Almost every day I get a message from Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele denouncing President Obama's "radical socialist" policies. Fox News relentlessly sounds this chorus, and some Americans agree, rallying with posters featuring hammer-and-sickle drawings and pictures of Stalin next to our elected leader.
For the rest of the world, this sounds pretty silly: they know what socialism looks like, and we have nothing like it. When Britain's then-socialist Labor Party won the 1945 general election, they created a cradle-to-grave free National Health Service and nationalized their leading industries. Cuba in the 1960s abolished all private businesses, and guaranteed a job, health care and education to all its citizens. Here at home, Eugene V. Debs, our most influential Socialist politician, took 6 percent of the vote for president in 1912 and called for a government takeover of our entire capitalist system, "expropriating the expropriators" in the language of Marx.
To compare George W. Bush's blank check for "too big to fail" banks or Obama's propping up Ford and General Motors and modest health-care legislation to any form of socialism makes little sense historically. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal went considerably farther in the direction of socialism than Obama has attempted, with jobs programs like the Works Progress Administration that kept one-third of American families from destitution. By these standards, President Obama governs not from the left but from the moderate center-right; to historians of global politics, calling him a "socialist" is so much demagoguery.
3 comments:
I suspect that conservative's use of "socialist" is just shorthand for anybody who espouses a government-centric solution to political problems.
The more appropriate accusation might be "progressive," a label that might be fitting for many on the Right as well as the Left. They pick and choose from a laundry list of legislation for improving American morality: "why not use government to create a better society by redistributing wealth, mandating health insurance, and restricting the liberties of homosexuals?"
Paul: Good point. I can't help but wonder if Obama would be called a socialist today if people truly understood American history. Just another reason for people like us to keep on plugging away.
I think a conservative's use of "socialist" is just shorthand for someone that nationalizes banks, insurances companies, auto industries, the health industry, the energy industry, home mortgage insdustry, student loan industry, etc, etc.
The more appropriate lable might be "communist", a label that might be fitting for many on the right and left. I suggest this merely because I don't believe the word "Socialist" was ever on the ballot so this label may speak more to the tactics.
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