[Peace] Fwd: How Socialists Built America

[Belden Fields]

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third Saturday.
In solidarity,
Belden

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Portside Moderator <moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG>
> Date: April 18, 2011 12:31:38 AM CDT
> To: PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
> Subject: How Socialists Built America
> Reply-To: moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG
>
> How Socialists Built America
> John Nichols
> The Nation
> April 13, 2011
> http://www.thenation.com/article/159929/how-socialists-built-america
>
> This article is adapted from The "S" Word: A Short
> History of an American Tradition. Socialism, published
> in March by Verso.
>
> If there's one constant in the elite national discourse
> of the moment, it is the claim that America was founded
> as a capitalist country and that socialism is a
> dangerous foreign import that, despite our unwarranted
> faith in free trade, must be barred at the border. This
> most conventional "wisdom"-increasingly accepted at
> least until the recent grassroots mobilizations in
> Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Maine-has held that
> everything public is inferior to everything private,
> that corporations are always good and unions always bad,
> that progressive taxation is inherently evil and that
> the best economic model is the one that allows the
> wealthy to gobble up as much of the Republic as they
> choose before anything trickles down to the great mass
> of Americans. Rush Limbaugh informs us regularly that
> proposals to tax people as rich as he is for the purpose
> of providing healthcare for kids and jobs for the
> unemployed are "antithetical" to the nation's original
> intent and that Barack Obama's reforms are "destroying
> this country as it was founded."
>
> When Obama offered tepid proposals to organize a private
> healthcare system in a more humane manner, Sean Hannity
> of Fox charged that "the Constitution was shredded,
> thwarted, the rule of law was passed aside." Newt
> Gingrich said the Obama administration was "prepared to
> fundamentally violate the Constitution" and was playing
> to the "30 percent of the country [that] really is [in
> favor of] a left-wing secular socialist system."
>
> In 2009 Sarah Palin raised similar constitutional
> concerns, about Obama's proposal to develop a system of
> "universal energy building codes" to promote energy
> efficiency. "Our country could evolve into something
> that we do not even recognize, certainly that is so far
> from what the founders of our country had in mind for
> us," a gravely concerned Palin informed Hannity, who
> responded with a one-word question. "Socialism?"
>
> "Well," she said, "that is where we are headed."
>
> Actually, it's not. Palin is wrong about the perils of
> energy efficiency, and she's wrong about Obama. The
> president says he's not a socialist, and the country's
> most outspoken socialists heartily agree. Indeed, the
> only people who seem to think Obama displays even the
> slightest social democratic tendency are those who
> imagine that the very mention of the word "socialism"
> should inspire a reaction like that of a vampire
> confronted with the Host.
>
> Unfortunately, Obama may be more frightened by the S-
> word than Palin. When a New York Times reporter asked
> the president in March 2009 whether his domestic
> policies suggested he was a socialist, a relaxed Obama
> replied, "The answer would be no." He said he was being
> criticized simply because he was "making some very tough
> choices" on the budget. But after he talked with his
> hyper-cautious counselors, he began to worry. So he
> called the reporter back and said, "It was hard for me
> to believe that you were entirely serious about that
> socialist question." Then, as if reading from talking
> points, Obama declared, "It wasn't under me that we
> started buying a bunch of shares of banks. And it wasn't
> on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement,
> the prescription drug plan, without a source of funding.
>
> "We've actually been operating in a way that has been
> entirely consistent with free-market principles," said
> Obama, who concluded with the kicker, "Some of the same
> folks who are throwing the word `socialist' around can't
> say the same."
>
> There's more than a kernel of truth to this statement.
