By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 1360
My friend Marshall Ward writes a regular column for the Murray Ledger & Times, his hometown newspaper. He also chips in musings to our website.
In a recent column, he recalled that the Republican crowd at the Fancy Farm picnic yelled “socialist!” at Democratic speakers. I heard the taunts, too.
The GOP true believers still figure "socialist" is a big-time slam in Red State Kentucky, where a lot of Democrats burnish their conservative creds and eschew the liberal label.
"Socialism" is a big bugbear in most parts of the Bluegrass State, especially in mainly rural areas like the Jackson Purchase, which encompasses Fancy Farm and Murray, the Calloway County seat.
Yet “socialist principles are alive and well in the U.S., Kentucky, and Calloway County,” Ward wrote. Some are. But by saying so, Ward doubtless raised eyebrows and hackles among more than a few subscribers.
“You may not have gotten the memo," he jabbed the GOP, "but we all love socialist principles, and we use them every day. Your life may have even been saved by them.”
Ward listed some “socialist principles:”
-- The U.S. military, which he called “the largest socialist program in the world”
-- taxpayer-funded highways and bridges
-- Public libraries
-- Public schools, community colleges and state universities like Murray State
-- City services such as police and fire departments
-- Farm subsidies
-- Medicare
-- Medicaid
-- Veterans hospitals
-- Public parks
-- OSHA
-- Social Security
The list is endless, but "socialist principles" also include support for
-- the right of workers to organize unions and strike
-- workers’ compensation
-- unemployment insurance
-- minimum wage and maximum hour laws
-- child labor laws
-- public utilities
-- TVA power
Conservative Republicans aren't cool with everything on Ward's list; they rant against everything on my addendum. But as he pointed out, “You and I benefit from at least one or more of these government-run, taxpayer-funded socialist programs, agencies, and laws.”
Indeed.
Even so, union-busting, social Darwinist Republicans have been defaming the Democratic Party (and unions) as "socialist" at least as far back as FDR's pro-labor New Deal, which they despised.
During the post-World War II McCarthy era and the Cold War, GOP conservatives cynically scared most Americans into falsely equating humane, western European-style democratic socialism, or social democracy, with murderous totalitarian communism. They pointed out that "U.S.S.R." stood for "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."
Labels can be deliberately deceptive when it comes to naming countries (or anything else). For example, when the reactionary, white minority ruled black-majority South Africa through apartheid, a rigid and brutal system of racial oppression, they called the country the Republic of South Africa.
The Soviet Union wasn’t socialist, and white-run South Africa wasn’t a republic. (It became a real republic after apartheid and white supremacy ended.)
But here's the key difference between socialists and communists: socialists believe reform must come only at the ballot box, not via the bullet.
Democratic socialism is also called “social democracy," which "has been conducive to free societies because it is principled about its goals but pragmatic about how to reach them," The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne explained in a recent column. “Like movements further to their left, social democrats are committed to greater economic equality and to empowering the marginalized. But they accept market systems as long as they are properly regulated in the public interest [Italicsmine].
He added, “Social democrats pushed back against inequality though social insurance (including guaranteed health coverage) and investment in social benefits, including infrastructure and education. The United States has never had a dominant social-democratic party, but the historian Richard Hofstadter was right to see the New Deal as introducing a ‘social democratic tinge’ to our politics.”
Ward suggested that Republicans who chanted “socialist!” at Democrats ought to “come clean on their hypocrisy” and admit they, too, enjoy “the benefits of ‘socialist!’ principles.”
Hogs will fly before they 'fess up.
At any rate, Dionne lamented the decline of social democracy in Europe and the rise of right-wing, ultra-nationalist parties that are similar to the Trumpist GOP. (Hitler and the Nazis called themselves “National Socialists,” using “socialist” to dupe and win over working-class voters. But the Nazis courted rich capitalists, furnishing them slave labor. The Hitlerites also loathed trade unionists and democratic socialists and murdered, tortured and imprisoned them.)
"The European experience underscores why the debate inside the Democratic Party is so vexing,” Dionne wrote. “The party’s left has a point in arguing that working-class voters (of all races) feel shortchanged by the new economy and the failure of government to offer them adequate relief. At the same time, those encouraging moderation in the party’s messaging stress the need to respond to the sense of cultural displacement many of these same voters' experience in a moment of rapid change. Can this circle be squared?
“Hostility to Trump may well be enough for Democrats in 2018. But like center-left parties elsewhere, they must grapple over the longer run with forces driving former friends of the post-World War II social settlement into the arms of right-wing nationalists.”
The New Deal and LBJ's Great Society were both "social democratic twinges." But the Democrats aren't a democratic socialist or social democratic party like, say, the German and Swedish Social Democrats, the French Socialist Party or the British and Norwegian Labor parties.
When Republicans call Democrats "socialists," they not only bend the truth, but they also reveal how far right-wing they are.