Bernie at Georgetown

Continuing with the discussion of Bernie Sanders' political philosophy and framing, he gave a Big Think speech at Georgetown University last November.

The whole theme of his "socialism" and talk of "revolution" don't bother me about him, even in terms of "electability" in the general election, for reasons I explained in the previous post. And for Democrats for several decades, claiming you're more "electable" than another Democrat means, "I'm more like the Republicans than my opponent."

This topic matters in the campaign because the herd opinion is that Sanders is running essentially a frivolous campaign. As Ed Kilgore writes, "there's no question elements of the media and political opponents alike would love to depict Bernie as an aging, strident ideologue serving as a pied piper to uninhibited and 'idealistic' youth." (Is Bernie Sanders Vulnerable to the Kind of Media Pile-On That Took Down Howard Dean? New York 02/04/2016)

Bernie's campaign has posted a video of the Georgetown speech on their YouTube account, Democratic Socialism and Foreign Policy 11/19/2015:

A transcript of the speech is available from In These Times, Bernie Sanders: My Vision For Democratic Socialism in America 11/19/2016.

In a basic sense, Sanders is attempting to popularize a long-established political science and economics perspective, in which the "welfare state" is broadly considered social-democraticm in contrast to the state socialism of the Soviet Union and other states at one time or another in the "socialist camp" of nations. And also in contrast to the neoclassical economic fundamentalism broadly known as "neoliberalism," which does not refer to "liberal" in the American political sense but to the type of Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning practiced by Angela Merkel's Grand Coalition goverment in Germany, which has become the dominant EU elite perspective on the world. The US Republican Party also embraces neoliberalism, even though to Republicans the word "liberal" in any form is like holy water to a vampire.

Sanders told the Georgetown audience, speaking of President Franklin Roosevelt:

And he acted. Against the ferocious opposition of the ruling class of his day, people he called economic royalists, Roosevelt implemented a series of programs that put millions of people back to work, took them out of poverty and restored their faith in government. He redefined the relationship of the federal government to the people of our country. He combatted cynicism, fear and despair. He reinvigorated democracy. He transformed the country.

And that is what we have to do today.

And, by the way, almost everything he proposed was called “socialist.” Social Security, which transformed life for the elderly in this country was “socialist.” The concept of the “minimum wage” was seen as a radical intrusion into the marketplace and was described as “socialist.” Unemployment insurance, abolishing child labor, the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as “socialist.” Yet, these programs have become the fabric of our nation and the foundation of the middle class.

Thirty years later, in the 1960s, President Johnson passed Medicare and Medicaid to provide health care to millions of senior citizens and families with children, persons with disabilities and some of the most vulnerable people in this county. Once again these vitally important programs were derided by the right wing as socialist programs that were a threat to our American way of life. [my emphasis]

I would note that Sanders is referring in that passage to FDR's 1937 Inaugural Address, after his resounding re-election in 1936.

But in his immediate action, he decided to embrace balancing the federal budget as a priority, which temporarily short-circuited the long recovery from the Great Depression and pushed the country into a new downturn. Or, at a minimum, acted as a pro-cyclical force when a contra-cyclical one was needed. FDR changed direction when he saw the results. But I hope we don't see a President Sanders in 2017 making balancing the budget his top economic policy priority!

And whether you call it the New Deal, the Great Society, socialism, or just good ideas, he wants to address real problems in an immediately realistic way:

Today, in America, we are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, but few Americans know that because so much of the new income and wealth goes to the people on top. In fact, over the last 30 years, there has been a massive transfer of wealth—trillions of wealth—going from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent—a handful of people who have seen a doubling of the percentage of the wealth they own over that period.

Unbelievably, and grotesquely, the top one-tenth of 1 percent owns nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

Today, in America, millions of our people are working two or three jobs just to survive. In fact, Americans work longer hours than do the people of any industrialized country. Despite the incredibly hard work and long hours of the American middle class, 58 percent of all new income generated today is going to the top one percent.

This is also an important statement on his policy goals:

Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system in America today which is not only grossly unfair but, in many respects, corrupt.

It is a system, for example, which during the 1990s allowed Wall Street to spend $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to get deregulated. Then, ten years later, after the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior of Wall Street led to their collapse, it is a system which provided trillions in government aid to bail them out. Wall Street used their wealth and power to get Congress to do their bidding for deregulation and then, when their greed caused their collapse, they used their wealth and power to get Congress to bail them out. Quite a system!

