Socialism :Long
deployed by the right as an epithet, this form of left-wing populism is as
American as apple pie.
Now that
Bernie Sanders has entered the contest for the Democratic Party’s presidential
nomination, Americans are going to hear a lot about socialism, because the
73-year-old U.S. senator from Vermont describes himself as a “democratic
socialist.”
“Ever since
I was a kid I never liked to see people without money or connections get put
down or pushed around,” Sanders explained in making his announcement. “When I
came to Congress I tried to be a voice for people who did not have a voice—the
elderly, the children, the sick, and the poor. And that is what I will be doing
as a candidate for president.”
We can
expect the right-wing echo chamber—including Fox News hosts, Tea Party
politicians, and Rush Limbaugh—to attack Sanders for espousing an ideology that
they’ll likely describe as foreign, European, and un-American.
But
Sanders’s views are in sync with a longstanding American socialist tradition.
Throughout our history, some of the nation’s most influential activists and
thinkers, such as Jane Addams, John Dewey, Helen Keller, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert
Einstein, Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King, and Gloria Steinem, embraced
socialism.
Of course,
America’s right-wingers say there’s already a socialist in the White House.
Of course,
America’s right-wingers say there’s already a socialist in the White House. For
the past seven years, Barack Obama’s opponents—the Republican Party, the Tea
Party, the right-wing blogosphere, and conservative media gurus like Glenn
Beck, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh—labeled
anything Obama proposed, including his modest health-care reforms and his
efforts to restore regulations on Wall Street, as “socialism.”
In March
2009, two months after Obama took office, the ultra-conservative National
Review put a picture of the new president on its cover over the headline,
“Our Socialist Future.” In 2010, Newt Gingrich authored To Save America:
Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine. Stanley Kurtz, a regular
contributor to conservative publications and frequent guest on Fox News,
published Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American
Socialism. These are only a few of the many right-wingers fulminating
against Obama’s alleged socialist views.
Obama joked
about this in his recent speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association
dinner. “I like Bernie. Bernie’s an interesting guy,” said Obama,
referring to Sanders. “Apparently, some folks want to see a pot-smoking
socialist in the White House. We could get a third Obama term after all.”
President
Franklin Roosevelt faced similar allegations. His conservative enemies,
including some members of Congress, consistently called him a socialist. In a
speech defending his New Deal goals, FDR said: “A few timid people, who fear
progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing.
Sometimes they will call it ‘Fascism,’ sometimes ‘Communism,’ sometimes
‘Regimentation,’ sometimes ‘Socialism’. But, in so doing, they are trying to
make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very
practical.”
When big
business and conservatives attacked FDR as a radical, FDR boasted: “They are
unanimous in their hate for me. And I welcome their hatred.”
Labeling
someone a “socialist” has long been conservatives’ convenient way of attacking
anyone who espouses even liberal views. In Sanders’s case, however, the label
fits. He is a socialist. But don’t expect him to call for government
ownership of banks and drug companies. His views fall squarely within the
progressive wing of the Democratic Party, similar to those of his Senate
colleagues Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Sherrod
Brown of Ohio, and Barbara Boxer of California and the late Paul Wellstone of
Minnesota.
In fact,
times have changed. Most Americans, even if they’re not socialists themselves,
don’t have the same knee-jerk, vitriolic hostility to the idea that was
widespread during the hysteria of the Cold War.
A Pew
Research Center survey
recently found that while only 31 percent of Americans had a positive
reaction to the word “socialism,” barely 50 percent of Americans had a positive
view of capitalism, and 40 percent had a negative response. That’s hardly a
ringing endorsement.
The Pew poll
found that young Americans are about equally divided in their attitudes toward
socialism and capitalism. Among 18-to-29 year olds, 49 percent had a positive
view of socialism, while 47 percent had a positive view of capitalism.
Similarly, only 43 percent had a negative view of socialism, compared with 47
percent who had a negative view of capitalism.
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“Many young people associate capitalism with
inequality, big corporations, and poverty,” Joseph Schwartz, a Temple
University political scientist, told me in an interview.
“During the
Cold War, socialism was identified with Communism, which meant totalitarianism
and dictatorship. It wasn’t a very positive image,” said Schwartz. “But things
have changed since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. If people now in their 20s and
30s have any image of socialism at all, it is probably northern Europe,
particularly Scandinavia. They know that northern Europe has less poverty, more
equality, and more social mobility. And they know that Canada, which has a
strong socialist party [called the New Democratic Party], is a more equal and
humane society than the United States.”
Dick Flacks,
a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, thinks that
right-wing attacks on Obama may have backfired, especially among the Millennial
generation, which gave Obama 66 percent of its vote in 2008, and 60 percent
four years later.
Read the entire piece.
It is worth it.
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