Occasionally I play tennis on weekends with a small group of men who are predominantly Republicans and who like to engage in Democrat bashing between games. One recent comment – which most of us have heard repeated ad nauseum – that sticks in my mind is that President Obama is the most “socialistic” president we’ve ever had.
The man who said that is a physician and is undoubtedly at least reasonably intelligent. So why would he (or anyone else) say such an ignorant and stupid thing? I believe that there is one reason above all else: It is repeated endlessly on our corporate media by the right wing propaganda machine. For people who don’t care to give matters much thought, when they hear something repeated often enough it becomes so self-evidently true that it requires no argument at all to sustain it. Furthermore, they can see that: 1) Obama is black (true); 2) Most black people are substantially to the left of the U.S. population (true – and with damn good reason); 3) Socialism is a leftist idea (true); 4) “Socialism” is a pejorative term in the United States (true), and; 5) Why let an opportunity to bash a Democratic president go to waste?
What could I say to the accusation of Obama being a socialist? “No he’s not” seemed too simple and childish. One could talk for hours about the evidence pointing to the fact that Obama is the least socialistic Democratic U.S. president since the 19th Century, but there’s hardly time to go into that between tennis games. So I just asked my tennis friend if he believes in Medicare and Social Security. He seemed stymied for a moment, before saying something non-committal like, “I think that there’s a place for them”.
That should be the absolute end of the argument against anyone attempting to stigmatize something simply by attaching the word “socialism” to it. The
difference between capitalism and socialism is that with capitalism the means of production and distribution are “owned” by individuals, whereas with socialism the means of production and distribution are
collectively “owned” by society/government. No economic system in the world is now or has ever been purely capitalistic. Any time a government taxes private individuals and then uses the collected money to provide goods or services to its citizens, that government is practicing socialism. Social Security and Medicare therefore are prime examples of socialism. So is our public school system. So is our national highway system. So are police forces and our military. Our nation’s economic system does now and always has consisted of aspects of socialism, along with aspects of capitalism. Anyone who is willing to acknowledge that Medicare or Social Security or our military “have a place” in our nation is thereby admitting that socialism has a place in our nation. They should think about that before they attempt to stigmatize something merely by attaching the word “socialism” to it.
Yet for about a century and a half the powers that be in the United States have turned “socialism” into such a pejorative term that the mere use of the word serves as the ultimate argument against anything that they don’t like. Medicare and Social Security were lambasted as “socialism” by right wing elites before they became the law of the land. But they wouldn’t dare do that now, now that they have become so popular.
The reasons for the war against socialism in the United StatesThe wealthy conservative elite of our society tag the “socialism” label on all those laws and policies that benefit approximately the less wealthy and powerful 98% of our population, and especially those that benefit the poor. They do that, very simply,
because those laws and policies reduce their own wealth and power. That is what the
century and a half war against socialism in the United States is all about. Those conservative elites are right about one thing. The policies that they rail against are indeed socialistic. When added to a primarily capitalistic system, such as operates in our country, they produce a mixed capitalism/socialism system which guards against the harmful excesses of capitalism which tend to drive people into poverty and reduce the quality of life of millions of our citizens.
The question is not whether government should intervene in the economy of its society, but
in what manner should it intervene and who should receive the benefits of that intervention. More to the point, the financial rules of a society may be set mostly for the benefit of the rich and powerful, or they may be set up to more broadly benefit everyone. Policies which tend to benefit the less wealthy and powerful include such things as: protections against environmental degradation; protection for consumers against the risks of dangerous products; protection against dangerous working conditions; anti-trust laws to ensure competition; anti-discrimination laws; progressive tax laws; minimum wage laws; provision of government health care, education, and child care assistance; promotion or assurance of full employment for those able and willing to work; and labor laws that strengthen the bargaining capabilities of workers. All of these policies can operate without reducing the profit incentive to the point where the public suffers from a non-productive economy. I believe that these policies
should be used because: 1) they provide needed protections to the most vulnerable of our population; 2) they benefit about 98% of the remainder of our population; and 3) they are fair.
Yet the slightest hint of these policies is enough to make the right wing conservative elite apoplectic. They rail against “socialism” as if it was the invention of the devil. And then they accuse anyone who advocates these policies, not only of socialism or Communism, but of “class warfare”. Well, it
is class warfare – but it’s practiced by both sides. It’s practiced by the right wing elite in order to preserve their wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. And in defense against that, when our plight becomes bad enough we object and attempt to create progressive policies or legislation in order to counter their attacks.
