They want to fail

Great essay by Lionel Shriver in the New Criterion: "What do progressives really want?"

The point is this: these people are not serious. They’re playacting. They gesture toward a future they have no desire to inhabit. The fringes of this movement openly wish to tear down the very civilization on which they personally rely and on which their own lives are entirely built. Yes, this brings us to the democratic socialists, some of whose advocates are wealthy and aglitter with designer froufrou. Let’s pretend to consider their platform in earnest for a moment. No jails, no police. Housing as a human right. National defense reduced to veritably zero. State usurpation of major industries. Citizenship for all illegal immigrants, presumably including the many visitors who’ve yet to arrive. Cozying up to North Korea.

It goes without saying that the socialists want everything free: free housing, free healthcare, free childcare, free pre-K; at the least, below-cost groceries. All this freeness will be paid for by “the rich.” Alas, there seems to be no plan for what happens when the money spigot runs dry because you’ve just confiscated all the assets of the people who made your society tick over. Repeated back-of-the-envelope demonstrations that “the rich” don’t have the wherewithal to pay for everything even if you suck up their last sou never faze these people. No, if only the “oligarchs” stopped picking everyone’s pockets, we’d all live on easy street. “Medicare for all” is also appealingly catchy. Yet Medicare reimbursement rates for hospitals average 10 percent below the break-even point; without overpayment by private insurers, the entire U.S. health system would collapse. Progressives aren’t big on math. Conservatives care about what works; leftists care about what should work.

Shriver theorizes that the Left wants failure because it extends their endless struggle and perpetuates their bottomless need to feel good about themselves:

For armchair revolutionaries, being eternally thwarted is a blessing, because they get to keep their resentment, their fury, their purity unsullied by contact with reality, and their sense of purpose that’s never ruined by getting what they claim to want.

Finally, as Shriver notes, Americans are pouring into Red states from the Blue states, showing what happens when the progressives actually take power...and fail.