> Obama really is avoiding consideration of socialist, or
> even mildly social democratic, responses to the problems
> that confront him. He took the single-payer option off
> the table at the start of the healthcare debate,
> rejecting the approach that in other countries has
> provided quality care to all citizens at lower cost. His
> supposedly "socialist" response to the collapse of the
> auto industry was to give tens of billions in bailout
> funding to GM and Chrysler, which used the money to lay
> off thousands of workers and then relocate several dozen
> plants abroad-an approach about as far as a country can
> get from the social democratic model of using public
> investment and industrial policy to promote job creation
> and community renewal. And when BP's Deepwater Horizon
> oil well exploded, threatening the entire Gulf Coast,
> instead of putting the Army Corps of Engineers and other
> government agencies in charge of the crisis, Obama left
> it to the corporation that had lied about the extent of
> the spill, had made decisions based on its bottom line
> rather than environmental and human needs, and had
> failed at even the most basic tasks.
>
> So we should take the president at his word when he says
> he's acting on free-market principles. The problem, of
> course, is that Obama's rigidity in this regard is
> leading him to dismiss ideas that are often sounder than
> private-sector fixes. Borrowing ideas and approaches
> from socialists would not make Obama any more of a
> socialist than Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt,
> Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower. All these
> presidential predecessors sampled ideas from Marxist
> tracts or borrowed from Socialist Party platforms so
> frequently that the New York Times noted in a 1954
> profile the faith of an aging Norman Thomas that he "had
> made a great contribution in pioneering ideas that have
> now won the support of both major parties"-ideas like
> "Social Security, public housing, public power
> developments, legal protection for collective bargaining
> and other attributes of the welfare state." The fact is
> that many of the men who occupied the Oval Office before
> Obama knew that implementation of sound socialist or
> social democratic ideas did not put them at odds with
> the American experiment or the Constitution.
>
> The point here is not to defend socialism. What we
> should be defending is history-American history, with
> its rich and vibrant hues, some of them red. The past
> should be consulted not merely for anecdotes or factoids
> but for perspective on the present. Such a perspective
> empowers Americans who seek a robust debate, one that
> samples from a broad ideological spectrum-an appropriate
> endeavor in a country where Tom Paine imagined citizens
> who, "by casting their eye over a large field, take in
> likewise a large intellectual circuit, and thus
> approaching nearer to an acquaintance with the universe,
> their atmosphere of thought is extended, and their
> liberality fills a wider space."
>
> America has always suffered fools who would have us
> dwindle the debate down to a range of opinions narrow
> enough to contain the edicts of a potentate, a priest or
> a plantation boss. But the real history of America tells
> us that the unique thing about our present situation is
> that we have suffered the fools so thoroughly that a
> good many Americans-not just Tea Partisans or Limbaugh
> Dittoheads but citizens of the great middle-actually
> take Sarah Palin seriously when she rants that
> socialism, in the form of building codes, is
> antithetical to Americanism.
>
> * * *
>
> Palin is not the first of her kind. There's nothing new
> about the charge that a president who is guiding "big
> government" toward projects other than the invasion of
> distant lands is a socialist. In the spring of 2009,
> just months after Obama and a new Democratic Congress
> took office, twenty-three members of the opposition
> renewed an old project when they proposed that "we the
> members of the Republican National Committee call on the
> Democratic Party to be truthful and honest with the
> American people by acknowledging that they have evolved
> from a party of tax and spend to a party of tax and
> nationalize and, therefore, should agree to rename
> themselves the Democrat Socialist Party."
>
> Cooler heads prevailed. Sort of. At an emergency meeting
> of the committee-which traces its history to the first
> Republican convention in 1856, where followers of French
> socialist Charles Fourier, Karl Marx's editor, and their
> abolitionist comrades initiated the most radical
> restructuring of political parties in American history-
> it was suggested that the proposal to impose a new name
> on the Democrats might make "the Republican party appear
> trite and overly partisan." The plan was dropped, but a
> resolution decrying the "march towards socialism" was
> passed. Thus, the RNC members now officially "recognize
> that the Democratic Party is dedicated to restructuring
> American society along socialist ideals" and that the
> Democrats have as their "clear and obvious
> purpose.proposing, passing and implementing socialist
> programs through federal legislation."