And, then, to add insult to injury, we were told that not only were the banks too big to fail, the bankers were too big to jail. Kids who get caught possessing marijuana get police records. Wall Street CEOs who help destroy the economy get raises in their salaries. This is what Martin Luther King, Jr. meant by socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else.

In my view, it’s time we had democratic socialism for working families, not just Wall Street, billionaires and large corporations. It means that we should not be providing welfare for corporations, huge tax breaks for the very rich, or trade policies which boost corporate profits as workers lose their jobs. It means that we create a government that works for works for all of us, not just powerful special interests. It means that economic rights must be an essential part of what America stands for. [my emphasis]

I can't help but recall that Jerry Brown made this sort of political corruption a central issue in his third and last run for the Presidency in 1992. He argued then that the system of campaign finance was legalized bribery. It sounded edgy and "extreme" at the time. Now it's painfully obvious. And about 100 times worse than it was in 1992.

Sanders offers the following in a more defensive but unapologetic mode:

So the next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this:

I don’t believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.

I believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America instead of shipping jobs and profits overseas.

I believe that most Americans can pay lower taxes - if hedge fund managers who make billions manipulating the marketplace finally pay the taxes they should.

I don’t believe in special treatment for the top 1 percent, but I do believe in equal treatment for African-Americans who are right to proclaim the moral principle that Black Lives Matter.

I despise appeals to nativism and prejudice, and I do believe in immigration reform that gives Hispanics and others a pathway to citizenship and a better life.

I don’t believe in some foreign “ism”, but I believe deeply in American idealism.

The Clinton camp has adopted a two-track approach in opposing Sanders which sounds muddled to me. They argue on the one hand that Clinton is more progressive on some issues than he is. On the other, they say his proposals are too unrealistic to ever get enacted and she can deliver more practical results.

It's essentially a rehash of her framing against Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries. And both were arguably more applicable in 2008 than today. Obama was generally vague about his proposals. He allowed voters to think he was more progressive than Hillary. And it turned out that's what Democratic voters wanted, someone who represented a significant change in both policy and demographics, a change not just from the Cheney-Bush Administration but from the cautious "pro-business" centrism of the first Clinton Administration.

Clinton is still the obvious "horserace" favorite for the nomination. But it seems to me there's definitely a confusing message. Paul Krugman is obviously if unofficially pro-Clinton for the primaries. He is probably more frank than the Clinton campaign would prefer in describing the Clinton/pragmatist position (Half A Loaf, Financial Reform Edition 02/03/2016): "The reality of the Obama era, for progressives, is a series of half loaves. But after all the defeats over the previous 30 years, aren’t those achievements something to celebrate?"

But this is how the Clinton pitch inevitably sounds to the Democratic base: Clinton, for half a loaf! I saw a satire label on Facebook (which unfortunately I can't find again even with Yahoo!) that said something along the lines of "HILLARY CLINTON - Because Real Change Is Just Too Hard."

But one of the most appealing things about Hillary for the Democratic base is that she's a fighter. And after eight years of frustration at Obama's sad pursuit of Bipartisanship as a benefit in itself, it's easy to imagine that she will act from Day 1 as President without any illusions about the nastiness and intransigence of the opposition. But her message in the primaries doesn't capitalize on that. Instead, it's sounds more like a pitch to the Bipartisan chimera that Obama chased for years, producing pre-compromised proposals that the Republicans then attacked as radical threats to freedom.

But who knows? Hillary Clinton could turn out to be a more transformative progressive President than Bernie Sanders would be. But her campaign so far gives us much reason to doubt that.

Sanders and "socialism"

Dan Roberts and Adam Gabbatt look at the "socialist" label and Bernie Sanders in Is the US ready for a socialist president? Sanders might be about to find out Guardian 02/06/2016.

Having seen the German Social Democratic Party push neoliberal policies for the last decade and a half, and enthusiastically backing Angela Merkel's Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economic policies, the "socialist" label has become pretty vague in practice. The SPD is one of the Ur-socialist parties, with Karl Marx as one of its co-founders. Although today's SPD prefers to stick with Ferdinand Lasalle as their founder.

