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[Ayock]

Note To GOP Candidates: Obama’s No Socialist
Published: Saturday 24 September 2011

Asked whether Barack Obama was a so­cial­ist—as Texas Gov­er­nor Rick Perry, Min­nesota Con­gress­woman Michele Bach­mann and for­mer House Speaker Newt Gin­grich have all agreed is most cer­tain—for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts Gov­er­nor Mitt Rom­ney tried to talk his way around the most pre­dictable ques­tion of Thurs­day night’s Fox News/Google de­bate.

But he more or less “went there.”

“What Pres­i­dent Obama is, is a big-spend­ing lib­eral,” Rom­ney replied. “He takes his po­lit­i­cal in­spi­ra­tion from Eu­rope and from the so­cial­ist-de­moc­rats in Eu­rope. Guess what? Eu­rope isn’t work­ing in Eu­rope. It’s not going to work here.”

A few min­utes later, Gin­grich went all in, de­cry­ing “Obama’s so­cial­ist poli­cies.”

So there you have it. Obama’s a so­cial­ist, right? Wrong.

The pres­i­dent re­jects the title, ex­plic­itly.

When he began talk­ing deficit re­duc­tion last sum­mer—with a pro­posal for a lit­tle bit of tax fair­ness com­bined with a sug­ges­tion that he was open to ne­go­ti­a­tions with re­gard to the fu­ture of Medicare, Med­ic­aid and So­cial Se­cu­rity—Obama went out of his way to ex­plain that his was not “some wild-eyed so­cial­ist po­si­tion.”

Agreed. Obama is no so­cial­ist.

In­deed, he has made the point again and again that he re­jects the so­cial­ist and so­cial-de­mo­c­ra­tic so­lu­tions that have worked in coun­tries such as Ger­many, Swe­den, Britain and Canada. He has re­jected “so­cial­ized med­i­cine” in favor of a health­care re­form plan that re­quires unin­sured Amer­i­cans to buy poli­cies from for-profit in­sur­ance com­pa­nies. He has re­fused to get tough on Wall Street and the big banks, al­low­ing “too big to fail” pri­vate in­sti­tu­tions to threaten the US econ­omy. He has cho­sen not to re­spond to the un­em­ploy­ment cri­sis with the sort of jobs pro­grams that Franklin De­lano Roo­sevelt im­ple­mented dur­ing the New Deal era, and that Hu­bert Humphrey made cen­tral to his ad­vo­cacy as a sen­a­tor and pres­i­den­tial can­di­date in the 1960s and 1970s.

So Obama is right. He is no so­cial­ist.

But his de­ter­mi­na­tion to dis­tance him­self from so­cial­ist ideas and so­cial­ist thinkers also dis­tances him from past De­mo­c­ra­tic pres­i­dents and party lead­ers—as well as past Re­pub­li­can pres­i­dents and party lead­ers.

So­cial­ism is not a for­eign con­cept. So­cial­ist ideas have been a part of the Amer­i­can dis­course and Amer­i­can pol­i­cy­mak­ing for the bet­ter part of two cen­turies. The Re­pub­li­can Party was founded in 1854 by, among oth­ers, fol­low­ers of the French utopian so­cial­ist Charles Fourier and rad­i­cal land re­form­ers who proudly pro­moted the ideal of re­dis­tri­b­u­tion of the com­mon wealth. Ho­race Gree­ley em­ployed Karl Marx as the Eu­ro­pean cor­re­spon­dent for the great news­pa­per of the Re­pub­li­can move­ment, the New York Tri­bune. And Abra­ham Lin­coln em­ployed Marx’s ed­i­tor and friend Charles Dana as a pres­i­den­tial as­sis­tant.

Sev­enty-five years later, Franklin Roo­sevelt con­sulted with the So­cial­ist Party pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, Nor­man Thomas, be­fore as­sum­ing the pres­i­dency and launch­ing the New Deal. First lady Eleanor Roo­sevelt an­nounced that, had her hus­band not been a can­di­date in 1932, she would have voted for Thomas on the So­cial­ist ticket.