Origins of the war against socialism in the United StatesWith the onset of the industrial age working people in the United States had it very rough. They often worked very hard, under very bad physical conditions, for very little money, and for so many hours that they had very little time for leisure or to spend with their families. A process that is crucial in allowing this to happen is called monopolization. When individuals or corporations have a monopoly on a particular product or service there is no room for market forces to operate. The owner of the monopoly has the opportunity to maximize its profits at the expense of everyone else. Barry Lynn discusses this process in his book, “
Cornered – The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction”.
The structural monopolization of so many systems resulted in a set of political arrangements similar to… corporatism. This means that our political economy is run by a compact elite that is able to fuse the power of our public government with the power of private corporate governments in ways that enable members of the elite not merely to offload their risk onto us but also to determine with almost complete freedom who wins, who loses, and who pays.
Labor unions began to form as a response to repressive conditions. Industry vigorously resisted their demands, greatly assisted by the leading newspapers of the time, as well as the powers of government. They endlessly described the U.S. labor movement as socialist, Communist, and anarchist, as a means of demonizing it. James Green, in his book “
Death in the Haymarket – A story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America”, describes in detail some of the early struggles of the labor movement in the United States. A major focus of the book, as the title suggests, was the
Haymarket Square bombing incident of May 5, 1886, which occurred during a major labor protest. Green describes how government officials bribed, threatened or tortured witnesses into testifying against 8 indicted labor leaders, which resulted in death sentences for 7 of the 8.
Then, much as the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon provided an excuse for the invasion of two sovereign nations, the
torture of thousands, widespread
violations of international treaties meant to protect human rights, and widespread violations of the U.S. Constitution in the cause of suppressing civil liberties in our country, the right wing elite used the Haymarket Square bombing and other excuses to justify suppression of labor unions. This very possibly set back the labor movement in the United States by decades. By the first decades of the 20th Century, the United States was in the midst of such a Red scare that Eugene Debs, perennial Socialist candidate for President of the United States, was
repeatedly imprisoned for speaking out about his beliefs. An overall idea of the violence involved in conflicts between labor and employers in the United States is provided by the historian Richard Hofstadter, writing in 1970. Hofstadter concluded that the United States had experienced at least 160 instances in which state or federal troops had intervened in strikes, and at least 700 labor disputes in which deaths were recorded, with clearly most of the violence being perpetrated by state or federal authorities.
Counter-measuresBeginning with the
Sherman Anti-trust law of 1890 and continuing with President Theodore Roosevelt’s
trust busting efforts, the
Progressive Movement sought to prevent unfair monopolistic practices, especially with regard to services that are essential to us.
Probably no figure in American history did more to socialize our economic system than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is widely recognized as the
second greatest president in U.S. history. Nor was any other figure in U.S. history despised as much by the right wing conservative elite, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, who is widely recognized as the
greatest president in U.S. history. Needless to say, Roosevelt was widely accused by the right wing elite of being a Communist. Cass Sunstein, in his book, “
The Second Bill of Rights – FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More than Ever”, describes the philosophy that motivated Roosevelt to fight for his radical (at the time) programs to benefit the American people:
To Roosevelt, human distress could no longer be taken as an inevitable by-product of life, society, or “nature”; it was an artifact of social policies and choices. Much human misery is preventable. The only question is whether a government is determined to prevent it…. Foremost was the idea that poverty is preventable, that poverty is destructive, wasteful, demoralizing, and that poverty is morally unacceptable in a Christian and democratic society.
Consequently, FDR introduced the concept of economic and social rights, which had not gained much traction in the United States until his Presidency. FDRs Presidency and fervent advocating of these rights coincided with circumstances (The Great Depression) that made their need glaringly apparent to a large proportion of American citizens. Some of the most concrete results of FDR’s efforts were the
Social Security Act of 1935, the
creation of several agencies that produced greatly needed jobs,
labor protection laws that created the right for workers to organize into unions and a federal minimum wage, antitrust policies, the
GI bill of rights, and to help pay for some of those programs,
record tax rates on wealthy corporations and individuals. But perhaps more important than these concrete accomplishments, by the end of FDR’s Presidency large segments of the American population accepted many aspects of his Second Bill of Rights as legitimate rights – for example, the right to a good education.