>
> The Republican Party is currently firmer in its
> accusation that the Democrats are steering the nation
> "towards socialism" than it was during Joe McCarthy's
> Red Scare of the 1950s, when the senator from Wisconsin
> was accusing Harry Truman of harboring Communist Party
> cells in the government. Truman had stirred conservative
> outrage by arguing that the government had the authority
> to impose anti-lynching laws on the states and by
> proposing a national healthcare plan. But what really
> bugged the Republicans was that Truman, who had been
> expected to lose in 1948, had not just won the election
> but restored Democratic control of Congress. To counter
> this ominous electoral trend, conservative Republicans,
> led by Ohio Senator Robert Taft, announced in 1950 that
> their campaign slogan in that year's Congressional
> elections would be "Liberty Against Socialism." They
> then produced an addendum to their national platform,
> much of which was devoted to a McCarthyite rant charging
> that Truman's Fair Deal "is dictated by a small but
> powerful group of persons who believe in socialism, who
> have no concept of the true foundation of American
> progress, and whose proposals are wholly out of accord
> with the true interests and real wishes of the workers,
> farmers and businessmen."
>
> Truman fought back, reminding Republicans that his
> policies were outlined in the 1948 Democratic platform,
> which had proven to be wildly popular with the
> electorate. "If our program was dictated, as the
> Republicans say, it was dictated at the polls in
> November 1948. It was dictated by a `small but powerful
> group' of 24 million voters," said the president, who
> added, "I think they knew more than the Republican
> National Committee about the real wishes of the workers,
> farmers and businessmen."
>
> Truman did not cower at the mention of the word
> "socialism," which in those days was distinguished in
> the minds of most Americans from Soviet Stalinism, with
> which the president-a mean cold warrior-was wrangling.
> Nor did Truman, who counted among his essential allies
> trade unionists like David Dubinsky, Jacob Potofsky and
> Walter Reuther, all of whom had been connected with
> socialist causes and in many cases the Socialist Party
> of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas, rave about the
> evils of social democracy. Rather, he joked that "Out of
> the great progress of this country, out of our great
> advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our
> rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have
> learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this
> country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all
> they do is croak, `socialism.'"
>
> Savvy Republicans moved to abandon the campaign. The
> return to realism was led by Maine Senator Margaret
> Chase Smith, who feared that her party was harming not
> just its electoral prospects but the country. That
> summer she would issue her "Declaration of Conscience"-
> the first serious challenge to McCarthyism from within
> the GOP-in which she rejected the anticommunist hysteria
> of the moment:
>
> Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in
> making character assassinations are all too frequently
> those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the
> basic principles of Americanism-
>
> 	The right to criticize;
> 	The right to hold unpopular beliefs;
> 	The right to protest;
> 	The right of independent thought.
>
> Republicans might be determined to end Democratic
> control of Congress, Smith suggested in her declaration:
>
> 	Yet to displace it with a Republican regime
> 	embracing a philosophy that lacks political
> 	integrity or intellectual honesty would prove
> 	equally disastrous to this nation. The nation
> 	sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don't
> 	want to see the Republican Party ride to
> 	political victory on the Four Horsemen of
> 	Calumny-Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear. I
> 	doubt if the Republican Party could-simply
> 	because I don't believe the American people will
> 	uphold any political party that puts political
> 	exploitation above national interest.
>
> Most Republicans lacked the courage to confront McCarthy
> so directly. But Smith's wisdom prevailed among leaders
> of the RNC and the GOP chairs of Congressional
> committees, who ditched the Liberty Against Socialism
> slogan and reduced Taft's 1,950-word manifesto to a 99-
> word digest that Washington reporters explained had been
> cobbled together to "soft pedal" the whole "showdown on
> `liberty against socialism'" thing. Representative James
> Fulton, who like many other GOP moderates of the day
> actually knew and worked with Socialist Party members
> and radicals of various stripes, was blunter. The cheap
> sloganeering, he argued, had steered the party away from
> the fundamental question for the GOP in the postwar era:
> "whether we go back to Methuselah or offer alternative
> programs for social progress within the framework of a
> balanced budget."
