Daily Beast
Why my rant against the Democratic candidate’s prescription for America went viral.
2016 seems like a strange time to be arguing the merits of socialism in an American presidential campaign. But it’s also strange for the prospective leaders of the free world to be talking about the KKK and their appendages, so clearly this year is not like any other. While the latter topics are, thankfully, beyond my purview, I have a great deal of interest in socialism.
Last week I expressed some of these thoughts on Facebook after hearing a clip of “democratic socialist” candidate Senator Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday. This was already a rarity, considering how little time the networks have left after their blanket coverage of Donald Trump’s latest outrages. My post on the nature of socialism was 113 words long, a quick response to critics of a cartoon I had posted of Bernie Sanders wearing a baseball cap reading “Make America Greece Again.”
My goal was to remind people that Americans talking about socialism in the 21st century was a luxury paid for by the successes of capitalism in the 20th. And that while inequality is a huge problem, the best way to increase everyone’s share of pie is to make the pie bigger, not to dismantle the bakery. Much to my surprise, my little rant went viral, as the saying goes. Instead of the usual few hundred Facebook shares, this paragraph quickly reached tens of thousands. By the next morning it had reached several million people, more than any of the day’s political posts by the leading candidates. A week later and it has over 3,000 comments, 57,000 shares, and a 9.3 million reach that is in the category usually reserved for photos of pop stars and kitten videos.
Thank You Mr Kasparov and Daily Beast.
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