Bernie should have been in socialism class with Obama and me

[wyldwolf]

Imagine if Sanders praised Hitler for reducing cigarette smoking or Mussolini for making the trains run on time. The American left would be up in arms.

In the spring of 1983, when I was a senior at Columbia University, I took a course entitled “The Sociology of Socialist Societies.” Like a lot of young American leftists, I was a bit starry-eyed about socialism. But the class quickly disabused me of that.

We read a memoir by Hungarian dissident Miklós Haraszti, whose bosses in a tractor factory fleeced and brutalized him. We also read American journalist Hedrick Smith’s unsparing account of the Soviet Union, an ostensibly class-free society that was hugely hierarchical and unequal. Yes, we learned, socialist economies provided health care, education and other state services to their citizens. But if you dared to criticize the state itself, it could remove your services — and, of course, your freedom — at any time.

A few students in the course gamely tried to defend these systems, arguing that the sacrifice of civil liberties was a small price to pay for guaranteed social welfare. The rest of us kept quiet. And that included a tall African American, also a senior, who sat next to me in class: Barack Obama.

The former president has never released his college transcript, and I’ve long suspected that “The Sociology of Socialist Societies” is part of the reason. Imagine what his legion of enemies — already disposed to see Obama as a dangerous radical — could have done with that course title.

Obama rarely spoke in class, and I have no idea what he took away from it. But I can assure you that the course did not romanticize socialism in any way. If Obama did the reading, he discovered that socialist societies oppressed their citizens in the name of a revolution that never delivered on its promise of human dignity and liberation.

Just don’t tell that to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

As we’ve been reminded over the past few weeks, the Democratic presidential candidate is stuck in a Cold War time warp. Like the students in my class in 1983, Sanders continues to congratulate Cuba and other socialist regimes for improving the lives of their people.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/03/05/my-socialism-class-with-obama-lessons-for-bernie-sanders-column/4941651002/

[wyldwolf]

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