Here’s a 2½-minute video of Secretary of State Marco Rubio talking about socialism, communism, and his vision of America. It’s a bit Ayn Rand-ish, and I ignored the bit about God. (I don’t know the narrator, but it appears to be a “media personality” named Jillian Michaels, a woman of conservative views.
Rubio is speaking about “radical leftism” and its goal of “social justice” that, he thinks, is really acting out a mindset of “poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation. . . “.
Have a listen and tell me that part of this doesn’t resonate with you; and forget it’s Marco Rubio speaking and just listen to the message. Of course I’ll get labeled an “alt-righter” for posting this, but I don’t care. I sent the video to several of my center-left friends, and in general they liked it (except for the God part).
Marco Rubio is a clown and an embarrassment. An ideal society is a mix of capitalism and socialism. It’s called a mixed economy. It’s called social democracy. It’s what Nordic countries have been doing. Rubio is too stupid to understand any of this.
Are you sure he’s stupid, and you are smarter than he is? Or do you just disagree with his politics. Nearly all of us do accept some form of socialism, including me, as I am for Medicare, Social Security, and so on. Do you think Rubio doesn’t know that. I think you’re missing his point, which is to dig out the real motivations of much of “progressivism.”
Whose ideal society are you referring to, and how do you make this determination? Do you really think that Rubio is stupid, or do you just disagree with him? Perhaps social democracies, whatever they are, can exist in smaller countries with homogeneous populations, but does that come even close to describing the United States in the 21st Century?
I’ll let people duke it out here, but the rules are do not make too many comments, no individual one-on-one fights, and BE RESPECTFUL and polite to your “opponents.”
DSA is not social democracy. Social democracy used to be called evolutionary socialism. The goal was socialism and the means was parliamentary democracy (and a swearing off of violence to achieve one’s political ends, while communists called for a violent revolution). But social democracy did not lead to socialism anywhere. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland are capitalist liberal democracies. And there is no expectation today that, after about 100 years, they are still on the road to socialism.
Today, if you call for the collectivization of the means of production you are not a social democrat, you are a socialist or communist. Today’s socialist claim to have made peace with democracy. The problem though is that there is no electoral route to socialism/communism. In no country has a socialist/communist party ever won an electoral majority (not even in Chile in the early 1970s).
I recommend two books by the very empirically-minded sociologist Lane Kenworthy (professor at the University of Arizona):
In the second book, Kenworthy writes
Exactly right about the distinction between Nordic social democracy and the dopey mouthing of the word “Socialism” common to both Left and Right in the US.
In the 1980s, the Swedish Social Democatic majority in the Riksdag enacted the Meidner Plan, a gradual, incremental way to give workers’ organizations substantial ownership in private corporations. It proved relatively unpopular, and was neutered a few years later by an elected center-right government. The SocDems never tried to resurrect it when they returned to power, because very few, including amongst workers, favored it. So much for doctrinaire (even incremental) Socialism in Sweden.
The Nordic countries are not a “mix of capitalism and socialism”, they are capitalist economies with a degree of redistributive taxation to fund social provision. That is indeed “social democracy”, but the term “social” is much weaker than the term “socialism”.
The Nordic countries are not doing anything fundamentally different from the US, though there are differences of degree.
Maybe of interesting to readers of this website:
Sheri Berman: Five myths about socialism. Washington Post, March 1, 2019
https://archive.ph/lyove
Berman is professor of political science at Barnard College. She is the author of the very good The primacy of politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century, Cambridge UP, 2006.
Her new book will be The Political Consequences of Economic Ideas: Neoliberalism, the Left, and the Fate of Democracy, Oxford UP, May 4, 2027.
But her next book holds out no hope for socialism, according to the last paragraph of the publisher’s description:
<
blockquote>Sweeping from the interwar crisis years and the postwar “golden age” through the Clinton-Blair era to the rise of MAGA Republicanism and Orbán-style illiberalism, this book lays the foundation for the path forward: one aimed not only at rebuilding the center-left’s support and identity, but at strengthening democratic capitalism itself.
