Unsurprisingly, President Trump has lowered the bar for public discourse again in his battle for the 2020 election. He began using the “S” word repeatedly in public a few months ago and probably won’t stop. “Democrat lawmakers are now embracing socialism,” he stated in early March.
If I wasn’t such a strong believer in the First Amendment, I might propose banning the word from political speech until after the election. It is a word that has been used in such radically different ways that it has no generally accepted meaning for voters of either party. Instead, it remains a bogeyman for many older voters — the monster under the bed — and a surprising security blanket for some younger ones.
Growing up in the Cold War, I knew Russia as both an imagined and real threat to the U.S., a country capable of playing chicken with nuclear weapons in Cuba. We hid under school desks and dreamed of mushroom clouds and a desolate nuclear winter. The villain’s real name was USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Their brutal and oppressed allies included the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Socialist Republic of Romania. If they represented socialism, I wanted no part of it.
Recently, some have termed the political and economic approach of Venezuela as a socialist experiment that has ended in a dictatorship, war in the streets, and a bankrupt economy in a nation with vast oil reserves. If that’s a good example of socialism, I’m heading the other way.
But younger voters have different experiences with the “S” word. Raised during the 2000s when the top 1% systematically drained wealth from the middle and lower classes directly into their own pockets, they have different views of “capitalism” and “socialism.” A Gallup poll shows that only 45 percent of those 18-29 view capitalism favorably while 51% react favorably to socialism. This is the generation that reacted to predatory capitalism with “Occupy Wall Street.” The American Dream for them has dissolved into peers drowning in student debt, working two jobs (they need a “side hustle” just to keep up), little job security, and limited access to good health-care coverage. Politicians point to lowest-on-record levels of unemployment but young people can’t pay the bills by working one full-time job.
It is a generation of workers that responds to leaders like Alissa Quart of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project: “Stop blaming yourself and start blaming the system . . . the deeper causes . . . There are forces that are constructed against you, everything from your taxes to whether you can have job security.”
They point to countries like Sweden and Denmark as examples of socialism that have brought broad economic equality without horrendous abuses of individual rights and economic decay. They say, “If that’s socialism, I want some of it.”
Historically, the term “socialism” came to be defined as a half-step towards Communism: close regulation of business and industry rather than complete government control of them. This was coupled with democratic elections and social guarantees for health care, housing, and food that were funded by high corporate and individual tax rates.
Republicans who use the “S” word disparagingly may need to find a different monster under the bed. In the early 1990s, when the Clinton administration proposed a more universal, government-backed health care system, the term “socialized medicine” was enough to frighten Americans away from reform. Today, “Medicare for All” is a positive rallying cry that few will attack. There is little difference in the approach to what is essentially a socialist-type program, but the words — and people’s experiences with catastrophic health-care expenses — make all the difference.
The same was true of Social Security when it was implemented by FDR in 1935. Republicans argued that it would undermine America by “destroying initiative, discouraging thrift, and stifling individual responsibility.” Today, it is the most popular government program in history, a “third-rail” that politicians don’t dare attack. It is a socialist program as well, providing social services for all workers in exchange for payment of taxes.
Branding a government program as “socialist” today is meaningless. Individuals and businesses pay taxes in exchange for services. Fixing potholes in the street, supporting the military, and addressing food insecurity are all part of the democratic and socialist bargain of trading taxes for services. We need to analyze proposals for what they will mean in our daily lives rather than rely on terms that are either very scary or very comforting to define them.
Allen Woods is a freelance writer and author living in Greenfield. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.