Did you ever have a monster living under your bed? Lots of people have had them. No one ever saw, heard, or smelled your monster; yet you were as convinced of its existence and the imminent danger it posed as if you had an entire photo album of high-def close-ups. So vivid were your mental images of impending doom that you stayed awake at night, demanded a night light in your room, and occasionally went on furtive searches with a flashlight, knowing for sure you’d uncover that little gremlin some day.
For millions of Americans, socialism is the monster under their beds that keeps them awake at night, causes them to worry over unfounded fears, and makes them vote for unqualified presidential candidates. It convinces them that intelligent, highly qualified candidates would turn our country into a place where people stand in line for a crust of bread. Mind you, few if any of these people have ever seen socialism in action, but they’re convinced they know exactly what it looks like and what the slippery slope that plunges us into socialist hell would look like.
Ask a dozen conservatives why they couldn’t possibly vote for a Democrat president, regardless of how hard they have to hold their noses to vote for the Republican candidate, and at least half of them will launch into a tirade on socialism completely unrelated to anything in your conversation. In their minds, “Democrat” and “socialist” are synonymous, evidence be damned.
Unscrupulous politicians play on the fear of the monster by labeling every new progressive idea “socialist” and warning of the slippery slope, just as they have convinced the fearful that universal background checks would lead to a total gun ban. Never mind that no one has ever proposed those things; the monster exists, and denying its presence means certain doom.
Words have power, and to accept the words of a fear-monger is to enslave oneself to that fear-monger. Accusations of socialism are not new, yet they never lose their impact. Paul Blumenthal, in a February 24 HuffPost article, writes:
“Every single political actor since the late 19th century advocating for some form progressive social change ― whether it be economic reform, challenging America’s racial caste system or advocating for women’s rights or LGBT rights ― has been tarred as a socialist or a communist bent on destroying the American Free Enterprise System.”
It seems few Democratic presidents and presidential candidates of the twentieth century escaped the derogatory labels “socialist” and “communist”; but Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the most consistently attacked because of his New Deal and other actions that enlarged our social safety net. Barack Obama was also a top contender for most accusations of being a socialist, even though Billy Wharton, co-chair of the Socialist Party USA, is quoted in an article as saying Obama’s election was no victory for socialists: “Obama isn’t a socialist. He’s not even a liberal.”
Terence Ball, who writes about ideologies, has told the Associated Press, “I grow weary of Obama and the Democrats being called socialist. If you talk to any real socialist, they disown them very, very quickly.” Billy Wharton told CNN he considers assertions that Obama is a socialist “absurd.” “It makes no rational sense,” says Wharton. “It clearly means that people don’t understand what socialism is.”
And that brings us to where every good conversation should start: understanding the subject. Time to visit the dictionary. My Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary gives this definition for “socialism”:
The theory or system of the ownership and operation of the means of production and distribution by society or the community rather than by private individuals, with all members of society or the community sharing in the work and the products.
In Communist doctrine, the stage of society coming between the capitalist stage and the communist stage, in which private ownership of the means of production and distribution has been eliminated, as in the Soviet Union, and the production of goods is sufficient to permit realization of the slogan from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.
The online dictionary Lexico by Oxford offers the same definition, adding the synonym “utopia,” which begins to give some hint as to how socialism can go wrong. Utopian societies throughout history have had a low (zero) success rate. Lexico also adds that socialism is “a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of Communism.”
It’s easy enough to understand why Americans are opposed to a socialist government but not so easy to understand why anyone thinks we’re headed in that direction. So far, no presidential candidate of either party has ever mentioned eliminating private property and turning the means of production and distribution over to the government. Not Barack Obama, not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not Harry Truman, and not even one of the current Democrat candidates.
Paul Krugman, a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote in a June 27 New York Times Op-Ed:
The Democratic Party has clearly moved left in recent years, but none of the presidential candidates are anything close to being actual socialists — no, not even Bernie Sanders.
Nobody in these debates wants government ownership of the means of production, which is what socialism used to mean. Most of the candidates are, instead, what Europeans would call ‘social democrats’: advocates of a private-sector-driven economy, but with a stronger social safety net, enhanced bargaining power for workers and tighter regulation of corporate malfeasance. They want America to be more like Denmark, not more like Venezuela.
Examples of the “social safety net” already in existence in our country include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, minimum wage, maximum work hours, and child labor laws, among others. All of these laws and programs can be considered socialist “in that the government intervenes in the capitalist market to require employers to meet minimum standards that might not be met in a pure, unregulated ‘free’ market. Agricultural and energy subsidies are likewise socialist programs.” (Miles Mogulescu 7 Feb 2019)
Mr. Mogulescu adds, “Stripped of the Red-baiting and name-calling, the real debate isn’t between capitalism vs. socialism, but about the appropriate balance between the two.”
Amen.
Time to drag this monster out from under the bed and send it on its way. There are plenty of genuine problems in America right now that should keep us awake at night searching for solutions. The probability that we’ll become an actual socialist country any time soon is not one of them.