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blockquote>
The term “socialism” is reasonably well-defined. E.g. after Googling the word:
AI overview: “Socialism is an economic and political system where the community or the government owns and controls the main parts of production, such as big businesses, factories, and resources, instead of private owners.”
Wikipedia: “Socialism is an economic and political philosophy … characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.”
M-W dictionary: “any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods”
Dictionary.com: “a theory or system of social organization that advocates the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, capital, land, etc., by the community as a whole, usually through a centralized government.”
Oxford reference: “An economic system in which the means of production are controlled by the state.”
American right-wingers go wrong is saying that a capitalist economy, along with taxation to fund universal healthcare etc is “socialism”. American left-wingers go wrong in the same way, suggesting that the Nordic economies are “socialist”. Nope, they’re capitalist.
True that. We know, from the historical record, that state ownership of the means of production does not work, and we also understand theoretically why it cannot work [János Kornai: The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism, Princeton, 1992]. So what then is socialism today for those who still hold it out as an ideal?
We also know that there is no electoral route to socialism. Socialism was always imposed by violence. (Apropos, did you hear that 80-year old leader of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega just declared there will be no more elections in Nicaragua. Ortega, the leader of the Sandinista socialist revolution in Nicaragua, was a darling of the left in the 1980s.)
Yale University political economist John Roemer, now 81 years old, has thought a lot about what socialism could be if it’s not state ownership of the means of production + political dictatorship.
John Roemer: What is 21st-century Socialism? Project Syndicate, February 11, 2020
https://archive.ph/H1gS0
John Roemer: What is socialism today? Conceptions of a cooperative economy. International Economic Review, 62(2), May 2021, 571-598
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/iere.12498
I disagree with Rubio on so many levels that I would break the rules in any meaningful response.
‘Rhetoric’ would be my one-word response.
I would love to know what you object to. “Rhetoric” is an interesting response, and I can only imagine what you mean. I assume that some other rhetoric might be more appealing.
That was my thought. When a progressive like Mamdani says the opposite, it wouldn’t be rhetoric.
There is something curious to me about referring to Mamdani as a progressive. It is a bit like saying Pee Wee Herman is like James Earl Jones because both are actors. One thing I will say about Mamdani is that he has elevated glibness to high art!
“A poisonous resentment” … I could break down the speech line by line. For the record, as a youth as was conservatively inclined. Voted for Maggie, six months later got on a plane, landed in Johannesburg and was a liberal. Notice the lowercase political persuasions.
Today, I would describe myself as a middle-of-the-road liberal. And depending on your perspective, that would make me alt-right or a leftie.
To elucidate where my politics lie… https://romscorner.com/2026/02/24/my-politics/ I’m done now before I am in trouble.
Whether you disagree with him on many other things is certainly not the point here. The point is whether you agree with anything he says, like the motivations of extreme “progressives.” It’s not helpful to say that because you disagree a lot with Rubio then you would use foul language on this site.
As someone with a deep disbelief in free will, I am always a little circumspect when dealing with motivations … my own and those of other people.
For the record, I was referring to the segment of Rubio’s speech.
I guess my initial reaction would be that his speech seemed so vague and generalizing that one can glean little of concrete worth from it. Contrast it to, e.g., the article by Helen Pluckrose that Coel linked to in Friday’s Hili Dialogue, and one can immediately see a stark difference between a meaningful discussion of the issues and a general diatribe.
Rubio’s is the argument that conservatives have long made: that Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Medicare and the like, progressive taxation, public schools and universities etc are “socialism/communism.” Everything is level.
Bernie Sanders calls himself a Socialist but he also says that he doe not advocate government ownership of the means of production, although as a young undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the early ’60s he apparently did. He’s really a New Deal Democrat. So am I.
