While it is true and important that ideas have consequences, I think a lot of people misunderstand the history of the 20th century because they forget that context has consequences, too. For example: Karl Marx’s ideas had profound consequences. But original Marxism—if you actually read Marx, anyway—is profoundly stupid and can only be appealing in certain contexts. Modern Marxism is, if you examine it, merely related to original Marxism, because it has adapted.

Modern Marxism/socialism (in the USA) is primarily an answer to a mass of people who were tricked into selling themselves into indentured servitude for a lottery ticket to the upper classes with a fraudulent representation of the odds of winning. This indentured servitude comes in the form of high-interest student loans which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and it’s important to note that in 2010 the US federal government became the issuer of all student loans, so these loans are no longer a matter between private parties.

A fuller picture of the context that makes Marxism/socialism appealing in the USA also has to do with the general history of it involving an upper class of bureaucrats who get to tell everyone what to do, and how much this appeals to the kind of people who desperately want to tell everyone else what to do.

This context of widespread indentured servitude is why it’s probably for the best to allow students to return their degrees in exchange for cancelling their debt. Given that the issuer of the debt is the same as the government which makes it uncancelable in bankruptcy and also the government which has, through its impact on compulsory lower education created a system of indoctrination of the importance of going to college, the moral hazard really runs just as much towards keeping the loans as it does toward allowing people to cancel them. People should, in general, pay their honest debts. Student loans are not really honest debts. (And I say this as a person who never took out even $1 in college loans, so I have no personal stake in this.) I think it would make a certain amount of sense to liquidate the endowments of prestigious universities to partially pay for this cancellation and for the federal government to eat the rest of the debt as restitution for having perpetrated or at least cooperated in fraud.

Changing the context in this way will make Marxism unappealing in contemporary America in a way that better education never will in a fallen world where most men’s beliefs are at least as influenced by their passions as by their reason. (The best solution is both good education and fixing the context.)

This importance of context is also why conservatives need to put a great deal of effort into adapting the principles that were true in centuries past to modern conditions. We no longer have an agrarian society and we never will again for the simple reason that industrial society produces industrial warfare, and industrial warfare is so much more effective and pre-industrial warfare that if we ever became an agrarian society, it would only last a few years until an industrial society conquered us and turned us into an industrial vassal state with crushing taxation to fund their own standard of living.

Fundamentally, economic productivity enables people to make more and better weapons, and the warlike nature of fallen humanity means that we must make these. We must, therefore, figure out how to achieve maximal human dignity in a way that produces at least extremely high productivity. Merely yearning for contexts which will not come back in which this was a (mostly) solved problem is not a strategy.

Ideas matter, but so does context, and people somewhat naturally prefer bad answers to non-answers.