John Nichols: How Socialists Built America

[marmar]

from The Nation:




How Socialists Built America

John Nichols
April 13, 2011


This article is adapted from The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism, published in March by Verso.

 
If there’s one constant in the elite national discourse of the moment, it is the claim that America was founded as a capitalist country and that socialism is a dangerous foreign import that, despite our unwarranted faith in free trade, must be barred at the border. This most conventional “wisdom”—increasingly accepted at least until the recent grassroots mobilizations in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Maine—has held that everything public is inferior to everything private, that corporations are always good and unions always bad, that progressive taxation is inherently evil and that the best economic model is the one that allows the wealthy to gobble up as much of the Republic as they choose before anything trickles down to the great mass of Americans. Rush Limbaugh informs us regularly that proposals to tax people as rich as he is for the purpose of providing healthcare for kids and jobs for the unemployed are “antithetical” to the nation’s original intent and that Barack Obama’s reforms are “destroying this country as it was founded.”

When Obama offered tepid proposals to organize a private healthcare system in a more humane manner, Sean Hannity of Fox charged that “the Constitution was shredded, thwarted, the rule of law was passed aside.” Newt Gingrich said the Obama administration was “prepared to fundamentally violate the Constitution” and was playing to the “30 percent of the country really is a left-wing secular socialist system.”

In 2009 Sarah Palin raised similar constitutional concerns, about Obama’s proposal to develop a system of “universal energy building codes” to promote energy efficiency. “Our country could evolve into something that we do not even recognize, certainly that is so far from what the founders of our country had in mind for us,” a gravely concerned Palin informed Hannity, who responded with a one-word question. “Socialism?”

“Well,” she said, “that is where we are headed.” ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/article/159929/how-socialists-built-america

[TomClash]

1. I stopped at "The point here is not to defend socialism."

Why not? Much of it is great. It is a good part of the reason why we got social security, the 40 hour work week, an end to child labor, unions, unemployment insurance, anti-discrimination laws, the minimum wage, health care, civil rights, progressive taxation, head start, medicare, medicaid, the national highway system, space exploration, the internet and thousands of other benefits for the common man and woman.