Marco Rubio certainly is not stupid but he is very shallow. Listening to his words about imposing terror and violence made me think if you substituted “Trump’s MAGA agenda” for “communism” and “socialism” in his speech, his words make sense.
The Stupidity is strong with this speech, but that may just be his chosen rhetorical tone. I expect he’s speaking to his intended viewers/listeners at the level of stupidity he presumes they possess.
Greg Z. Agreed!
I think that Rubio’s statement has many elements that perhaps should be evaluated separately.
Is socialism idealistic or utopian? He says no. But, in the minds of many of the proponents, it is idealistic (even if naive). For others, it’s probably as cynical as Rubio claims.
As for socialism as a killer of ambition and creativity, well, it depends. We already live in a mixed socialist society in the U.S.—with Social Security, Medicare, SNAP, government support of science and the humanities through grants, etc. Those institutions benefit society and help the least able to live with dignity. But an extreme and thoroughgoing socialism—a socialism where “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” would be another matter. Under that sort of regime, with no reward for innovation, who will bother to innovate? How would such a society not turn into anything more than a gray, monotonous subsistence?
I won’t go through his statement piece by piece, but it might be worth doing so.
Is Rubio’s socialism a caricature of what the progressive left is calling for? Perhaps. Maybe it’s overly influenced by his Cuban heritage. Even so, his message is worth listening to.
Right wingers have always brushed aside concerns about inequality by characterizing those sentiments as jealousy and resentment. As though those are the only reasons people could possibly oppose policies that favor the rich and facilitate their ever increasing consolidation of wealth, power, and resources. As with so many things circulating within the conservative psyche, this seems like a case of projection. As though it’s impossible to oppose their ideas on principled grounds.
It’s just not true that in Western countries such as the US there is an “ever increasing consolidation of wealth, power, and resources” by the rich. I
n terms of money spent in a year and resources consumed in a year the vast, vast majority is spent and consumed by the broad mass of the people (enjoying a material standard of living vastly better than anyone anywhere in history or elsewhere). The fact that a small handful of people have major shareholdings in rather-successful companies that they founded does not change this.
Further, in terms of power, the broad mass of the people really can vote into power whatever government they wish, there is nothing stopping them. Whether they choose to is a different matter.
Actually that is happening. Paul Krugman has a number of charts, graphs and statistics showing an increase in wealth at the very top (the billionaires) exceeding the Gilded Age.
Check out his Substack for more information.
The very wealthy in the US have also increased their political power from various Supreme Court rulings. Vast sums are now poured into elections.
As far as Rubio goes, I’m not blown away. The DSA are a tiny segment. What’s somewhat concerning is them acquiring political power.
Based on much time spent on American left leaning forums, I see little support for the more flaky DSA views.
But I do see a couple of things over and over: getting the big money out of politics and a universal healthcare system along the lines of Europe and Canada. These don’t strike me as radical ideas. People are voting for any candidate promising to deliver, even if they’re DSA.
🎯 !
The “increase in wealth at the very top” is purely about a small number of people having founded mega-successful businesses and having large shareholdings in those businesses. This is not that relevant to the wider economy (where churn-over is much more relevant than static holdings) and does little harm.
Money in politics is indeed a problem, but I’m not convinced that it actually makes much difference. (E.g. Harris way outspent Trump, as well as having much more of the media on her side.)
Somehow I did not find a link to Rubio’s remarks in the post, so haven’t watched it. But I’ve been dismayed by what does seem like poisonous resentment, on the part of the progressive left, of people who’ve succeeded wildly by making life better for others. Jeff Bezos is a good example, and there was no guarantee he’d succeed. In the mid-90s my largest client was Intel, and the CEO at the time, Andy Grove (brilliant man), explained to us exactly why Amazon would fail. But now it provides a marketplace for many thousands of small businesses, it’s put a lot of pressure on other retailers to be more efficient, and I can find some esoteric item not available in our small town and have it at my door two days later. In the meantime politicians like Mamdani, Sanders, Warren, etc, speak about Bezos like he’s the scum of the earth.
