An Open Letter to Sergey Brin About Socialism
Maybe it's time to take this socialism talk seriously.
Hi Sergey,
You donāt know me. Or maybe you do. In some ways, weāre basically the same person.
Iām two years older than you. We were both saved from the Soviet monstrosity by our amazingly brave, erudite parents, yearning to not be abused for their Jewish heritage. We were both brought to America in the same year, 1979 by hook and by crook, via a largely unknown but absurdly fascinating process involving invitations from fake relatives in Israel and our stateless, nomad families shepherded by various Jewish organizations and the Italian mob, hounded by Palestinian terrorists, crossing the Alps without documents, living on pennies and the goodwill of our merciful American benefactors and on and on and on.
All this happened when I was 7 and you were 5, so we were young.
But also not so young.
Iām sure, like me, you have vivid memories of the abuse you suffered at the hands of Soviet anti-Semites. Iām sure you know the stories of our elders describing all the ways in which they were tormented by every class and method of the codebase. It was all baked into the kernel of the OS. For us, even in kindergarten, there was no refuge. As Lev Golinkin describes so accurately in his book, we were going to take our beatings and our parents were going to suffer the nightmare of knowing that their children were being abused and there was nothing they could do about it.
Ultimately, it was precisely these abuses that drove them to undertake the perilous journey away from their friends and families and to a foreign land where everything, from the language to the cuisine to the customs was alien and where it would take them years to find a footing.
Itās hard for us to understand how precarious this exodus must have felt to our parentsāwho at the time were actually a little younger than you and I are now. And just how dreadful things had to have been for them to subject themselves and their children to such an arduous and risky flight.
This experience now serves as a keel of relative positivityā¢ (itās my term, you canāt have it). It keeps us upright when others, who lack this ballast, are capsized by lifeās complexities.
We notice when Americans get outraged and we say to ourselves, āYou have absolutely no idea just how magical your lives are and just how bad it can get.ā
But then again, we get itāābecause they generally donāt have our frame of reference and the outrage is generally justified, even if itās hyperbolic. America is very far from perfect and if one doesnāt know how deep the barrel is, itās easy to think youāre near the bottom even when itās still quite a ways further down. Itās entirely reasonable to get indignant about all the imperfections.
Americans still have plenty of real problems and not everyone needs to be force fed their own vomit in front of the class by an abusive preschool teacher while being called a āfilthy kikeā (true story!) to know what strife is.
Iām fond of saying that when you hit rock bottom, itās good to remember to be grateful that at least youāre not at smooth-jazz bottom, or worse, <shivers>musical theater bottom! </shivers>
Anywayāāāwhat else do we have in common?
Well, weāre both software professionals. Youāre about $50 billion more āprofessionalā than me but Iām guessing that this wealth has changed very little about who you see in the mirror every morning.
Iām also guessing you havenāt gilded any of your toilets and youāre probably not spending most of your time paying hush money to porn stars (no judgement if you areāāāIām just thinking about how Iāll spend my billions when I get them).
All of this is windup to explain why Iām writing to you today: Because for several years now Iāve been noticing a very peculiar trend in American politics. Namely, the move by some left-leaning folks and factions to embrace āsocialism.ā
Cathy Young, who is also a member of our nomadic clan, has a really fantastic piece on the subject. I strongly recommend you read it.
Iām heartened by the way her analysis endsāāānamely, that perhaps this is much ado about nothing and maybe (probably?) this is a passing phase where people who donāt know any better pick a term that they associate with egalitarianism and start using it, naively, unaware of what it actually means.
However, Iām not willing to bet the house on the optimistic view. (Deep down, I am still Russian.)
You and I know what socialism truly is. Itās not about free education or free medical care or feminism. Itās about oppression and abuse and gulags and death.
