Why Isn't Socialism Dead?

Writing for TCS Daily, Lee Harris provides his thoughts on the question that advocates for limited government and individual rights should be asking. Harris reviews the history of socialism in detail but the following two paragraphs highlight the most likely answer.

Why Isn't Socialism Dead? When Hernando de Soto asserts that capitalism is the only rational alternative left to mankind, he is maintaining that capitalism is the alternative that human beings ought to take because it is the rational thing to do. But what human beings ought to do and what they actually do are often two quite different things. For human beings frequently act quite irrationally, and without the least consideration of what economist called their "enlightened self-interest." And it is in this light that we must approach the problem, Why isn't socialism dead?

It may well be that socialism isn't dead because socialism cannot die. As Sorel argued, the revolutionary myth may, like religion, continue to thrive in "the profounder regions of our mental life," in those realms unreachable by mere reason and argument, where even a hundred proofs of failure are insufficient to wean us from those primordial illusions that we so badly wish to be true. Who doesn't want to see the wicked and the arrogant put in their place? Who among the downtrodden and the dispossessed can fail to be stirred by the promise of a world in which all men are equal, and each has what he needs?

Humans tend to behave habitually and react emotionally. The rational functions of human thought learn over time that doing this tends to produce that. Getting people to act outside of habits requires an emotional push, and the collectivists, populists, progressives, and socialists believe the way to get apolitical people to turn out and vote is to fire them up with visions of reward and revenge for differences. Failure to achieve some goals is not as bad as failure to prevent the Democrats from seizing back control of government. The Republican factions need to grieve their losses and find a really positive counter message.