Opinion Who you calling socialist?
We are all socialists now, proclaims Newsweek. We are creating socialist republics in the United States...
We are all socialists now, proclaims Newsweek. We are creating socialist republics in the United States,says Mike Huckabee,adding,on reflection,that Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff. We are witnessing the Obama-era phenomenon of European socialism transplanted to Washington, says Newt Gingrich. Well! Even as we all turn red,what follows is a report on the state of actual existing socialism.
First,as we survey the political landscape,whats striking is the absence of advocates of socialism,at least as the term was understood by those who carried that banner during the capitalist crisis of the 1930s. Then,socialists and communists both spoke of nationalising all major industries and abolishing private markets and the wage system. Today,its impossible to find a left-leaning party anywhere that has such demands or entertains such fantasies. (Not even Hugo Chavez more an authoritarian populist than any kind of socialist says such things.)
Within the confines of socialist history,this means that the perspective of Eduard Bernstein the German socialist who argued that the immediate struggle to humanise capitalism through the instruments of democratic government was everything,and that the goal of supplanting capitalism altogether was meaningless has definitively prevailed. Within the confines of American history,this means that when New Yorks garment unions left the Socialist Party to endorse Franklin Roosevelt in 1936,they were charting the paradigmatic course for American socialists: into the Democratic Party to support not the abolition of capitalism but its regulation and democratisation.
But in the United States,conservatives have never bashed socialism because its spectre was actually stalking America. Rather,theyve wielded the cudgel against such progressive reforms as free universal education,the minimum wage or tighter financial regulations. Their signal success is to have kept the United States free from the taint of universal health care. The result: We have the worlds highest health-care costs,borne by businesses and employees that cannot afford them but at least (phew!) we dont have socialised medicine.
Give conservatives credit for their consistency: They attacked Roosevelt as a socialist as they are now attacking Obama,when in fact Obama,like Roosevelt before him,is engaged not in creating socialism but in rebooting a crashed capitalist system. The spending in Obamas stimulus plan isnt a socialist takeover. Its the only way to inject money into a system in which private-sector investment,consumption and exports the other three possible engines of growth are locked down. Investing more tax dollars in education and research and development is a way to use public funds to create a more competitive private sector. Keeping our banks from speculating madly with our money is a way to keep banking alive.
If Obama realises his agenda,what emerges will be a more social,sustainable,competitive capitalism. His more intellectually honest conservative critics dont accuse him of Leninism but of making our form of capitalism more like Europes. In fact,over the past quarter-century,Europes capitalism became less regulated and more like ours,one reason Europe is tanking along with everyone else.
Laissez-faire American capitalism is about to be supplanted not by socialism but by a more regulated,viable capitalism. And the reason is because the deregulated capitalism of the past 30 years has blown itself up,taking much of the known world with it.
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