Here I'll quote David Conradt's article, Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Encyclopædia Britannica (accessed 02/06/2016). He doesn't talk about Marx' role in the merger of the two predecessor parties but it's a good sketch of classical European socialism of the late 19th century:

The SPD traces its origins to the merger in 1875 of the General German Workers’ Union, led by Ferdinand Lassalle, and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, headed by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. In 1890 it adopted its current name, the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The party’s early history was characterized by frequent and intense internal conflicts between so-called revisionists and orthodox Marxists and by persecution by the German government and its chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. The revisionists, led at various times by Lassalle and Eduard Bernstein, argued that social and economic justice could be achieved for the working class through democratic elections and institutions and without a violent class struggle and revolution. The orthodox Marxists insisted that free elections and civil rights would not create a truly socialist society and that the ruling class would never cede power without a fight. Indeed, German elites of the late 19th century considered the very existence of a socialist party a threat to the security and stability of the newly unified Reich, and from 1878 to 1890 the party was officially outlawed.

Fast-forward to the US and Bernie Sanders, 2016. "Socialism" has been used and misused so much that we have to look at what Sanders himself says about what he means when he uses the word for his own positions. Roberts and Gabbatt give us these glimpses in their not especially sympathetic to Sanders report:

As the only candidate proposing to abolish tuition fees at public universities, Sanders frequently takes on the role of a reverse auctioneer, asking members of the audience at his rallies to shout out how much student debt they have. For a while, the record was $300,000. Then he met a dentist who graduated with loans of $400,000.

But paying for college by taxing Wall Street speculation is not the only policy that has seen the senator from Vermont branded a dangerous extremist – by his own party. Despite the limited health insurance reforms passed by Barack Obama, 29 million Americans remain without any coverage and many more are underinsured to the point where they cannot afford to see a doctor. [my emphasis]

Tuition-free public colleges and "taxing Wall Street speculation." Of course the One Percent is happy to stigmatize such policies, and will do so no matter who advocates them.

But are they really terrifying for working and middle class voters? For some, sure. But if "socialism" for Sanders means better access to college, closing remaining gaps on health insurance while better controlling health care costs, taxing and better regulating giant bank, and reducing the currently extreme power of campaign contributors and corporate lobbyists - those things in themselves are not inherently scary for general election voters who aren't already committed Republican voters.

On the last topic, Roberts and Gabbatt write: "The notion, proposed by Sanders, that a corrupt campaign finance system is the only thing standing between voters and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change this might seem simplistic. But it is proving wildly popular."

And they make this important point:

Confusion also stems from the fact that Sanders uses the phrase “democratic socialist” partly to stress his belief that change must come through the ballot box, but also because, in continental Europe at least, he would probably be known as a social democrat, a label that does not easily translate to the US.

A “Democrat” in US parlance is something the independent senator from Vermont only became when he decided to seek the party’s presidential nomination in May. Anyone using the word “social” in American politics might as well go the whole hog and add the “ist” before somewhere else does.

The first President Clinton never advertised himself with the "socialist" label. On the contrary, he emerged on the national stage as an advocate for the neoliberal "DNC" strategy of giving the Democratic Party a distinctly more conservative image. And when he ran for President in 1992, the supposedly moderate incumbent, Old Man Bush, pulled this: Bill Clinton and the KGB by Paul Wieck Christian Science Monitor 10/15/1992. One of the sleaziest pieces of sleazes US political history. But I doubt in the midst of a Presidential campaign, that Bill's wife is much embarrassed by the following, also reported by Dan Roberts: Sanders smeared as communist sympathiser as Clinton allies sling mud Guardian 01/22/2016.

Sanders is also calling for a "political revolution" and doing so without embarrassment. When he says this, he makes clear that what he is talking about is more ordinary people getting involved in politics with the goals of reducing the power of organized money and electing a Congress not dominated by Republicans. I'm sure that sounds pretty scary to a lot of Democratic office-holders. But it sounds like a good idea to me. Whether or not we want to quibble about the political-science definition of "revolution."

But we also need to see this in terms of how the right uses the term these days. Sanders parried a question from Anderson Cooper on the term this week by reminding him of the "Reagan Revolution" and the "Gingrich Revolution," terms that haven't bothering the Grand Old Party much.

Then there are our cornpone Duck Dynasty John Calhouns, like the Bundy boys and their fans. Not only such characters, but the NRA that few Republicans are willing to criticize at all, talk about the need for people to have unlimited access to guns in order to fight "tyranny" if the occasion arises. Now a clever pollster or sociologist could surely document that what most white people have in mind when they talk about "tyranny" in this context actually means "black people."

