A second, even more worrying example is Left-NIMBYism. In response to the nationwide housing affordability crisis, many socialists across the country have embraced the theory that building more housing increases rents and causes gentrification. This is obviously a silly idea to apply at the national scale — if you don’t build houses for people, they won’t have anywhere to live. But even at the local level, the evidence is strongly against Left-NIMBYism — building more housing acts holds down rent and usually the decreases displacement of low-income renters from a fashionable neighborhood. But as in so many things, evidence doesn’t dent the socialist worldview — in a recent article, Nathan J. Robinson made the farcical argument that instead of building new housing we should simply build new cities.

Now the Left-NIMBYism is beginning to extend to alternative energy as well. Although the Sunrise Movement — a darling of America’s new socialists — started out as a promoter of the pro-growth Green New Deal, the organization’s local chapters now routinely oppose clean energy projects. It’s possible that Sunrise is beginning to follow in the footsteps of older legacy environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, who tend to equate environmentalism with a lack of development. This is, of course, extremely deleterious to the fight against climate change, which requires rapid deployment of green energy everywhere in the country. The organization’s foray into decrying high gasoline prices certainly isn’t a good sign.

This has become a pattern; time and again, America’s socialists spend their intellectual and political capital on these vials of snake oil. It was only through the timely intervention of more sensible socialist writers that the movement was saved from going all-in on the pseudo-economics cult called MMT. As for the opposition to Ukraine’s self-defense, it smacks of pure anti-American “campism” — the idea that anyone who opposes America can’t be all that bad, even if it’s a rightist dictator like Putin.