Real, live actual socialism has failed and wrought havoc in every single instance that it has been attempted, with its capās feather being Stalinās murder of somewhere between 25 and 65 million of his own citizens. And as Kristian Niemietz eloquently observes even if you somehow magically managed to finally realize Marx and Engelsā dream without the secret police and the imprisoning of dissidents and the genocide (and so far no one has), youād still be left with a really anaemic economy that fails to fix any of the economic problems that were the reason for going down this road to begin with.
People love to point to Scandinavia as examples of āsocialismāsā success. But of course, those nations arenāt at all socialist. They are capitalist democracies that simply tax and regulate their corporations and individuals slightly more than America does and allocate more of those funds for various public projects and safety nets. If you want to call that āsocialismā then words mean nothing and the Atlantic ocean is just a giant margarita because, you know . . . salt.
As a founding member of Googleāarguably the most influential and consequential technology company that humanity has ever witnessedāand as someone who, like me, has had first-hand experience with the realities of socialism and its aftermath, Iām curious as to what you think about all of this.
You have a platform like no one else except, maybe, Zuck and Bezos. And while I genuinely appreciate your desire not to wade into politicsāāāitās a truly thankless jobā and no one will ever be satisfied, no matter what you doāāI feel like weāre at a potentially cataclysmic point in our history and it is not hyperbole to observe that the arrival of āsocialismā as a legitimate platform on the American political scene should trigger Defcon 1 for you.
It certainly does for me and as weāve already established, you and I are more or less the same person.
As Iām sure you recall, in spite of the fact that the Carter administration played an instrumental role in our ability to flee Soviet Russia, most of the people of our parentsā age who came here in the ā70s and ā80s became staunch (almost fanatical) Republicans. This always struck me as incredibly ungrateful, but when you asked them why it was generally a one-word answer.
Socialism.
Obviously, Reagan had them at hello (which he pronounced āmy fellow Americansā) but they saw in the GOP an unwavering rejection of anything and everything even vaguely related to communism. It was a very simple formula. Communism == Socialism == oppression == death. (Yes, Iām using the comparative operator because Iām a nerd and I know who Iām talking to.) In their eyes, the Democrats werenāt as committed to capitalism as the Republicans were and that was the end of the conversation.
As a child, I followed their lead but then as I developed my own sense of the world I realized that they were being reactionary. American Democrats of the ā80s and ā90s were no more likely to be genuinely anti-capitalist or pro-totalitarian than their Republican colleagues. This was just a caricature bandied by their political opposition. There were, to be sure, genuine disagreements on the prescriptions to how to solve problems. But at least the problems themselves were all (generally) agreed upon. The delta between what the Right and Left believed were the correct solutions was pretty small.
You could, for example (as I did and continue to) become a supporter of liberal policies on immigration and education and criminal justice and equality of opportunity and be an atheist without ever playing footsie with state-controlled industry and gulags!
One thing was for sure, though: Both parties were adamantly defensive of free expression and the rule of law. And in my worldview, so long as that remained true, the arguments around how to tax and spend the publicās wealth and whether or not to regulate airlines and pollutants were worthwhile and interesting but not existentially critical to the future of the nation.
But over the last 30 years, the income disparity increased and the American Dream, with its promise that hard work and perseverance would be reliably rewarded with a home and a picket fence and college for your 2.5 kids, started looking less and less like a promise and more and more like a random distribution of luck.
Or not-so-random. If celebrities and the wealthy feel like the only way to guarantee their children's success is through payola and graft then what must average Jane Wisconsin think about her kidsā prospects?!
Naturally, as moderate solutions to this problem looked increasingly useless, the two political parties started proposing more extreme alternatives.
The Right predictably turned to nationalism and the promise to shove everyone into a time machine and take them back to 1959.
And the Leftāwell, theyāve decided that they will finally figure out how to do āsocialismā without the oppression and abuse and gulags and death. Whichāif weāre being honest hereāis about as realistic as the conservative time machine fantasy.