But we don't need any special studies to know that the Republican Party is perfectly comfortable with the formal justification of the need for unlimited gun proliferation as required to fight "tyranny." What would that mean if it ever got more serious than a bunch of fools seizing a building on a wildlife sanctuary? It would basically be applying the techniques of partisan warfare, aka, "terrorism": sabotaging infrastructure like bridges and power stations, ambushes on police and soldiers, assassination of hostile public officials. Ugly stuff even when employed in the best of causes. And our present-day junior John Calhoun's don't have a good cause.

So if the Republican Party's acceptance and encouragement of this kind of revolutionary and seditious rhetoric has persuaded the public to vote the Republican Party out of existence, Bernie Sanders calling for more citizen involvement to make the political system less corrupt is unlikely to send the voters fleeing in panic to Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or even the fresh-faced warmonger Marco Rubio.

From the "you can't make this stuff up" files, Ted Cruz drawer

David Barton, whose pseudohistory is a favorite on the Christian fundamentalist home-schooling circuit, is taking over leadership of Ted Cruz' $38M Super-PAC "Keep the Promise." (Karoli, Wallbuilders Founder Takes Over Cruz SuperPAC C&L 09/09/2015)

Karoli's post features audio of Barton talking about how dubious he finds all this here bitness about wimmin voting.

The same audio with transcript can be found in this post by Kyle Mantyla, Barton: Not Allowing Women To Vote Was Designed 'To Keep The Family Together' Right Wing Watch 05/01/2014.

It features this striking bit of "history" from Barton: "You look at the Pilgrims, when they finally moved away from socialism and moved toward the free enterprise system ..."

Yes, kiddies, the Pilgrims were socialists. Just like Barack Obama and pinko RINOs like Jerry Ford and those Bushes.

I know for the Christian homeschool crowd, all this nonsense about actual history is like, soo-ooo 1969!

But in the boring old real world, the Pilgrims, aka, Puritans, landed in North American in 1620. You know, the Mayflower and Thanksgiving and all that? The expedition was sponsored by a London joint stock company, an early capitalist enterprise, an organizational ancestor of today's corporations.

In one of my more studious moments, I dug up a couple of articles about the origins of the word "socialism." (Who you callin' a socialist? 11/29/2009) Here's my summary from 2009:

Carl Grünberg (1861–1940)

Anyway, I thought this post would be a good place to mention the real historical origin of the word socialism, based on a couple of articles from what is known as the Grünberg Archiv, after its editor Carl Grünberg (1861–1940). The publication was actually called Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (Archive for the History of Socialism and the Workers Movement). Grünberg later became director of the Institut für Sozialforschung, better known as the Frankfurt School. These two articles from the Archiv deal with the origins of the words "socialism" and "socialist": Carl Grünberg, Der Ursprung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ 2/1912 and Ernst Czóbel, Zur Verbreitung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ in Deutschland and in Ungarn 3/1913.

The earliest usage of the words Grünberg found was from an Italian cleric in 1803, where it was used to refer broadly to the opposite of individualistic philosophies, which Grünberg describes as "a thoroughly different" meaning that the one it was to later acquire. He finds a French usage from 1831 of "socialisme" where it referred to ... the Catholic Church! In the sense of the Universal Church: Catholic theology emphasized the importance of community in contrast to the more individual-oriented Protestant theology.

The first use of "socialist" he identifies is in 1827 from the English Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald, a paper of Robert Owens' reform movement to describe the Owenites. This is essentially the first usage he finds of the word in the sense it came to be generally used in the 19th century. Although he notes the word didn't catch on for a while in England.

In 1831, he finds "socialisme" used in a French paper, Le Globe, where it is used to describe the Saint-Simonist reform doctrine in contrast to individualism. This is a very similar usage to that of the English Owenite paper in 1927.

So, in other words, the term socialist came into usage as a reference to the reformist doctrines that later came to be known as utopian socialist, particularly those associated with Robert Owen (1771-1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Claude Henri Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825).

Grünberg and Czóbel find the first usages of the adjective form "sozialist" in German in 1840, though it's not clear which among them was the earliest, Fr. J. Buss in a speech of July 1840 or August Ludwig Churoa, writing under the pen name of Rochau, in the book Kritische Darstellung der Sozialtheorie Fouriers. Grünberg finds the first use of the noun form in German in an 1842 book by Lorenz von Stein (1815-1890), Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs. Czóbel finds the earliest incidence of the word in Hungary in 1842.

In short, the use of "socialist" and "socialism" in the sense to which the world became accustomed in the 19th century began around 1830 and by the 1840s was beginning to come into general usage to describe utopian reform schemes like those of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon.