I agree. How many hundreds of thousands of jobs have Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders created?
Probably about as many as Marco Rubio.
I wouldn’t ask Warren, Sanders, or Rubio to be job creators. We need people to serve the public, as they are.
I would ask them not to demonize people who do create jobs, innovations, and prosperity for others.
I don’t think the left disparages the innovators and job creators, apart perhaps, from a few crackpots. I think they want to tax them more than we do to support to social programs like Medicare and Social Security. We’ve had, I believe, four tax reductions in the 21st Century: two under Bush II and two under Trump. There were slight reductions in the low income area–so that they could claim to be cutting everyone’s taxes–but mostly the cuts were at the very top. We were a very prosperous country in the 1950s and 60s. For most of that time the highest rate was around 90 percent.
The left does disparage those who amass wealth (and create jobs) See AOC’s remark about the impossibility of becoming a billionaire without theft. (She shut up about it when asked how Taylor Swift steals form people.)
The most interesting thing about the self-proclaimed socialists is how many of the leading members of the group come forum the upper middle class— and then claim to be “workers”. A shift or two as a bartender does not make you a worker. (Of course, I do not disparage the work of full or part-time bartenders.) Many of these folks are nepo babies. When the hades did Mamdani do an honest day’s work? Look at the reports of El Sayed, who is clearly in the running for the country’s biggest hypocrite.
The DSA gains followers when they talk about things like reducing rent in NY. But then they start talking about abolishing home ownership, which does not exactly go down well with middle class people who have worked hard to buy those homes, and see such talk as a threat.
The video is embedded in the post.
Rubio’s entire speech is available below (2:30-22:00).
A few of the comments here illustrate his larger point: the data on left-wing violence will be denied reflexively, from ignorance or tribalism (or both). Or the subject will be changed. Rubio is talking about those who slaughter, bomb, assault, and execute. But let’s retreat to tired policy debates.
I disagree with Rubio in that I don’t see Antifa, lone actors, mobs, or other left-wing violence as a principal threat—at least not yet. The far greater threat is from those who would use the coercive power of the state to either curb or deny free expression, free worship, free assembly, due process. It is from those who use social and institutional power to weed out dissenters, who coerce others into parroting manifest-yet-fashionable falsehoods, who in the name of policing hate demonstrate a sectarian intolerance. In believing they are doing good, they believe you are either too stupid or too wicked to understand. Each of us must decide which foundational threats matter more; stale talk of tax rates, welfare programs, and the size of bureaucracies all miss the point. As will a default to “my team.”
Few such movements thrive without the acquiescence, the cowardice, the tacit support of the far greater share of the population. This is clear when “they” do it. But it was also evident long before “stolen election” lies or Mamdani and the DSA arrived on the scene. I suspect the latter will be opposed no more than were those who coerced approved speech; who gutted campus due-process protections for young men; who put confused and impressionable children on a lifelong course of sterilizing medicalization and called it “care.”
We have already crossed the bridge where many who should know better will acquiesce to the illiberal and the irrational; now it’s just a matter of degree. That degree will matter little, I predict, when liberals side with modern-day Bolsheviks against our hated Czar. Oh, yes, the Czar has his own problems. Are you sure things can’t get worse?
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/07/remarks-at-the-opening-of-the-ministerial-on-the-resurgence-of-political-terrorism/
Sorry, which set of “stolen election” lies? ISTM the current leader in that particular race to the bottom is MAGA and friends.
