How to explain this turnaround? For nearly a century, one of the worst political labels you could hang on someone was to denounce them as "pro-socialist." I grew up in the 1950s when you could be denounced as a "socialist" or "communist" because you liked to listen to world music, or thought racial segregation was a disgraceful hangover from the Civil War, or wanted to buy this new thing called a "condominium." I'm serious. Numerous professors were hounded out of their college teaching jobs for the sin of engaging in nothing more than innocuous liberalism, or for teaching their students to think for themselves.
One explanation for the new acceptance of socialism by so many Americans can also be traced to the Hard Right of the Republican Party. They call anything and everything "socialist" that they don't like, and many of those initiatives (public health care, regulation of avaricious corporations, saving the manufacturing base by temporarily propping it up, firm pollution controls, etc.) are quite popular with a majority of the citizenry. If those proposals are called "socialist," the popular thinking goes, then maybe this "socialist" scare stuff is just a partisan Republican tactic. The bogeyman behind the curtain is just P.R. spin. In point of fact, even though the good name of "liberalism" has been tarred badly, recent polls show that Americans generally favor liberal programs; in short, the U.S. actually supports center-left policies, and, as mentioned above, a growing body of opinion is no longer afraid of the socialist label.
On the other hand, as was the case in the aftermath of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the catacysmic social upheavals of "The Sixties," capitalism is a shape-shifter extraordinaire. To save its prerogatives, its wealth, its power, it'll do anything to preserve and extend itself -- including accepting "socialist" reforms. As we saw in the run-up to the Health Care Reform Act, and the Financial Reform bill, it'll even accept a few minor hits in legislation in order to maintain the fiction that something major is being done. That way, its lasting control of American $ociety remains in place.
A DIFFERENT OBAMA EMERGED
Plus, let us not forget, that the president we thought we had elected in 2008 -- one who promised to confront the greedy corporations, end the wars, respect civil liberties and eschew torture, demand transparency and accountability -- is the same one who wouldn't fight for true health care reform (no public option), who spent billiions in tax dollars bailing out the major Wall Street predators (and continues to let them do their thing), swallowed whole the CheneyBush policies on imperial wars and torture renditions and warrantless surveillance, has set up a rigged commission to weaken Social Security, etc. etc., ad nauseum.
In short, Obama talks the talk (or at least talked the talk) but won't walk the walk, beholden to the same greed and power centers that have ruled the social-political roost for decades.
At one time, Obama seemed eager to be a transformational president, in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR, a patrician, realized that the Great Depression was a warning that had to be heeded, that unfettered capitalism could not be permitted to run roughshod over the citizenry. The results of that unregulated economic system were nearly apocalyptic in their gross damage.
FDR understood that socialism was a strong political force in the U.S. and abroad, and a social/economic revolution was indeed possible in this country, given the anger and frustration of a destitute, frightened populace. If capitalism was to be saved -- i.e., the best aspects of capitalism: its entrepreneurial spirit, its emphasis on innovation, its ability to spread the wealth around more -- it would have to be transformed, leavened with socialist reforms. These New Deal initiatives were not merely nice-sounding, incremental reforms, but real groundbreaking changes.
DEALING WITH "THE CRAZY"
And here we are nearly 80 years later and the Republicans, afflicted with a bad case of the crazy, are still trying to undo those popular reforms. Up until recently, they've somewhat disguised their desire to tear down the New Deal. But just listen to leading GOP office-holders, and candidates for midterm election slots in the Senate and House: Do away with governmental regulation on banks, insurance companies, mining companies, energy corporations, oil drillers -- basically, any business. The "free market," they maintain, will provide all the regulation the country needs.
If you point out that that kind of thinking is precisely what has taken us into our own era's Grand Depression -- where corporations and the rich are doing quite well, while 15 million ordinary Americans can't find work -- they deflect the argument and instead direct fevered attention to their hand-picked villain: the CommunistMuslimNaziAfrican guy in the White House.
And it's not just the New Deal the HardRight is out to destroy, but also the major reforms of LBJ's later Great Society. The Republican rightists are not only advocating "privatizing" (read: effectively eliminating) Social Security, but also getting rid of Medicare, the popular program added in the mid-'60s.
So many in charge of the Republican Party are eager and openly willing to re-fight that social-economic war, and the gains of the New Deal/Great Society, and some (mostly in the South) are even threatening to re-fight the Civil War by urging state nullification of federal law or calling for secession from the Union.
THE COSTS OF A GOP VICTORY
That's where we are in 2010. There is no center, no moderating influence in the GOP; that may have been true a decade ago but now the party has morphed into extremism as the new Republican normal. The HardRight is now the center. On the other side of the aisle, there is virtually no powerful organized Left. To get anything done, or so Obama and Reid would have us believe, requires constant accommodation to that new center. Thus, it's not surprising that Obama hovers around a triangulating mode of operation.
To protect what incremental reforms Obama has been able to engineer, the progressive base of the Democratic Party feels it has to support the President. This is especially the case with regard to the 2012 election, where the unorganized left is hostage to its fear of the possible alternative: a President Gingrich or Palin or Romney or Cheney (Liz) or Bush (Jeb), since the damage they could, and would, do is incalcuable. After eight years of wrack and ruin under CheneyBush, where the Constitution's Bill of Rights was essentially eviscerated, one doesn't even want to think about putting the Republicans back in charge.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
2
1