But David Barton thinks the Pilgrims in America were already practicing it before those guys were even born! Awesome.

Who you callin' a socialist?

Claude Henri de Rouvroy Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825)

I must admit, even having as low a general opinion of the Republican Party as I do, that even I'm surprised at the popularity among the Republicans on the Know-Nothing usage that has become as common as dirt in which socialist, liberal, communist, fascist, and Nazi are used as interchangeable concept. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to it, members of Congress do it, "movement conservatives" with intellectual pretensions do it, and rank-and-file Republicans do it. I really wonder what they mean, what image in their minds those interchangeable words call up, other than something like "bad". And I know for the Christian Right they all mean something like "atheist", too.

But how crack-brained is that? Jon Stewart did a brilliant skit that was less a satire than just an imitation of Glenn Beck in which he said that Beck had had apendicitis. And he explained the significance of that: "Youre appendix is connected to your large intestine which is connected to your small intestine which is something that Karl Marx had." That kind of arbitrary association is what passes for thinking among many Republicans today.

How can someone even have a simple-minded understanding of the most basic events of the 20th century without having an elementary notion of the differences between those concepts? It would be pointless for anyone with that concept to try to understand the political process by which Adolf Hitler came to power, for instance, to take one of the more consequential events of the last century. Because, trust me: none of it will make jack for sense to you. Even though the Beckians love to compare Obama to Hitler.

Without knowing some basic facts about the split between the Social Democrats and Communists around the German Revolution of 1918-19, without knowing something about why the Nazis were fighting the Social Democrats and the Communists in street battles as well as in elections during the 1920s up until 1933, without understanding something about how the Nazis fit into the German rightwing and how their position meshed with the position of wealthy and powerful Germans opposed to the democracy of the Weimar Republic: forget it. Just memorize the fact that Hitler came to power in 1933 and don't give yourself a headache even trying to understand any of it.

What's even worse for our xenophobic Republicans, they would also have to understand the difference between what "liberal" means in most of the world and what it has meant in the US since 1920 or so. It was around that time that pro-labor activists who had called themselves progressive appropriated the word liberal to differentiate themselves from the dying Progressive movement as well as from, yes, communists and socialists.

As far as what "liberal" means in the rest of the world, I strongly advise that you not go look at the Web site of the Liberal International (LI), the Federation of European and other parties in the world that self-identify as liberal. If you go there and start reading, your head may explode. Or not, because it has nothing to do with whatever it may be that the Beckians and Limbaugh dittoheads, i.e., most Republicans, mean when they use the term "liberal". The affiliate of the LI in Germany is the Free Democratic Party (FDP). They are part of the current "center-right" coalition in Germany. The "center" part of that name refers to the conservative party, Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU); the FDP is the "right" portion. The FDP is anti-union. The CDU has a union "wing".

If you should stumble across their Liberal Thinkers section. You will find people listed there like Friedrich von Hayek, a hero of American economic "libertarians", i.e., advocates of de-regulated Killer Capitalism. And also (gulp!) Ayn Rand. Yes, the John Galt and Fountainhead Ayn Rand, guru of Alan Greenspan. And Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute.

Carl Grünberg (1861–1940)

Anyway, I thought this post would be a good place to mention the real historical origin of the word socialism, based on a couple of articles from what is known as the Grünberg Archiv, after its editor Carl Grünberg (1861–1940). The publication was actually called Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (Archive for the History of Socialism and the Workers Movement). Grünberg later became director of the Institut für Sozialforschung, better known as the Frankfurt School. These two articles from the Archiv deal with the origins of the words "socialism" and "socialist": Carl Grünberg, Der Ursprung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ 2/1912 and Ernst Czóbel, Zur Verbreitung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ in Deutschland and in Ungarn 3/1913.

The earliest usage of the words Grünberg found was from an Italian cleric in 1803, where it was used to refer broadly to the opposite of individualistic philosophies, which Grünberg describes as "a thoroughly different" meaning that the one it was to later acquire. He finds a French usage from 1831 of "socialisme" where it referred to ... the Catholic Church! In the sense of the Universal Church: Catholic theology emphasized the importance of community in contrast to the more individual-oriented Protestant theology.

The first use of "socialist" he identifies is in 1827 from the English Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald, a paper of Robert Owens' reform movement to describe the Owenites. This is essentially the first usage he finds of the word in the sense it came to be generally used in the 19th century. Although he notes the word didn't catch on for a while in England.

