Book Review: Why You Should Be a Socialist by Nathan J. Robinson

 

Nathan J. Robinson’s Why You Should Be a Socialist is not a book so much as a sanctimonious lullaby for the terminally naïve. It is the intellectual equivalent of a toddler’s crayon drawing, loud, messy, and insisting to be taken seriously despite offering nothing of substance. Robinson parades his half-baked arguments with the pomp of a man who believes moral preening is the same as political thought. His method is insultingly simple: capitalism bad, socialism good. That’s the depth of it. Everything from poverty to climate change is waved about as proof that we must burn the market system to the ground and build his dream utopia, though he never explains how. It is all outrage masquerading as logic. What makes the book almost comical is Robinson’s wilful blindness to history. The gulags, the breadlines, the surveillance states, the corpses stacked in the millions, none of this, apparently, was “real” socialism. He demands we take his fantasy socialism seriously while pretending every actual attempt at it was an unfortunate misunderstanding. By this logic, communism never fails; it just hasn’t been tried by people as whimsical and clever as Nathan J. Robinson. Stylistically, the book reeks of smugness. Robinson’s affected quirkiness and “isn’t this fun?” tone are meant to disarm you, but really they expose him as a man terrified of confronting reality. The prose is littered with cutesy asides, as if he knows his arguments collapse under scrutiny, so he distracts you with charm offensives. It’s politics written like a Buzzfeed listicle: shallow, self-indulgent, and designed to flatter an audience desperate to be told they are morally superior. At its core, Why You Should Be a Socialist is dishonest. It pretends to be a radical manifesto, but it is little more than therapy for guilt-ridden Westerners who sip lattes and fantasize about revolution while benefiting from the very capitalist system they claim to hate. Robinson offers no roadmap, no workable ideas, only the intoxicating narcotic of moral self-congratulation. This isn’t a book; it’s a recruitment pamphlet for people who mistake envy for justice and utopian delusion for political courage. It contributes nothing to debate, except as an example of how low intellectual standards have sunk in the modern Left. Verdict: An embarrassment to political thought, juvenile, dishonest, and better suited to the recycling bin than the bookshelf.