Dur­ing the cold war, cities as di­verse as Mil­wau­kee, Wis­con­sin; and Bridge­port, Con­necti­cut, elected so­cial­ist may­ors.

As pres­i­dent, John F. Kennedy read and praised the writ­ings of Michael Har­ring­ton, a So­cial­ist Party mem­ber who would go on to lead the De­mo­c­ra­tic So­cial­ists of Amer­ica. Lyn­don John­son’s ad­min­is­tra­tion brought Har­ring­ton into the fold as a con­sul­tant on the de­vel­op­ment of “war on poverty” pro­grams and in­vited vet­eran so­cial­ist union leader A. Philip Ran­dolph (the or­ga­nizer of the 1963 March on Wash­ing­ton for Jobs and Free­dom) to pre­sent his “Free­dom Bud­get” for end­ing poverty at the White House.

Ran­dolph made that pre­sen­ta­tion along with the Rev. Mar­tin Luther King Jr., who in that same year, 1966, would ex­plain to his staff: “You can’t talk about solv­ing the eco­nomic prob­lem of the Negro with­out talk­ing about bil­lions of dol­lars. You can’t talk about end­ing the slums with­out first say­ing profit must be taken out of slums. You’re re­ally tam­per­ing and get­ting on dan­ger­ous ground be­cause you are mess­ing with folk then. You are mess­ing with cap­tains of in­dus­try…. Now this means that we are tread­ing in dif­fi­cult water, be­cause it re­ally means that we are say­ing that some­thing is wrong…with cap­i­tal­ism…. There must be a bet­ter dis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth and maybe Amer­ica must move to­ward a de­mo­c­ra­tic so­cial­ism.”

It is cer­tainly true that Barack Obama is not an ad­vo­cate for any “wild-eyed so­cial­ist po­si­tion.” Nor is he an ad­vo­cate for any sober and sound so­cial­ist po­si­tion.

Obama’s ex­plicit and fre­quent re­jec­tion of the word “so­cial­ist” par­al­lels his re­jec­tion of the ideals and ideas as­so­ci­ated with that word.

But dis­tanc­ing him­self from so­cial­ist and so­cial de­mo­c­ra­tic ideals does not make Obama or his poli­cies any more “Amer­i­can”—or any more in sync with the ap­proaches of the coun­try’s great pres­i­dents.

Quite the op­po­site.

Great Amer­i­can pres­i­dents, from at least the time of Lin­coln, have re­spected and en­gaged with so­cial­ists and so­cial-de­mo­c­ra­tic ideas. They have not al­ways em­braced those ideas. And even when they have bor­rowed from the so­cial­ist toolkit, the act of doing so did not make them so­cial­ists—any more than Jimmy Carter’s open­ness to drug law re­form made him a lib­er­tar­ian or Obama’s in­trigu­ing with those who would begin the gut­ting of Medicare makes him a Barry Gold­wa­ter Re­pub­li­can.

When Obama goes out of his way to de­clare that his is no “wild-eyed so­cial­ist po­si­tion,” the pres­i­dent tells us what every­one ex­cept Rick Perry, Michele Bach­mann, Newt Gin­grich and Mitt Rom­ney knows. Obama also buys into the right-wing rhetoric that tells us Amer­ica needs a nar­rower and more list­less de­bate.

Obama and the con­ser­v­a­tives he echoes are wrong. Now, more than ever, Amer­ica needs more ideas, more de­bate, and a wider range of op­tions.

Re­ject­ing whole ide­olo­gies—con­ser­vatism or lib­er­al­ism, lib­er­tar­i­an­ism or so­cial­ism—is un­healthy, es­pe­cially in so dy­namic a coun­try as the United States. And doing so re­in­forces the no­tion that the false choices ped­dled by cor­rupt politi­cians and con­vo­luted thinkers are all that we have avail­able to us.