In 1831, he finds "socialisme" used in a French paper, Le Globe, where it is used to describe the Saint-Simonist reform doctrine in contrast to individualism. This is a very similar usage to that of the English Owenite paper in 1927.

So, in other words, the term socialist came into usage as a reference to the reformist doctrines that later came to be known as utopian socialist, particularly those associated with Robert Owen (1771-1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Claude Henri Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825).

Grünberg and Czóbel find the first usages of the adjective form "sozialist" in German in 1840, though it's not clear which among them was the earliest, Fr. J. Buss in a speech of July 1840 or August Ludwig Churoa, writing under the pen name of Rochau, in the book Kritische Darstellung der Sozialtheorie Fouriers. Grünberg finds the first use of the noun form in German in an 1842 book by Lorenz von Stein (1815-1890), Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs. Czóbel finds the earliest incidence of the word in Hungary in 1842.

In short, the use of "socialist" and "socialism" in the sense to which the world became accustomed in the 19th century began around 1830 and by the 1840s was beginning to come into general usage to describe utopian reform schemes like those of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon.

Tags: socialism, radical right, republican party

The Republicans' "socialist" slogan

Eugene Debs: He actually was a Socialist

It's been hard not to notice that the Republicans have been frantically accusing Obama and his programs with of "socialist". Rightwing commentators have been sounding even more like drooling-at-the-mouth Birchers, calling Obama a Marxist, a radical communist, a Marxist-Leninist, a Bolshevik and so forth.

On the most obvious level, they are caricatures of themselves in doing that. And it's pretty obvious on the face of it that they are just slinging accusations to try to associate Obama's administration with something most American voters would tend to regard as "bad stuff". And they are sleazy accusations.

But now, the "quality" press steps up and incorporates this notion into their own regular usage, specifically the New York Times in Obama’s Interview Aboard Air Force One 03/07/09:

Q. The first six weeks have given people a glimpse of your spending priorities. Are you a socialist as some people have suggested?

A. You know, let’s take a look at the budget – the answer would be no.

Q. Is there anything wrong with saying yes?

A. Let’s just take a look at what we’ve done. We’ve essentially said that, number one, we’re going to reduce non-defense discretionary spending to the lowest levels in decades. ...

What we have done is in a couple of critical areas that we have put off action for a very long time, decided that now is the time to ask. One is on health care. ...

The second area is on energy, which we’ve been talking about for decades. Now, in each of those cases, what we’ve said is, on our watch, we’re going to solve problems that have weakened this economy for a generation. And it’s going to be hard and it’s going to require some costs. But if you look on the revenue side what we’re proposing, what we’re looking at is essentially to go back to the tax rates that existed during the 1990s when, as I recall, rich people were doing very well. In fact everybody was doing very well. We have proposed a cap and trade system, which could create some additional costs, but the vast majority of that we want to give back in the form of tax breaks to the 95 percent of working families.

So if you look at our budget, what you have is a very disciplined, fiscally responsible budget, along with an effort to deal with some very serious problems that have been put off for a very long time. ...

So the dirty blogging hippies will now have to start paying more attention ourselves to this political cuss-word and its variants, it seems. Some are starting already.

Dave Neiwert writes about the hysterical Glenn Beck's raving about "isms" on his FOX News program in Glenn "McCarthy" Beck tries to link Communists to Obama, but they don't cooperate Crooks and Liars 03/05/09.

And Hullabaloo's dday takes a particularly interesting crack at the current use of the "Obama is a socialist/Marxist/Bolshevik" slogan in "Is There Anything Wrong With Saying Yes?" 03/08/09.

This is one where actually knowing something about the history of socialism and about political theory may be more a hindrance than a help. But here's how I'm framing the rightwingers' "socialist" accusation right now.

As impossible as I've always found it to convince European friends and acquaintances of this, "socialism" in the normal American political vocabulary just means "bad". And not really anything else.

In American politics, you call something "socialist" when you want to discredit it as undesirable and at least vaguely unpatriotic and bad. I think that's the basic linguistic fact that we have to keep in mind in approaching this.

For one thing, there's no other way that you can make any sense at all of rightwingers stringing together socialism-communism-fascism as though they were all just names for the same thing. You have to be basically dumb as a rock to not be able to make some distinction between those things. Unless you're using the very low conceptual-level vocabulary that, say, reporters at our most prestigious newspapers apply.

