The reason Communism has failed in foreign countries is because they lacked the pep, gusto and the never give it up optimistic stamina of good ole' Yankee Ingenuity.
Long live the progressive dream! May it achieve full fruition across the safe spaces of the fruited plains!
A capitalist racist moneybags may have forestalled the slippery slope prepped by O the Great and Powerful but do not give up your hope for change.
The Evil Hag may have been bumped out of her entitled place in line but many other more than equal elites await to serve the will of those needful to be ruled.
Yes, comrades, we the most exceptional of all snowflakes can make anything work in the USA. Just ask Bolshevik Bernie!

I think a main reason is they have not learned an alternative. As children, we are not born understanding that there are goods and services that come from means of production plus some human labor and that all of those are finite. We certainly not born understanding factors of production come mostly from human effort and ingenuity. We're not born understanding the concept of "making money", a phrase Rand loved, how someone can buy junk that was in my way, fix it up, sell the fixed-up stuff that had been junk, use the profit to create a new business that helps even more people, and as a result have way more wealth for all involved in the trades. Maybe it's obvious to us, but it's not obvious to a kid. And it's not obvious to some adults if no one taught then.

The Twentieth Century Motor Company comes to mind. Our Canadian social system is beginning to look that way. My sister who contributes to society has to pay for needed medication while some of her tax money goes to free, clean injection sites and drug antidotes for druggies. The list goes on and on.

Marxism is hilarious. It denies a divine presence while maintaining a future, stateless heaven of equal, peaceful living. It denies consciousness while maintaining a promise to incredible scientific achievement. It promotes altruism in order to achieve fairness. It defines all consciousness as bourgeois and all existence as a natural resource. It's the philosophical stance of a spoiled toddler all dressed up in a sweat stained Che Guevara t-shirt.

Wow, “The Marxist vision” paragraph reminded me of the Democratic Party. That’s perhaps why some of our own friends and relatives might always just vote democrat, without any thought or reason whatsoever. They just belong to the party, so they don’t need to waste any more time leaning anything else.

It also brought a question to my mind. Do politicians really know the facts, the truths, behind the lies and rhetoric they spew to get elected? Or are they just as blind as the masses of voters that actually believe in their lies and nonsensical rhetoric? Which relates to another question, has Nancy Pelosi based her latest raging rhetoric against the new healthcare bill on any facts, has she even read the bill yet? Her followers will believe it anyway.

These issues, lack of real education, including all the media bias, are the things that are really preventing this country from achieving utopia. It’s really a shame that once people figure it out it’s just too late, they are too old and tired, they die before they can expose and influence enough of our youth to the truth. Maybe that is part of why dictatorships work (for the dictator), it’s just so much simpler.

It's a question of "internal" versus "external validation." Eric Hoffer: "There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation."

As far as I'm concerned Communism is Fascism in drag. Even the Black Mask Hoodies in current liberal street demonstrations are just that! They are equivalent to Hitlers Brown Shirts. It's guise in disguise and the Progressives are totally blind to it.

They either flunked history or they paid attention and are evil.

Marxism is simply theft and plunder wrapped up in psychobabble nonsense about "fairness and equality". The idea of collective effort to a goal has never been a long term successful process for one simple reason, people do not percieve their effort at the same level. What one thinks is great work digging a 4 foot trench, another thinks is "pussyness" and digs an 8 foot. Are their efforts equal? Is the value equal? Heinlein killed a lot of the arguments in his discussions in Starship troopers, look up the one about "value" and what justification people have for "fair". As he said, what right to life does a person adrift at sea with no life jacket have? Marxism simply is an easy way to dispose of personal responsibility and transfer it (along with all the power) to the state, which will immediately do what every state has done before: abuse and use it for their own interests. Our history has 250 years of this, and yet we refuse to learn from it. The most successful people were the independents who went out in wilds, and made their own living, and hated any government coming along. Henry Fonda was a perfect character for in in "How the West was Won".

Why? Mental illness.

I would apply that to practitioners of "abstract" or "pure" science, also. Of course, no one has thought of implementing the John Galt model for funding basic research. Which is: to offer the results at a price to interested investors and managers, as John Galt did.

The concept of a communal society with equally shared property is probably older than historical records. Plato, who claimed to be documenting the ideas of his mentor, Socrates, described a communal society in The Republic. Even then these brilliant Greek philosophers recognized that the only possibility for such a society to have a chance of succeeding was to grab children at an early age and brainwash them to dedicate themselves selflessly to the state.

What Socrates couldn't see was that the dynamic economic environment of even a modest sized human community was too complex for effective state control. Succeeding adherents to concepts of communal societies haven't been any brighter.

Mark Levin's Ameritopia nicely describes historical concepts of Utopian societies and how they fail. Each human is as unique as their fingerprints, which is the flaw in Utopian thinking, which always relies on a homogeneous population. For some reason, communist thinkers always miss that point.

The closest thing to communism in the animal world is the social insect. The hive structure of bees, ants, and termites reflects a system where the hive is the primary organism and the individual insects are like component cells in that organism. As is the case with communism the hive is more important than the individual. I think it was Lenin that observed "The citizen is like a brick in a wall." This suggests that it is the wall that is important and the citizens are simply interchangeable parts of that wall. So from the perspective of the communist citizens exist to support the government. In a system that prizes personal liberty the opposite is true. Government is justified only to the extent that it supports the citizen. Of, by and for the people is the key concept that separates personal liberty from the collective.

This article was originally published yesterday in the FEE daily newsletter. As i I said there:

I suspect the fundamental appeal of socialism is based on the acceptance of the Primacy of Consciousness rather than the Primacy of Existence as a metaphysical belief.

Sunk Cost Fallacy, Tucker's suggestion, yes, but I suspect it is what we see is a typical aspect of Cognitive Dissonance.

The most difficult beliefs for people to examine are those beliefs which have been:
(1) held for a long time,
(2) adopted before age of reason, and
(3) most often repeated.

Research involving several thousand studies over the last sixty years universally concludes people respond to dissonant beliefs by using one or more of three key strategies.

First, they might ignore the dissonant belief. In essence saying, I don’t want to believe it, therefore it isn’t true. Or explain it away by saying the leaders corrupted “true” socialism. This, as the psychologists would say, is a form of repression.

Second, people experiencing cognitive dissonance might reduce the importance of the conflicting belief. This is evident by phrases such as “I’ll think about it tomorrow,” meaning I have more important things to consider. This, as the psychologists would say, is a form of evasion.

Third, they make the newer conflicting belief consistent with the older belief by twisting the evidence, then claiming the beliefs are not really in conflict. This, as the psychologists would say, is rationalization.

Finally, for most people there are some beliefs are not amendable to change. In fact, it seems the older the person the less likely they are to change beliefs.