“We renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” Trump said in his State of the Union speech Feb. 5.
Republicans already are claiming that Democrats, given half a chance, would turn the US into another Venezuela. At the same time the increasingly authoritarian Grand Oligarch Party pushes to build an Iron Curtain along our southern border.
Of course, Republicans have been calling Democrats socialists ever since Franklin D Roosevelt and his advisers drafted the New Deal to revive the economy from the Great Depression in the 1930s — and the accusation that Roosevelt was a socialist was a source of amusement and/or resentment for real socialists ever since. But, socialist or not, voters re-elected FDR three times as the New Deal revived the economy from the Great Depression and saved many a family’s farm and livelihood.
FDR’s government did not take over the means of production, which is the actual definition of socialism, but the New Deal provided support for farmers, created public works programs that put millions of Americans back to work, set up Social Security, which included unemployment insurance, welfare programs and income for disabled people and retirees, and it gave workers the right to organize into unions and bargain collectively. Above all, FDR’s New Deal saved capitalism by regulating it, and the plutocrats never forgave him.
The New Deal coalition dominated Congress through the 1960s, although Southern Democrats and Republicans formed coalitions to roll back the rights of labor organizations with the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and resisted other liberal initiatives. The New Deal’s last hurrah was Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, which included the Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty in 1964, the Voting Rights Act and Medicare in 1965, Medicaid in 1966, as well as consumer and environmental protections, as he got Congress to create the Department of Transportation as a cabinet-level agency and provided federal funding for education, affordable housing, rural development and the arts and public broadcasting.
Opposition to the War in Vietnam and backlash against passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in the South and among conservative Democrats in the North gave Republicans an opportunity to exploit divisions in the New Deal coalition. That helped Richard Nixon win the presidency in 1968, but Democrats continued to control Congress until 1981, when Republicans gained a majority in the Senate to work with Ronald Reagan during the first six years of his presidency. But Republicans lost the Senate in 1987 and it was not until 1995, in the third year of Bill Clinton’s first term, that Republicans managed to get control of the House and Senate.
In 1999, the Republican Congress, with Clinton’s signature, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had separated commercial and investment banks, preventing commercial banks from getting involved in speculative stock deals and investment banks from accepting federally insured deposits. The financial services industry made it through eight years of free-market capitalism under George W. Bush before excessive risk-taking by banks, dealing in subprime mortgage debt securities, caused the financial crisis of 2007-08, which spread to a global economic downturn.
It fell to Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress to clean up the mess the free-market Republicans left them, and they proceeded to pass an $800 billion economic stimulus package in February 2009. Obama also approved loans for General Motors and Chrysler to continue operations while they reorganized in March 2009. The stock market bottomed out in March 2009 before beginning the climb back up; the unemployment rate peaked at 10% in October 2009 before the economic recovery kicked in. By November 2012 unemployment had dropped to 7.7% and it continued to drop in Obama’s second term, down to 4.7% when he left office in January 2017.
Republicans accused Obama of being a socialist, of course, so the term has lost much of its sting — so much that young Americans who have grown up since the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are more likely to associate socialism with prosperous democratic socialist states, such as Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
Axios reported Feb. 2 that centrist potential Democratic candidates for president are rethinking their plans because the “rising Democratic enthusiasm for big government liberalism” might limit their appeal.
“Michael Bloomberg and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, each of whom were virtual locks to run, are having serious second thoughts after watching Democrats embrace ‘Medicare for All,’ big tax increases and the Green New Deal,” Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei reported for Axios. “Joe Biden, who still wants to run, is being advised to delay any plans to see how this lurch to the left plays out. If Biden runs, look for Bloomberg and McAuliffe to bow out, the sources tell us.”
The Axios writers also noted polling in Iowa “by a prominent 2020 hopeful found that the Democratic electorate has moved sharply left. For instance, the polling found that ‘socialism’ had a net positive rating, while ‘capitalism’ had a net negative rating.”
If so, good feelings toward socialism might reflect national trends. A Gallup Poll found for the first time in August 2018 that Democrats have a more positive view of socialism than capitalism. In 2016, 56% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents had a positive view of capitalism and 58% had a positive view of socialism. By 2018, only 45% had a positive view of capitalism while 57% were positive about socialism.
Among Americans aged 18-29 in the Gallup Poll, 45% were positive about capitalism while 51% were positive about socialism, but older Americans favored capitalism over socialism, with people aged 30-49 favoring capitalism (57%) over socialism (41%), people aged 50-64 favoring capitalism over socialism 60% to 30% and people aged 65 and over favoring capitalism 60% to 28%.
A supermajority of Americans also support taxes that hit the rich. A Fox News poll in January found 70% of voters support raising taxes on those with incomes of over $10 million and 65% support higher taxes on those with incomes over $1 million.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who actually calls himself a democratic socialist, got over 12 million votes and narrowly lost the Democratic nomination in 2016 to centrist Hillary Clinton. With high-profile victories of democratic socialists last year, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York’s 14th Congressional District, the Democratic Socialists of America’s membership has grown from 7,000 members to over 50,000 since 2016.
Support for socialism may have grown in the past few years, but Democrats don’t need to spend time and resources trying make the case for socialism among voters over 30. Democrats should embrace the time-tested brand of progressive populism, which has promoted greater equity among people, rights for labor and farmers, regulation of capitalism, improved social services and universal health care in the United States for the past century.
Above all, Democrats should tell voters what they’ll do if they get back in power. And a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, expansion of Social Security benefits to raise all retirees above the poverty level, and federal grants that make university education affordable for everybody who can make the grade — all paid by higher taxes on the superrich — is a good start. But we’ll let the capitalists keep their corporations, as long as they’ll behave. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2019
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