For examples of such slogans, see Salon.com's Walsh on Cramer's "insane" description of Obama as a "Bolshevik" County Fair blog 03/08/09; Savage: Obama "is a neo-marxist fascist dictator in the making" 03/06/09 County Fair; Obama's Ideological Father by Herbert London Human Events 03/09/09;

Not so long ago, this kind of thing was called "redbaiting". But one of the eccentricities of the American political vocabulary is that we use the color red as a symbol for the Republican Party. Whereas in most of the world red is the color of the Communist and Social Democratic parties. And once you get to the point of even saying something like that, you're already outside the strange OxyContin universe of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the like. But you're also outside the usual terms of American political discourse, too.

Now, most people literate enough to be able to read Time or Newsweek are at least vaguely aware that there are Social Democratic parties in Europe that are different from Communists. Assuming that Republicans who complain today about "European-style socialism" are actually making such a distinction would be a dubious assumption.

Americans know that Cuba is Communist, which is of course also taken automatically as bad, very bad. In general, the American political vocabulary dealing with communism and socialism is a product of the Cold War. And Cuba still looks to most people like part of the Other Side from the Cold War days.

A headache-inducing variation is that what was called "Red China" in the 1950s and 1960s achieved the status of honorary capitalist country in the US political vocabulary beginning with their tilt during the Nixon administration toward supporting the US in the conflict with the Soviet Union and even urging the US to intensify it. Chinese foreign policy positions in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently very much in line with those of the most hawkish American hardliners in the US.

Today China is regarded in the American press as a "free-market" country though it still has a Communist government.

And during the 1990s, even the word "capitalism" largely receded from the American political vocabulary, replaced by "market economy". As John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out in his last book published during his lifetime, "market economy" is a particularly serviceable term for defenders of corporate power because it basically means nothing at all.

I've been reading quite a bit the last six months about events in 20th century German history, including the 1918 democratic revolution, the postwar history of Communist East Germany and its relations to West Germany, the student movement of the 1960s, and the German terrorist groups of the 1970s, particularly the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), better known as the "Baader-Meinhof gang".

To understand any of those on anything beyond the most superficial level, you have to have some sense of what socialism, social-democracy, communism, and fascism were, both conceptually and historically. Real historians generally don't confuse the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) of the early 1930s with the German Communist Party (DKP) of that time. Nor do they confuse the economic and political goals of the SPD and DKP, even though both stood for "socialism". Those two parties never had trouble distinguishing themselves from each other and they considered themselves mutual enemies.

Nor do historians confuse the SPD and DKP with Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), whose name included the word "socialism" only because they hoped to attract working-class voters, and working-class voters generally liked the "socialism" of either the SPD or the DKP. ("Nazi" is a short form of "National Socialist".)

But in line with their general strategy of dumbing-down American politics to schoolyard-type slogans, Republicans are out to blur the distinction between any of those things. The result is apparent in idiotic slogans like "Islamofascism", a conceptually empty concept whose only apparent purpose is to associate violent Sunni Salafi groups like Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida with the Other Side in the Second World War, which most Americans consider to be the Good War.

A similar piece of idiocy appeared from the computer of the National Review's Jonah Goldberg in his 2008 book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Dave Neiwert analyzed its many failings in a series of posts to which he provides links in 'Liberal Fascism': The response Orcinus blog 01/27/08. By merrily conflating concepts and historical realities like fascism, socialism, liberalism and "left", he basically uses the book to say liberals are fascists.

At the conceptual level, Goldberg's notion of "liberal fascism" is even less meaningful than one of the German RAF's only two real political ideas, the notion that the West German democracy of the 1970s and that of the later reunited Germany were only a thinly-disguised version of Nazism.

Here in the real world, I generally try to avoid using the term "fascism" altogether unless I'm talking about specific historical regimes like Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain, or Austria under the "Standestaat" (corporate state) dictatorship of 1934-38 which is also known as "Austrofascism". I guess you would have to use the concept of fascism to talk about Juan Perón's first government of 1946-55 in Argentina. But ever there its gets to be an awfully squishy concept, even though Perón was an open admirer of Mussolini and Franco. I discussed some of the difficulties in actually trying to define fascism as an historical phenomenon in a post of 04/15/07.