FDR’s radical transformation of U.S. society was followed by several decades of what Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman refers to as the “
the greatest sustained economic boom in U.S. history”. So popular was this socialization of U.S. economic policy that the Republican Party gave up on trying to fight it, for reasons that are made clear in a letter that Republican President Eisenhower
wrote to his brother on the subject:
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are…. a few Texas oil millionaires… Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
The U.S. international war against socialismFor several decades the U.S. justified its Cold War policies as a fight for freedom against the Communist/Socialist forces of the Soviet Union. Using Communism/Socialism as an excuse, our CIA and military
intervened in dozens of nations anywhere and everywhere in the world to overthrow the legally elected governments of other countries or to prevent them from being elected in the first place. This gave rise to repressive right wing governments all over the world and resulted in untold misery widely distributed throughout the world. Richard J. Walton describes the situation in his book, “
Henry Wallace, Harry Truman, and the Cold War”:
Various right wing dictators… were quick to perceive that the United States was supporting them not out of a genuine concern for their people but because they were allies in an anti-Communist crusade that took precedence over all other considerations… It is difficult to think of a single instance where the United States took effective measures to end repressive, undemocratic practices of a regime it claimed to be supporting in the defense of democracy…
There were many reasons for these interventions. Perhaps the most important reason was that our right wing elite knew that they couldn’t afford to allow a successful example of socialism be made visible to the American people, thus opening up the possibility that the American people might want to go that route themselves.
Thus it was that, fearing a Communist victory in the 1956 elections in Vietnam, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles convinced President Eisenhower to
prevent those elections from taking place as planned. Eisenhower proclaimed an indefinite commitment by the United States to that effect, despite the fact that the
Geneva Conference Agreements, which officially ended the war between France and Vietnam in 1954, provided for general elections with the intent of bringing about the unification of Vietnam. Yet from the time that we prevented the Vietnamese from holding elections in 1956 as previously agreed, until our withdrawal from Vietnam 17 years later, the justification for our imperial policies there was always the claim that we were helping the Vietnamese to throw of the yolk of Communism and to prevent the spread of Communism to other countries.
As many as four million Vietnamese died for that cause of ours.
And so it continuesAnd so today, as it has for the past century and a half, the right wing elites continue to rail against socialism. They use the scare of the socialist menace to
rail against meaningful health care reform. They use it to rail against regulation of Wall Street’s predatory financial practices. They use it to
rail against any meaningful measures to curb the corporate induced climate change that threatens to destroy our planet. And they use it to elect their own kind to public office. And Democrats so often fall in line with this nonsense that they’ve been unable to accomplish much over a two year period in which they controlled the Presidency and both Houses of Congress by large majorities – and now they face likely defeat at the polls because of this.
Instead of bowing to right wing forces and thus contributing to the continuing ignorance of the American people on this issue, Democrats should explain to the American people what socialism is and the role that it has played in our history. They should explain to the American people that many of their most cherished and popular programs are largely grounded in socialistic ideals.
At least we have one example in the U.S. Senate of someone who isn’t afraid to do that. Senator Bernie Sanders is often asked – or challenged – to defend socialism. When
Amy Goodman asked him, “What do you mean, Socialist?” Sanders responded:
that as a right, all of our kids, regardless of income, have quality childcare, are able to go to college without going deeply into debt; that it means we do not allow large corporations and moneyed interests to destroy our environment; that we create a government in which it is not dominated by big money interest. I mean, to me, it means democracy, frankly. That’s all it means. And we are living in an increasingly undemocratic society in which decisions are made by people who have huge sums of money. And that’s the goal that we have to achieve.
Sanders also defended Socialism is
his own article, in which he pointed out that the system under which we currently live is very far from the heaven on earth that so many defenders of the status quo portray it to be:
We have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world. Our childcare system is totally inadequate. Too many of our kids drop out of school, and college is increasingly unaffordable. One of the results of how we neglect many of our children is that we end up with more people in jails and prisons than any other country on earth. There is a correlation between the highest rate of childhood poverty and the highest rate of incarceration.
Perhaps Sanders’ respect for the truth, and his willingness to share it with his constituents, is one reason why he has one of the safest seats in the U.S. Senate despite the lack of corporate money in his campaign coffers.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
