 |
| Governments were intervening for the common good before the first socialist theories were invented. |
I know many of you Republicans right now are fixated on the
awful prospect of Donald Trump becoming the party nominee for President. It may
be of some comfort that the Democrats are also displaying cracks in their unity
along much the same lines: they too are going through a revolt of the Populists
against the Optimates. The only difference is, their Optimate candidate, Hillary
Clinton, is in a much better position to steal — er, win the nomination than is the Republicans’ Optimate, Jeb! Bush.
(However, if
Clinton gets the nod, Republicans have a better chance of winning in November.)
Sanders Still Viable
Right now, though, explaining how we got to this point is of
less interest than considering how we get out of this mess … or, at least, how
we avoid repeating it four years down the line. Bernie Sanders is still a
viable candidate, despite the poor turnout in Nevada; if he pulls off the
nomination, the GOP will likely lose the White House no matter who they
nominate.
This fact doesn’t seem to register with Republicans: Optimate
Democrats are much less concerned about Sanders than Optimate Republicans are
scared (yes, scared) of Trump and
Cruz. There are fewer Democrats who would never vote for him than there are
Republicans who would never vote for Trump or Cruz.
I hate writing about Sanders’ candidacy again so soon after my
last post on the topic. However, in thinking about it, my last post was too
indirect, too reflective. What needs to be said, has to be said bluntly:
Republicans, wake the
[deleted] up. You’re missing the point. You’re not paying attention, and that’s going
to cost you every other November until you get the hint. Here’s why:
1) The millennials aren’t scared by the word socialist.
Hard as it may be for us veterans of the Cold War to realize
it, we have to remember that people born after 1980 weren’t raised with the
baggage of the decades-long struggle with the Soviet Union. Glasnost and perestroika are words devoid of
any emotional content, to say nothing of the fall of the Berlin Wall. That was
all a quarter-century and more ago.
The Eastern Bloc is no more; China is Communist in name
only; Vietnam is the millennials’ grandfathers’ war; relations with Cuba are
normalizing; Khadafy is only a vague memory; North Korea is merely a question
mark with an odd-duck dictator. Socialist
simply doesn’t have the scare value that transphobic
or misogynist have nowadays. Calling
Sanders a pinko commie just dates you, my friend; go back to smoking your pipe and
listening to your Lawrence Welk 45s.
2) Socialism is not the same thing as communism.
I may be fooling myself; but I seem to remember a time when
conservatives were somewhat more economically sophisticated, and could discuss
different flavors of socialism without sludging them together. Many could even
concede that the variety found in many northern European countries worked,
though under some conditions which we wouldn’t tolerate in our country. Some
might argue that European socialism isn’t “pure” or “classic”, but they didn’t
pretend it was all of a piece with the socialism of the Eastern Bloc. Some
could even admit that the American system contained some socialist elements.
Twenty-five years of simplistic economic and historical analysis
by reactionary blowhards like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter have
softened the Republican mind. Point out that ten out of eleven countries the conservative
Heritage Foundation’s 2015 Index of Economic Freedom
listed as having more economic freedom than the US also have universal
health care, and you’re likely to get a blank look and a “But that’s socialist!” … as if that were a sufficient
rebuttal. Or you might get a picture of a ravaged city in Venezuela, as if you
couldn’t substitute for it a picture of Detroit.
I’m not about to go off on a tangent here. Suffice it to
say: read up on socialism. If nowhere
else, start with the
Wikipedia article; if Wikipedia isn’t the most accurate or reliable, at
least you’ll be less misinformed than you are now. Communism is simply the most
extreme form; equating all socialism with either Soviet Russia or present-day
Venezuela is like equating all forms of Christianity with Westboro Baptist or
the Alamo Christian
Foundation.
3) Bernie addresses the “wealth gap”; you don’t.
The Great Recession of 2008 didn’t just devastate large
portions of the Rust Belt and throw millions of workers out of work; it also
shook the faith of many people in the tenets of economics in general and of
free-market economics in specific. Artur
Rosman states that 2008 “was when so many of us became aware that ... the
correlation with reality, the scientific and predictive value of economics, is
almost nil.” This is a sentiment I’ve seen echoed in various places and to
varying degrees by economists and businessmen, such as Tyler
Cowen, Liam
Halligan, and Pascal-Emmanuel
Gobry.
More and more attention is being paid to income inequality. As
I’ve noted elsewhere, more billionaires are worrying about the US wealth
gap, such as Warren Buffett, Lloyd Blankfein, and (more recently) Kenneth
Langone. Just two years ago, French economist Thomas
Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, which argued that rising inequality
inhibits economic growth, took the nation by storm. Even Paul
Krugman has come to the realization that the bottom and middle classes need
to be paid more. In a
recent post on economic stagnation, Lawrence H. Summers argued that monetary
policy is no longer effective at stimulating the economy, and that inequality
would have to be addressed to stimulate demand.
The Republican solutions to the problems of the economy —
cut taxes; cut social spending; deregulate the financial industry (again) — pretend
that the financial sector meltdown never happened. In this blog, I’ve
documented a couple of cases where conservative writers claimed that income
inequality is a good thing, that liberals
focus on it to wage class war, and that the
best way to create jobs is to lower the minimum wage. None of the
Republican candidates have shown any appreciable concern for income inequality,
or crony capitalism, or regulatory capture, or the disappearance of the middle
class (except Marco Rubio, to a limited degree).
So take issue with Sanders’ ideas for free college and
universal health care, by all means. Scream about taxing corporate offshore
income or Wall Street speculation, if you think it’ll get you any sympathy. The
point is, Sanders is addressing the working poor’s concerns; whether his plans
will work or not is almost irrelevant. By contrast, Republicans are hiding
behind outdated, shopworn buzzwords and flat-earth economic dogmas.
The End of the Reagan Revolution
We who were children in the Sixties and Seventies are cursed
with the baggage of the Cold War and the Vietnam era, with a worldview framed
by the clash between capitalism and communism, the Establishment of the World
War II veterans and the Counterculture of the flower children. But we’re also
victims of our own mythmaking, our re-writing of the ten years between Ronald
Reagan’s inauguration and the collapse of the Soviet Union as a validation of
Capitalism and the final argument against Socialism. We endlessly repeat
Santayana’s dictum about not remembering the past; however, what we remember is
not the reality of the time but a two-dimensional, somewhat romanticized
picture of it.
Universal health care, free college, and other Sanders
proposals don’t require a police state, a Gulag system, or a KGB. Indeed, we’ve
already been driven close to instituting these totalitarian aberrations by our
own fears of terrorism, illegal immigrants, and the criminal element. Nor do
they require armed revolution and the dispossession of the rich; they merely
require the appropriate legislation and some higher taxation of the 1%. Indeed,
some of the taxes may drive real capital investment and job creation, rather
than mere speculation on price fluctuations. At any rate, other First World
countries have managed to introduce universal health care and even subsidized
college education without collapsing into economic wastelands.
But the reason socialism in any and all of its varieties
holds any attraction for young people is that they purpose to offer solutions to economic injustice. Setting
aside the question of whether any of them do
solve economic injustice, or even ameliorate it, they would hardly be considered
if everyone thought the present system yielded a just and reasonable society. Au contraire, mes frères: many people,
both old and young, feel the present system allows the gradual robbery of the
lower and middle classes by the 1%, with the active connivance of a government
of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.
Telling people that they deserve
to be robbed because they’re lazy, ignorant, and make poor decisions is the worst
politics imaginable; it’s the sort of obtuse insensitivity that leads one to
say, “Let them eat cake.” If you remember history at all, you should remember
what happened to the last rich person who said that.