As recently as 3 years ago I was confident in my underlying theory that the adults were still mostly in charge and when you separated the signal from the noise you had an America that was not much different from the one you and I fled to in ā79. There were real problems to be solved but the stuff I was hearing from the likes of Ben Sasse and Elizabeth Warren left me with the impression that serious people were debating workable policy and I could rest easy.
Then Bernie came along calling himself a āDemocratic Socialist.ā
If anyone can explain to me what this actually means, Iād be gratefulā. Because as far as I can tell, Bernie hasnāt proposed anything even vaguely socialist. And if āDemocratic Socialistsā are just people pushing for a little more government oversight of the capitalist markets then we can all rest easy.
But words have meanings and as far as I can tell socialism has just the one definition and I donāt mean to keep laboring the point, but itās the one involving oppression and abuse and gulags and death.
If you donāt understand, just substitute the āsocialistā in āDemocratic Socialistā with āfascistā or āHitleristā or āSatanistā and see how they make you feel. Notice how āDemocraticā doesnāt quite soften the blow as much as you seem to think it should? To those of us who suffered through actual socialism, this looks like a distinction without a difference and itās really scary.
And honestly, I just donāt get it . . . why that word?! WHY? It seems to be a lose/lose because either you MEAN it (and thatās terrifying) or you DONāT mean it, and then Iām just confused causeā youāre gonna get trounced on election day in the name of misunderstood semantics. And in the words of the self-appraised greatest orator of our time, that would be āSAD!ā
My Canadian wife insists that āeveryone understandsā that āsocialismā in 2019 isnāt what the Soviets were doing. Sheās all: āThey were Communists!ā.
But I canāt help but remember what the second āSā in U.S.S.R stood for. And also, āwhatās up with the everyones in Venezuela? Are they in on the new definition? Because they donāt seem to be helping the rebranding effort.
Sorry, Sergey, Iām digressing.
A few years ago Iād be more sanguine about this because I would just vote for the least nutty Republican in 2020 and let the Dems take their lumps and learn a lesson about poor linguistic choices. Except that we donāt have that luxury because the Republicans elected Trump and he declared journalists the enemy of the people whom heād like to throw in prison for not saying nice things about him. Oh, and after heās done tongue-bathing his KGB sugar daddy, can he please have his military parade and perhaps it can include some of the āvery fine peopleā who like to march with torches in the name of a return to the good oleā days of the Klan, while dragging cages full of migrant kids across the border back to Mexico?
Record scratch. Because thatās the current alternative to socialism.
I donāt understand how this happened. I want to believe that it didnāt happenāāāthat this is all a lot of noise and that the signal is still the America that gave you and me safe harbour from the (undemocratic) socialists of Eastern Europe.
But Iām not so sure anymore. And I think youāre probably not so sure either. And Iām going to guess that you and your family are having the same conversation that I and all our ex-Soviet tribesmates are currently having.
However I donāt know what you think because youāre famously guarded and private but Iām going to say that the time is rapidly approaching when those of us who have a platform and know first-hand what it means to live in a nation where you canāt say whatās on your mind and there isnāt enough food to feed your kids and everything is run by corruption and graft and the strong oppress the weak and there is no truth or reason or fairness or justice or lawā, āthere is just The Stateāwell, when weāll need to use our platforms to try to convince our well-intentioned but misguided co-citizens that theyāre barking up some very dangerous trees.
Maybe Iām worried about nothing. Maybe democratic socialists just want to raise the top marginal tax rate and make community college free. And if so, thatās great news. Though I would suggest that their branding is terrible and they ought to call their platform āVegan Barbarismā or something else thatās genuinely meaningless.
Hi, Iām Bernie Sanders, Vegan Barbarian and Iād like to be your next president.
It has a catchy ring to it, no?
Iām sorry to bug you, Sergey, and I know youāre really busy, but this is important so I hope you reply with your perspective before things take a turn for the (much much) worse.
Your alternate multiverse self,
Yevgeny Simkin
