The Pandemic That Never Ended

The new socialists are selling therapy, not economics. Their promises are emotionally satisfying but intellectually vacant, offering moral absolution instead of practical answers.

Sorry, not sorry, but I’m just not buying the claim that America is suddenly experiencing an explosion of socialism.

What has fundamentally changed over the past few years that would cause millions of people to become so disillusioned with our economic system that they are now embracing ideas rooted in Marxism?

Nothing material.

America still has the strongest economy in the world, even after what the Biden administration did to it. Inflation has certainly hurt families, but inflation did not appear out of nowhere. It was fueled by the panic-driven response to COVID, a virus that posed a very real threat to specific, identifiable segments of the population but far less danger to the overwhelming majority.

The world lost its collective mind. Governments shut down economies, schools closed, businesses failed, civil liberties were suspended, and fear became public policy. Some people never recovered from that emotional state. They are still living there.

So, what explains the apparent rise of socialism?

I think we are looking at a different kind of epidemic altogether.

The contradictions became too great to reconcile rationally. We were told everything was unprecedented, yet much of what we were witnessing had been predicted by people who were mocked for saying it. We were told dissent was dangerous. We were told “follow the science,” even as the science kept changing. We were assured institutions deserved our trust, only to watch many of those same institutions prove themselves partisan, dishonest, or simply incompetent.

Reality refused to cooperate with the narrative.

When logic fails to resolve contradictions, people often retreat into emotion. They search less for truth than for psychological comfort. I believe millions of people experienced exactly that beginning in 2020.

For four years before COVID, the country had been subjected to an unrelenting campaign portraying Donald Trump as not merely a flawed president but as an existential threat to the republic itself. Increasingly, America itself became the villain because Trump represented America to those making the accusations. Whether those claims were grounded in fact became almost irrelevant. They served an emotional purpose.

Then COVID arrived and amplified every fear already simmering beneath the surface.

Much of what followed was avoidable had people resisted the temptation to surrender completely to fear. Instead, panic became virtue, skepticism became heresy, and emotional reasoning replaced careful judgment.

Admitting that today would require millions of people to acknowledge they overreacted, that they supported policies that damaged children, businesses, families, and constitutional liberties, and that much of the fear they embraced was wildly disproportionate to the actual risks they personally faced.

That is an extraordinarily difficult confession to make.

It is psychologically easier to construct a story in which you remain the hero. If events turned out badly, then someone else must be responsible. If your emotional state deteriorated, someone else must have caused it. If your judgment proved flawed, then the system itself must have been broken all along.

That search for blame naturally expanded into opposition—not simply to Trump, but to many of the institutions, traditions, and economic arrangements that existed before 2020. Opposition itself became an identity. The more radical the proposal, the stronger the signal that one had broken with the old order.

That helps explain why so many of these newly minted “socialists” rarely spend much time explaining how any of their proposals would actually work. They promise free this, guaranteed that, debt forgiveness, wealth redistribution, and endless new government benefits , but become remarkably vague when asked who pays (other than Elon), how markets continue functioning, or why these ideas have repeatedly failed wherever they have been tried.

The appeal is not economic. It is therapeutic.

That is precisely what makes this movement dangerous. It is driven less by coherent political philosophy than by unresolved emotional trauma. It asks people to feel rather than think, to condemn rather than understand, and to embrace comforting narratives instead of inconvenient realities.

A society governed by emotionally damaged people who refuse to examine the causes of their own distress will eventually make emotionally damaged political decisions.

History suggests that rarely ends well.