Socialism? What Socialism??

BERNIE SAID IT FIRST

Thanks, Bernie. When you made your quixotic run for the Presidency in 2016, knowing full well you had no chance to win against the Democratic National Committee’s choice, you electrified college kids, millennials and the media, got them all involved and excited and went on to win some important primaries.

There were weeks and even months when it seemed you were the only Democrat in the race. You even competed successfully with the Donald Trump Republican primaries, the nation’s first Political Reality show.

Your rhetoric was powerful and to the point. You slammed the overwhelming power of the millionaires and billionaires with great exuberance and never tired of doing it over and over again as you rode across the country like a modern-day Paul Revere. You woke up our younger population by talking about a broader healthcare policy based on a single provider and nicknamed “Medicare for All”, even though you knew that the healthcare industry all but owned Congress, making such a plan all but impossible. You spoke of a free college education to millions of Americans already one trillion 300 billion dollars in student loan debt, even though you never mentioned anything about dealing with that debt…which has since increased to one trillion 600 billion dollars.

And though you endlessly repeated the mantra that so much could be paid for by taxing the rich you never explained “how” things were going to be changed because you “hadn’t thought it through yet”. If you’ve been reading the papers lately, you’ll see that Elizabeth Warren has thought it through for you.

But here’s the most interesting and important thing you did for the Democratic Party. You gave it some meaning…some semblance of a program…of what it could stand for…of what we might expect from a Democratic Party after the Clinton years when Bill triangulated its meaning and purpose into oblivion and Barack Obama paid little attention to it.

Oh and one last thing you did. You called yourself a Democratic Socialist.

A BIG DIFFERENCE

So here we are swimming around in a political lake named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez…AOC herself. A media star and now fair game for anyone who wants to slam her for what she says, what she does, what she looks like and what campaign money she has paid to her boyfriend. She counts her blessings as being a Democratic socialist like Bernie and she went cross country helping more young women become new members of Congress using similar language and ideas…including the Green New Deal…which sounds so real to some and so impossible to others.

So what is Democratic socialism all about? The Republican Party is already having a field day warning the country against the ‘socialist-lefty take-over’ of the Democratic Party. And the Republican President, not much of a history or factual information buff has decided that socialism is another name for communism…and he hasn’t even gotten started yet.

You can’t talk about democratic socialism without first understanding socialism. So although this is not the place for a history lesson (they used to take place in schools, remember?) here is a succinct explanation of socialism.

As the very basic elements of this new industrialized America progressed those who owned the means of production – in coal, automobiles, electricity, steel, the railroads – did two things: they took advantage of the huge availability of cheap immigrant labor across the country and they took charge of the distribution of what they had produced.

For instance, Ford not only built the first best-selling cars, they owned all the dealerships established around the country. Esso, Texaco, Mobil, Sunoco not only owned the oil wells and refineries that produced gasoline for cars, they owned all the service stations they built across the nation to sell it to motorists. New York businessmen who saw a future in moving pictures, built the Hollywood studios which produced the movies, signed actors to exclusive contracts and then built the movie theaters to play those movies in cities and towns across the country.

Controlling what they did – the means of production and the distribution of products – they amassed enormous fortunes and that bought them an outsized influence on government amounting to a power and control unknown in our history. They did what they wanted to do in what became known as the Gilded Age as those industrial emperors would become known as Robber Barons.

The Socialist Party of America became the first political party to support moves to counter the power of these industrial giants over the lives of the working class. Labor unions were in formation to help the working men in these industries in what would become a pitched battle for a decent income and working conditions. This effort would take years before some reasonable levels were reached. The effort would include the years of the First World War and the strong pacifist movement which opposed it. Among those leading that effort was Norman Thomas.

Thomas was born in a small Ohio town, grew up to attend Princeton University in New Jersey and then attend the Union Theological Seminary in New York to become a Presbyterian Minister. His first long-term positon was as pastor of the East Harlem Presbyterian Church. While at Union Thomas became active in liberal and social politics and it was from his Harlem pulpit that he began preaching against WWI and the efforts of the superrich to continue to dominate much of America’s economic life.

As an outspoken pacifist, Thomas got close to the Socialist Party which essentially led the pacifist movement …and then into politics running on their line for Governor of New York in 1924, Mayor of New York in 1925, the NY State Senate in 1926, alderman in 1927 and Mayor again in 1929. In 1934, he ran for the US Senate.

But in 1928 Thomas became the Socialist Party candidate for President. He would run in six more Presidential elections in time becoming a respected American figure dedicated to equalizing the power and influence of the capitalist system over the lives of all Americans.

During Thomas’ last years he met and mentored Michael Harrington, an academic, writer and activist living and working in New York. Harrington would became nationally known in 1962 as the author of the book The Other America, the first comprehensive study of poverty in America.

The book would so influence President Lyndon B Johnson that he based his War on Poverty on the facts and realities of what Harrington found researching the book.

Harrington followed the dedication of Norman Thomas in his early activities with the Socialist Party. But in time he recognized and accepted that socialism would never be accepted by Americans and so he stepped away and in 1982 founded an organization (not a political party then or now) called democratic socialists.

Their singular purpose was to pull the Democratic Party left towards more meaningful concerns for working Americans. And that is what they continue to do today — believing that today’s income inequality is an indication that America has turned once again towards a new Gilded Age represented not by oil companies or real estate developers but through companies like Amazon, Apple and Google..companies that own the production of platforms and all the material being distributed on them.

Bernie Sanders was never questioned about his identification as a democratic socialist. Now that some young Democrats are waving that banner there are people wondering what it’s all about. It is easy for some to leave out the word democratic and simply imply socialism. Rest assured Bernie would cut out his tongue before he ever said that our government should own or control our free market economy.

It is easy in our social media based politics, with America divided in ways it hasn’t been in decades (let’s not forget the Vietnam War and what it did to America) to find easy “scapegoat” targets. The ignorance that any scapegoating shows becomes immediately apparent whether it succeeds or not.

Ideas about new forms of universal healthcare, how to deal with climate change, what to do about the horrendous cost of higher education without the “how” they will work should always be suspect not as a recognition of evil but as a search for truth.

We live in the age of reality politics and we are about to witness something like the last Presidential campaign only with a “blue circus” not a “red” one. Just remember that with all the scapegoating you will hear about lefties and socialists, the only “red” you will be seeing is the color of the hat and the tie.