Debunking Charlie Kirk on socialism
Since the 2018 election of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, and the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT — two people who have promoted ideals and ideas of socialism — Charlie Kirk, president and founder of Turning Point USA, has focused a lot on socialism. Turning Point often uses the slogan “socialism sucks.”
I want to fact-check and analyze Kirk’s words on socialism. He has tweeted about it, written op-eds and made videos. And recently he did a podcast episode dedicated to the topic.
Populist Claim
Kirk’s August 27 podcast episode — “The Rise of Socialist Populism” — says a lot of broad things about the rise of Elizabeth Warren. Kirk compares Warren to William Jennings Bryan and Eugene Debs, progressive and socialist candidates for president in late 19th and early 20th century. And Kirk suggests there are some differences between them and her. The key difference seems to be the context — the former ran in eras of economic depression but the modern populist Warren is running during an economic boom.
But then Kirk makes an interesting claim about Trump’s campaign in 2016 (and implicitly what his policies have shown since). After noting that populism has become a bad word to conservatives and libertarians, Kirk notes he is populist in some ways, though he doesn’t list them. That brings him to Trump.
Kirk notes Trump realized that people had economic anxiety but they didn’t want the “free stuff” associated with socialism; “they wanted their jobs back.” And Kirk names industrial Midwest states that Trump won, including Pennsylvania.
“Trump was very, very strategic and he was philosophically sound” in creating his populist movement around “the defense of Western civilization, around the ideas of hard work, around the ideas of the family, and the ideas of the greatest culture to ever exist…. a culture that doesn’t embrace that one person or heritage is better than others, but does embrace that some ideas are better than others.”
There is a lot going on here, but I want to focus on how Kirk ties together populism and socialism with Warren, but then refuses the latter with Trump.
First, there is a difference between a strategy and a philosophy. Kirk implies Trump was following populism in his strategy and conflates that with Trump knowing the “philosophy” of populism.
Second, populism is not a philosophy. It is a “thin ideology” that is usually centered on negative rhetoric — kicking out the establishment or vilifying the elites — but not supplying any positive rhetoric on what should replace those groups, according to Cas Mudde, UGA professor of International Affairs. Populism is so “thin” it needs to be tied to a more robust political stance or series of stances and is so thin it is can be used by people of all political stripes.
As Mudde in The Atlantic notes, populists tie themselves to a moral agenda: The “distinction between the elite and the people is not based on how much money you have or even what kind of position you have. It’s based on your values.”
And The Atlantic adds: Given their moral framing, populists conclude that they alone represent “the people.” They may not win 100 percent of the vote, but they lay claim to 100 percent of the support of good, hardworking folks who have been exploited by the establishment. They don’t assert that the neglected people who back them should be kept in mind by political leaders just like all other citizens; they claim that these neglected people are the only people that matter.
Trump as populist is not a new claim. Many have made that case. But Trump as philosophically sound is unique to Kirk.
What is important is how Kirk sees the strategy everyone knows happened. Kirk defends Trump-ism. But as we know his strategy was a divisive one that spoke to a certain segment of the population and made promises that couldn’t be and haven’t been kept. As The New York Times wrote in July: “His rhetorical appeals to white working-class voters have not been matched by legislative accomplishments aimed at their economic interests.” Paul Krugman made same argument here.
Second, if indeed Trump’s campaign was one of division — elites versus the real Americans, as Mudde notes here — then he is not interested in expanding his tent through the kind of democratic pluralism we have seen from other presidents, who have sought to unite us around what is best or shared in all of us.
This is what makes Kirk’s claim about Trump not just false but willfully dangerous.
First, the false. Kirk sees Trump as not favoring one “person or heritage” over another, but then directly names the heritage Trump aims to defend or save: Western Civilization. [Western Civ as a culture is often code for the alt-right for white.]
This narrows down to a patriotism that slides easily into nationalism and hero-worship. See Kirk’s tweet here and his comparison of Trump to Jesus here.
And if Trump has ideas, I haven’t heard him offer a succinct or even complex defense of them as better than others. As the Times notes: “The president is also largely detached from the legislative process and has rarely been heard discussing what a second-term agenda could look like or how to tie it to his re-election bid.”
Then there is the danger. In defending how Trump does populism, Kirk is suggesting his divisiveness is not only good but part of a broader appeal that should outlast him, if indeed it is a philosophy, not just Trump-ism.