The American use of the word "liberal" for the pro-labor and popular-reform party and movements also complicates these sorts of theoretical discussions. In the early part of the 20th century, left and right in American politics was mainly a matter of "progressives" and "conservatives". The mainstream left generally began to adopt the self-description of "liberal" after the First World War because the concept of "progressive" had become too vague and too confusing in the party environment (Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party ran against both Woodrow Wilson's Democrats and William Howard Taft's Republicans in the 1912 Presidential election.)

Meanwhile, in Europe and most of the rest of the world, "liberal" means pro-business and anti-labor, a leaning toward "laissez-faire" economics, and in some countries more than others a commitment to civil liberties. There really is no direct comparison between the meaning of political "liberalism" in the United States and its meaning in Europe.

Probably unbeknownst to most Americans, there are international associations of socialist (social-democratic) parties and also of liberal parties, called respectively the Socialist International and the Liberal International.

So, blog trolls may be asking, does that mean that I think the Democratic Party and/or the Obama administration can be directly compared to the European social-democratic parties?

Let's put it this way: the official of Spain's conservative party responsible for international issues, the People's Party (PP), which is the current opposition party to the majority social-democratic government, said during the US Presidential campaign last year year that Obama was more conservative than the PP on several major issues. (Jorge Moragas (PP): "Me atrevería a decir que Obama está casi a la derecha del PP" Cadena SER 05.11.08) He explained that Obama, "está a favor de la pena de muerte, en contra de los matrimonios homosexuales, propone un sistema de protección social mucho más liviano que el que puede defender un partido de centro derecha como el PP en España o en Europa. Me atrevería a decir que Obama está casi a la derecha del PP". (supports the death penalty, opposes homosexual marriage, proposes a system of social protection much less substantial than any party of the center-left like the PP or the [conservative Christian Democratic] parties of Europe could defend. I would venture to say that Obama is almost to the right of the PP.)

Let's say this again. Spain's conservative party sees itself as less conservative than Obama on a number of important issues. Obama and the Democrats are barely even "left" enough to be conservatives in Europe. And our Republicans are calling them "socialists" and "Marxists"!

Getting back to the Republican slogan-slingers who don't give a flying [Cheney] for what concepts like socialism or social-democracy may actually mean, the Democrats have to respond to the "socialism" slogan by saying that it's not true, as Obama did to the New York Times. Because while Obama knows what social-democracy, communism and fascism actually are, he also knows that in American politics, "socialism" is mainly just a synonym for "bad".

But I think the Democrats will have to get more aggressive, too. For instance, by responding in ways that make it clear that Republicans tossing around the "socialist" slogans are clueless about what they are actually saying. To borrow a memorable comment of Lyndon Johnson's, most of them wouldn't know what a socialist was if one came up and bit them on the leg.

Obama's response quoted above also reflects that fact that to the extent "socialism" has any conceptual meaning beyond "bad" in normal American political talk, it's vaguely associated with state ownership of stuff. Stuff like banks and businesses.

But taking over (nationalizing) a failed bank to dispose of the bad assets and reform to management so it can be re-privatized as a healthy institution is not a distinctly social-democratic program, though in Europe both social-democratic and conservative governments are facing the same issues and are like to do more nationalizations. If the government were to decide that it was going to take over all major banks and run them on a permanent basis, that could legitimately be called a social-democratic program. But even though "European socialist" parties the Republicans dread so much don't generally propose large-scale state ownership of finance or industry these days.

Would universal health-care coverage along the lines that Obama has discussed be "socialized medicine"? Since the plan he's outlined up until now would continue to rely on private hospitals and private insurance, there's no meaningful real-world sense that could be called "socialized medicine"? If Congress decides that most doctors and other health-care providers would work for the government as in Britain's National Health Service, that could legitimately be called "socialized medicine". Canada's (highly-effective and efficient) state-run health insurance system as I understand it could be called "socialized health insurance". but neither of those things are on the political agenda in the US.

The bottom line is that the current round of sleazy McCarthyist name-calling from the Republicans is just that, a bunch of sleazy Bircherite name-calling. And the Democrats need to deal with it straightforwardly as such. Hopefully by getting into the Republicans' faces and not by finding some of their own allies to criticize as too far left (see the case of MoveOn.org vs. the infallible Gen. Petraeus) in order to try once more unsuccessfully to get the Rush Limbaughs and Mitch McConnell's of the world not to call them names any more. I mean, the Dems are bound to figure out one of these days that the fact that the tactic hasn't worked for decades now is probably a pretty good indication that the tactic doesn't work. They need to shove it back in the Republicans' faces instead.

Tags: obama administration, republican party, republicans, socialism