more entitled than grateful? Where an individualism cloaked in socialism triumphs over a personalism which gladly see free minds, free markets, and a free society as the engine for economic growth?
Bear in mind that there are certain things a society requires in order to function. By no means is this some Rothbardian fever dream. Subsidiarity demands that certain functions that cannot be maintained by communities should and ought to be maintained by the government — education, transportation, energy infrastructure, national defense, economic development, planning, our justice system, and so forth. Yet the principle of solidarity also makes demands on behalf of individual initiative, localism, families, civic organizations, parks, charities and the like.
The fusing of government and society to produce individual outcomes is the error.
Regardless as to its soft or hard versions, socialism fails everywhere it is tried. That we as Americans are so spoiled as to refuse to see what others see in America? Not only is it a moral failure of our education system, but it is a principal failure of our institutions as they struggle to understand why socialism is surging in America’s suburbs and urban cores in spite of common sense and the evidence.
Facts are, I would rather be surrounded by World Cup tourists who love America rather than the self-styled credentialed elites who secretly and then openly hate this country. America doesn’t have to be perfect to be loved.
Will Centrists Be Allowed to Come Home to the GOP?
Ah yes — the million-dollar question.
If there is one thing Republicans are very good at, it is internecine warfare. Democrats are too difficult to beat, so goes the reasoning, so the purity contests are the shortest path to influence and power.
Obviously, Republicans have to believe in something. For as long as the conservative movement has been the centerpiece of the Grand Old Party — and at present, conservatives are most certainly a minority in their own ranks — we have held to certain principles. Free minds, free markets, free enterprise, and a free society. Or as the RPV Creed argues:
That the free enterprise system is the most productive supplier of human needs and economic justice,
In fact, it is our first plank.
The very first thing that unites the whole of the Republican coalition. In short — if you believe this, then welcome to the Republican Party.
We have other clarifications and ramifications. That rights come with responsibilities. Fiscal responsibility and fiscal restraint. Individual liberty through constitutional limitations. Peace through strength. That faith is essential.
Yet these are ordinal for a reason. Certain things are pre-political, yet a defense of the free enterprise system is the first article. We can disagree on the how, but among Republicans our faith in the free enterprise system is sacrosanct precisely because it is the best system — not a perfect system — but by far superior to every other system that has ever been utilized or abused by mankind.
We should remember that the origin story of the Republican Party in America was predicated on human freedom. Our track record on human rights is impeccable: Republicans fought and bled to end slavery, Republicans fought against Jim Crow, Republicans fought against segregation and proposed the first Civil Rights Act, it was Republicans who argued against the dehumanization of the welfare state, Republicans who championed the basic right to exist and fought the war against terrorism.
When Democrats argued it could never be done, it was Republicans under President Ronald Reagan who successfully broke the Soviet Empire.
Now we should remember that Republicans worked in coalition with Democrats to achieve much of this. Many of these Democrats came over to the Republican coalition in due course — in fact, many of the present administration in Washington are former Democrats pushed out of their own party.
If the Democrats continue their inexorable push towards democratic socialism, will Republicans have the courage to set down the internecine conflict in order to focus on a clear and present danger?
I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know it is a good question to raise early and ask ourselves to consider in a world whose politics are about to change rapidly with the onset and advancement of artificial intelligence, work patterns, and an increasingly dangerous world.
Here’s hoping that we see in ourselves what others see in us.
SHAUN KENNEY is the senior editor for The Republican Standard.