Rubio is demonizing the “radical left” as a huge, scary movement in the US, which it isn’t, using cold-war rhetoric about communism, godlessness etc to evoke images of a communist/socialist takeover. Many people, including many Democrats, support a lot of the policy positions of the DSA (one avatar of the “radical left”), but most people reject a lot of their extreme positions. There is absolutely no way the DSA “platform” (which has a lot of truly idiotic goals) will be implemented in the US. But it is really worth examining why certain “extreme left” positions have any appeal whatsoever. The DSA argues for policies like “raising the minimum wage, paid family leave, universal pre-K, lower prescription drug prices, protecting Social Security and Medicare, stronger labor unions and easier unionization. In other words policies that aren’t particularly radical at all, but in fact are broadly popular. People recognize that the institutions that Rubio wants to glorify (those things, in his words, “that greater men have built”, that are “beautiful and..right”) are screwing this planet, depriving people of opportunities, and creating Gilded Age levels of wealthy inequality and economic insecurity. People see Republicans and many centrist Democrats going back to Clinton agents that have destroyed the American dream. But Rubio goes totally off the rails when he evokes the specter of “violence and…terror” as the tools the left wants to use to achieve these aims. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the vast majority of violent incidents and fatalities have been caused by right-wing extremists and jihadists, and a small minority by left-wing extremists. Marco Rubio deserves not the tiniest amount of respect.
When you write, “The vast majority of violent incidents and fatalities have been caused by right-wing extremists and jihadists,” have you considered that, despite jihadists and right-wing extremists having much in common, jihadists have strategically aligned with the Left probably in order to make inroads into the American political landscape (The Right’s Christian orientation probably precludes their making common cause with their jihadist counterparts, at least for the present), and that the Left has welcomed their presence? Or perhaps you disagree with that analysis?
No I would definitely agree that jihadists are trying to influence the left, but that influence has been mainly rhetorical and is fairly recent thanks to pro-Palestinian propaganda. The biggest pulse of jihadist attacks in the US occurred from 2009-2019, and coincides with peak activities of ISIS. There is no sense in which this can be seen as a movement aligned with the American left. Right wing violence has always been the majority of the problem (until a drop off in 2025), and left-wing violence has always been comparatively low. That’s the key thing that gives Rubio away as a liar.
The anti-Israel movement is definitely aligned with the American Left. And up until just a year or two ago, the majority of deplatformings and censorship came from the Left, not the Right (go back about ten years and look at the FIRE deplatforming database.
What bothers me is the name-calling; would you call Mamdani or AOC liars when they say Israel engages in apartheid and genocide? Those accusations in America come mainly from the Left.
Not sure they’re liars if they think they’re telling the truth. But I certainly call them antisemites.
Judith Butler, the U. Cal. Berkeley doyenne of Critical Gender Theory, explained everything in 2006: “it is extremely important to see Hamas and Hezbollah as progressive social movements, which are on the left and part of a global left…” When Professor Butler tells us what is Left—and “globally” at that— who are we to quibble?
Yes I would, but my point was that Rubio is lying when he accuses the left of violence and terror without acknowledging that far more violence in the US is perpetrated by the right than the left
Rubio is only lying if he has the data to show the opposite of what he said. I wouldn’t accuse anybody of that unless you knew what was inside their head.
No need to reply.
I gather the title behind him refers to the administration he is apart of.
That’s either a typo or a trenchant political observation (even though the preferred preposition would be “from”). Maybe both — a Freudian typo.
I admire many of the comments, but i personally can’t judge a highly general 2-minute talk.
I will say that as of this moment, among all reasonable contenders for the presidency Marco Rubio is the best choice. Not perfect. But the best. I’m a Democrat. But if the election were this week, I vote for Rubio .
I would not vote for a man who wears oversized Florsheim shoes just because his boss gave them to him after criticizing his footwear.
Thank you, PCC(E).
Seems to me he’s talking about a lot of isms without actually addressing any issues — health care, pollution and climate change, energy, nuclear prolif
eration and so on.
One can agree or disagree with elements of Rubio’s speech. But I find it puzzling that discussion about political psychology, the appropriate means of waging politics, and the emergence (once again) of a totalizing political project that seeks to purify the world and align it with its own, ever-changing moral standards can be discounted as not addressing any “issues.”