>
> Imagine if today a prominent Republican were to make a
> similar statement. The wrath of Limbaugh, Hannity, Palin
> and the Tea Party movement would rain down upon him. The
> Club for Growth would organize to defeat the "Republican
> in Name Only," and the ideological cleansing of the
> party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower and
> Margaret Chase Smith would accelerate. Some of my
> Democratic friends are quite pleased at the prospect; as
> today's Republicans steer off the cliffs of extremism
> that they avoided even in the days of McCarthy, these
> Democrats suggest, the high ground will be cleared for
> candidates of their liking. But that neglects the damage
> done to democracy when discourse degenerates, when the
> only real fights are between a party on the fringe and
> another that assumes that the way to win is to move to
> the center-right and then hope that fears of a
> totalitarian right will keep everyone to the left of it
> voting the Democratic line.
>
> * * *
>
> If universal building codes and health protections for
> children can be successfully depicted by our debased
> media as assaults on American values and the rule of
> law, then the right has already won, no matter what the
> result is on election day. And a nation founded in
> revolt against empire, a nation that nurtured the
> radical Republican response to the sin of slavery, a
> nation that confronted economic collapse and injustice
> with a New Deal and a War on Poverty, a nation that
> spawned a civil rights movement and that still recites a
> Pledge of Allegiance (penned in 1892 by Christian
> socialist Francis Bellamy) to the ideal of an America
> "with liberty and justice for all" is bereft of what has
> so often in our history been the essential element of
> progress.
>
> That element-a social democratic critique frequently
> combined with an active Socialist Party and more
> recently linked with independent socialist activism in
> labor and equal rights campaigns for women, racial and
> ethnic minorities, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and
> people with disabilities-has from the first years of the
> nation been a part of our political life. This country
> would not be what it is today-indeed it might not even
> be-had it not been for the positive influence of
> revolutionaries, radicals, socialists, social democrats
> and their fellow travelers. The great political
> scientist Terence Ball reminds us that "at the height of
> the cold war a limited form of socialized medicine-
> Medicare-got through the Congress over the objections of
> the American Medical Association and the insurance
> industry, and made it to President Johnson's desk."
>
> That did not just happen by chance. A young writer who
> had recognized that it was possible to reject Soviet
> totalitarianism while still learning from Marx and
> embracing democratic socialism left the fold of Dorothy
> Day's Catholic Worker movement to join the Young
> People's Socialist League. Michael Harrington wanted to
> change the debate about poverty in America, and perhaps
> remarkably or perhaps presciently, he presumed that
> attaching himself to what was left of the once muscular
> but at that point ailing Socialist Party was the way to
> do so. In a 1959 article for the then-liberal Commentary
> magazine, Harrington sought, in the words of his
> biographer, Maurice Isserman, "to overturn the
> conventional wisdom that the United States had become an
> overwhelmingly middle-class society. Using the poverty-
> line benchmark of a $3,000 annual income for a family of
> four, he demonstrated that nearly a third of the
> population lived `below those standards which we have
> been taught to regard as the decent minimums for food,
> housing, clothing and health.'"
>
> Harrington succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The
> article led to a book, The Other America: Poverty in the
> United States, which became required reading for policy-
> makers, selling 70,000 copies in its first year. "Among
> the book's readers, reputedly, was John F. Kennedy, who
> in the fall of 1963 began thinking about proposing
> antipoverty legislation," recalls Isserman. "After
> Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson took up the
> issue, calling in his 1964 State of the Union address
> for an `unconditional war on poverty.' Sargent Shriver
> headed the task force charged with drawing up the
> legislation and invited Harrington to Washington as a
> consultant."
