Ideologies and policies and outcomes are all interrelated, of course... but it's not quite a chicken and egg thing. The original intent and driving impulse cannot be to cause disaster and devastation. Even when Lenin and Trotsky started their revolution, the *intent* was -- ultimate (utopian) prosperity and happiness for the majority. But - bad ideas lead to bad outcomes.
American Left is different from the hard, Stalinist (edit - or N. Korean) Left. Their socialism is "soft", closer to the West European model. And West Euros, actually, had a pretty nice run since WWII, and it is only recently that their socialistic ways (job protections, 6 week vacations, etc.) are proving to be unsustainable. I think there are reasons why W. Euro model of socialism would not succeed in the US, the way it worked for a while in Europe - but that's another conversation.
The initial Leftist's impulse is to "improve" the world. It so happens that the way to such "improvements" is through political power, and... people are attracted to power. Power is a complex and powerful drive, probably on par with the procreative impulse. It is not hard for those on the Left who are honest souls to delude themselves that they are not interested in power, but only in doing all those wonderful and good things which power would enable them to do. But in due course most will become corrupted.
Their "improvements", however, are destined to fail. The simple fact is that free markets perform better than centrally controlled and managed ones, leave alone centrally planned. With bad ideas in control, economic decline and deterioration of individual freedoms will be inevitable.
(Our single most devastating bad idea is proving to be Keynesian spending, which removes limits to government spending. And money, btw, is an important form of power. And power corrupts).
....the other day I took a stab at this subject, from a different angle... I'll try to find it and link it below, in a moment.
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