Again, which side’s totalizing political project are you referring to?
Marco Rubio, who is neither stupid nor shallow, is exactly right. Members of the Democratic Socialists of America call themselves democratic socialists, but their program is much closer to communism.
It is truly appalling that, in America today, we still have to convince people that communism is bad. What ignorance! Anyone who had studied history would know that communism is no better than fascism.
Many people also seem to know little about economics. They believe that America’s wealth can simply be redistributed so that everyone can live comfortably without damaging the economy.
Even more troubling is the unwillingness of well-educated people, including some university professors, to criticize the extreme ideas promoted by the DSA. President Obama campaigned for Mamdani. Why? Perhaps ideology prevents otherwise intelligent people from thinking clearly or speaking with intellectual honesty.
IMO basic economics (including balance sheets and double-entry accounting) ought to be taught in high school. But the problem is two-sided: indeed most people know little about economics; but most current economists seem to know little else — the price of everything but the value of nothing.
An old story that DSAers propose increased minimum wages, increased benefits, increased this and that, a chicken in every pot, and an adorable pony for every child—all to be funded by a magic cornucopia called “Socialism”. Along with that, they pretend to have solved the deep, tragic puzzle of revolutionary social change by pasting in the magic word “democratic” here and there. The appeal of the DSA performance, as others have pointed out, is mainly to a stratum of young, mis-educated, over-credentialed and under-employed individuals in certain urban neighborhoods—a small if talkative base. In the long run, I predict that the DSA will end up providing important help to the Republican Party’s electoral prospects everywhere but those few neighborhoods— just as SDS, the Weather Underground, the brief “defund the police” meme, and other such fads did.
Read an article that suggested that the DSA’s agenda is embraced by the highly educated/downwardly mobile. Made sense to me.
Indeed. What is left for those who spend seven years working on graduate degrees in sociology or Marxist interpretations of modern dance? Where would they find work (outside of political organizing or teaching in the same universities that indoctrinating them (and there ain’t enough university positions for all of them).
They are indeed “downwordly mobile”, but perhaps we should better define “highly educated”. They are woefully ignorant about history, and of course science—even basic science.
I have my fingers crossed for Rubio as the 2028 candidate, rather than Vance.
There is another potential explanation as to why so many pampered young people are keen on socialism: they are emerging from a situation where all their needs and more were met for them by their parents. So while as young adults they seek independence from their parents, in many cases they retain the expectation of their needs and wants being met, with the government an obvious parental surrogate.
Yes indeed. Even those who do not qualify as”nepo babies” are Characterized by their dependence on parents, and often, by dependence on social services meant to help the real working poor. (Who pays for a 7-year college degree?) Perhaps those monies could be better spent on helping single Working mothers of several childreN tryinG to go to community college To get a better real job.
(Sorry—having trouble with the caps on my iPad.)
One real fault with socialism is there never seems to Be a real attempt to come up with a plan for paying for all the programs On their wish list. Even raising taxes won‘T do the job. Maybe one or two of these folks should take a degree in accounting or economic planning? Or are numbers too difficult for them?
There was an interesting column in the NYT recently by Bret Stephens in which he discussed how certain ideas, such as communism or full socialism, can appear as fresh and exciting to younger people, while those of use who are older (guilty) have seen this movie before. We know how this goes. Of course, the political landscape at present is a bit different, with, among other things, the incomprehensible embrace of Islam by the progressive left. And it is being fueled by the pathetic pantomime villains on the right and their wretched excesses, so it is hard to know just how much damage this infatuation with discredited ideologies will cause this time. I’m not looking forward to watching it play out.
One thing I’ve seen with militant anti-communist campaigns, the ones with war, violence and FBI/CIA is they have more success in getting rig of the non-commie left-wing adversaries of the commies who now have more desperate people with no one else to turn to, even if they would rather not, give it 20 years and it no longer matters.
A stopped clock is right twice a day.