>
> Harrington's proposals for renewal of New Deal public
> works projects were never fully embraced. But his and
> others' advocacy that government should intervene to
> address the suffering of those who couldn't care for
> themselves or their families underpinned what the author
> described as "completing Social Security" by providing
> healthcare for the aged. It urged on the Johnson
> administration's Great Society, including the Social
> Security Act of 1965-or Medicare. Johnson took his hits,
> but Americans agreed with their president when he argued
> that "the Social Security health insurance plan, which
> President Kennedy worked so hard to enact, is the
> American way; it is practical; it is sensible; it is
> fair; it is just."
>
> Could a plan decried as "socialized medicine" by the
> American Medical Association because it was, in fact,
> socialized medicine really be "the American way"? Of
> course. During the Medicare debate in the early '60s,
> Texas Senate candidate George H.W. Bush condemned the
> proposal as "creeping socialism." Ronald Reagan, then
> making the transition from TV pitchman for products to
> TV pitchman for Barry Goldwater, warned that if it
> passed citizens would find themselves "telling our
> children and our children's children what it once was
> like in America when men were free." But Bush and Reagan
> managed the program during their presidencies, and Tea
> Party activists now show up at town hall meetings to
> threaten any legislator who would dare to tinker with
> their beloved Medicare.
>
> Americans would not have gotten Medicare if Harrington
> and the socialists who came before him-from presidential
> candidates like Debs and Thomas to organizers like Mary
> Marcy and Margaret Sanger and the Communist Party's
> Elizabeth Gurley Flynn-had not for decades been pushing
> the limits of the healthcare debate. No less a player
> than Senator Edward Kennedy would declare, "I see
> Michael Harrington as delivering the Sermon on the Mount
> to America." The same was true in abolitionist days,
> when socialists-including friends of Marx who had
> immigrated to the United States after the 1848
> revolutions in Europe were crushed-energized the
> movement against slavery and helped give it political
> expression in the form of the Republican Party. The same
> was true early in the twentieth century, when Socialist
> Party editors like Victor Berger battled attempts to
> destroy civil liberties and defined our modern
> understanding of freedom of speech, freedom of the press
> and the right to petition for redress of grievances. The
> same was true when lifelong socialist A. Philip Randolph
> called the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
> and asked a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr.,
> who had many socialist counselors besides the venerable
> Randolph, to deliver what would come to be known as the
> "I Have a Dream" speech.
>
> * * *
>
> Again and again at critical junctures in our national
> journey, socialist thinkers and organizers, as well as
> candidates and officials, have prodded government in a
> progressive direction. It may be true, as historian
> Patrick Allitt suggests, that "millions of Americans,
> including many of these critics [of the Obama
> administration], are ardent supporters of socialism,
> even if they don't realize it and even if they don't
> actually use the word" to describe public services that
> are "organized along socialist lines," like schools and
> highways. In fact, contemporary socialists and Tea
> Partiers might actually find common (if uncomfortable)
> ground with Allitt's assertion that "socialism as an
> organizational principle is alive and well here just as
> it is throughout the industrialized world"-even as they
> would disagree on whether that's a good thing. Programs
> "organized along socialist lines" do not make a country
> socialist. But America has always been and should
> continue to be informed by socialist ideals and a
> socialist critique of public policy.
>
> We live in complex times, when profound economic, social
> and environmental challenges demand a range of
> responses. Socialists certainly don't have all the
> answers, even if polling suggests that more Americans
> find appeal in the word "socialist" today than they have
> in decades. But without socialist ideas and advocacy, we
> will not have sufficient counterbalance to an anti-
> government impulse that has less to do with
> libertarianism than with manipulation of the debate by
> all-powerful corporations.
>
> Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt,
> Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy were not socialists.
> But the nation benefited from their borrowing of
> socialist and social democratic ideas. Barack Obama is
> certainly not a socialist. But he, and the nation he
> leads, would be well served by a similar borrowing from
> the people who once imagined Social Security, Medicare,
> Medicaid and the War on Poverty.
>
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