Kirk has drowned himself in the kool-aid, so to speak, because he now envisions what Trump wanted all along from his followers. Kirk has ideas and now sees his ideas embodied in Trump, who has no ideas.
Mudde describes Trump as selling something larger than himself. “Trump shifted from exclusively “selling himself” to presenting “himself as a vehicle of the people,” Mudde observed, and this allowed his supporters to feel part of something bigger than Trump. “You couldn’t be part of Trump, and that was what he sold before,” Mudde said. “That was where the genius came in. Before it was just one man standing against everyone. Now it was a movement that had him as its leader. That energized [people] much more.”
The Video Claim
This video was tweeted by The Reagan Battalion a few hours before Kirk posted it. The video comes from Venezuelan actor Sergio Novelli from a tweet about 45 minutes before the Reagan one. Novelli says he does not know the source of the video himself: “it does not matter when this video has been recorded.” The video has also been retweeted by a professor in Venezuela who says that the video is evidence of “how national guards loyal to dictator Maduro operate, in #Venezuela.”
Of course, we have no idea from the video or any of the Spanish-language coverage of this viral video that I looked at why these young men are being beaten. [Note: I am trying to get a translation of the voices in the video and will update if I do. Update 9/5: A translator colleague suggested the boys being beaten were being “punished” for illegally mining minerals (bronze/copper). Clearly nothing to do with speech, if indeed that is the reason for the actions by the police.]
That said, Kirk’s claims that this police brutality as an example of “unlimited power” of the government is what Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez want is wildly ignorant or willfully stupid. As leftist website CounterPunch author Tim Gill wrote: “Anyone who suggests that Sanders wishes to “turn the U.S. into Venezuela” is a bad-faith actor. They’re distorting reality and deceiving citizens.”
Sanders has condemned this version of socialism, Venezuela’s current dictator, and its former one. Ocasio-Cortex has also condemned Maduro, calling him authoritarian and undemocratic.
For more on Kirk claims about Venezuela and my checks, look here.
The Oil Claim
In an op-ed for a Tea Party newsletter in Tennessee, Kirk made this claim without a source: “Hugo Chavez, for instance, was praised by democratic socialists such as Bernie Sanders for seizing the nation’s oil fields and promising to eliminate poverty and provide free health care and education for the people.”
It’s hard to know what Kirk is referring to. Here are some guesses after an extensive search:
- A Sanders staffer who praised Venezuela in 2013, before he became a speechwriter for Sanders.
- In regard to praising oil seizures, Sanders posted two op-eds to his Senate website that discuss “the importance of environmental policies and energy independence which mention Venezuela alongside other oil-producing nations such as Russia and Saudi Arabia. None involve Sanders praising or supporting the emulation of Venezuela’s economic policies, or saying anything about Venezuelan politics at all.” [I acknowledge the link in this paragraph above comes from Quillette, a questionable, very right-leaning source. The website’s deep dive debunking a Sanders meme is given a bit more credibility because of that leaning. This piece is the author’s only on this website and has been praised by others.]
- In regard to free health care, Kirk might be referring to an interview Sanders did with CNN in June 2019. Though he was speaking of Canada, Sanders said: “I suspect that a lot of people in the country would be delighted to pay more in taxes if they had comprehensive health care as a human right.”
- A moment in 1985 when Sanders spoke well of Cuba. According to Slate, Sanders during a 2016 debate “spoke about Nicaragua and enthusiastically described how Fidel Castro had “totally transformed” Cuban society, providing education and health care. After Univision anchor María Elena Salinas followed up, Sanders acknowledged Cuba as an “authoritarian, undemocratic country” but then proceeded to praise the Castro regime, again, for its “advances in health care” (a dubious claim at best).”
The Numbers Claim
As you can see Kirk changes his number between 2018 and 2019. The 100 million claim comes from The Black Book of Communism, published by the Harvard University Press. Its authors tried to amass the number of people killed under communism. The book “concluded that the human cost of genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, and artificial famines stood at over 94 million,” according to the Cato Institute. There have been some criticisms of the number and method.
The 150 million is an upper estimate that may include “losses of Soviet populations during wartime.”
In his video, Kirk lists 77 countries where socialism has been tried/failed. I can’t possibly check them all but here is a fine Wikipedia article about many.
The 100 years seems to come from the 100th anniversary of the Communist International in Moscow in 1919 or the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917.
