Socialism from the Democrats...Eeek!

Written in response to a plea from Kentucky historian Warren Greer for Democrats to abandon non-centrist ideas.


(c) by Mark Dempsey

Dear Professor Greer,

I read your recent Courier-Journal column with interest. In it, you plead with Democrats to get more "centrist" in their appeals to the public, and abandon left-leaning ideas like [gasp!] socialism. In your account, socialism has failed throughout history, with its "centralized control [that] requires the suppression of individual freedom and dissent. Simply calling it democratic socialism doesn’t make it safer — it masks the coercive machinery that lies beneath."

But isn't one point of a modern state an apparatus to manage coercion, for example, catching and punishing crooks? Or are we to allow people to drive on the left side of our roads? The fantasy of an uncoercive state--say, one without taxes or punishment for crimes--would have to rise several levels before it reached "ridiculous."

You say that the "Soviet Union and Cuba offer clear examples [of the failures of socialism]: both promised justice and equity but delivered authoritarianism, censorship, and economic disaster. These outcomes weren’t incidental—they were baked into systems that centralized power under the guise of the collective good."

Note that Russian per-capita incarceration is a little more than half the US rate, which is roughly three times the world average. Socialist China incarcerates just under 22% of the US per-capita rate, while (socialist) Denmark incarcerates just under 13% of the US rate. Could these bits of "authoritarianism" have escaped your notice? And if capitalism is so beneficial and "freedom enhancing," why are so many people in jail?

And never mind "Declassified Biden-Era Domestic Terror Strategy Reveals Broad Surveillance, Tech Partnerships, and Global Speech Regulation Agenda"

You also ignore the Princeton study that says the US is a power-centralizing oligarchy, not a democracy. Just to clarify: The oligarchs who are centrally planning US public policy are not elected and are rewarded not for how they serve the public, but for how they line their own pockets. If Democrats can't acknowledge this and provide some remedies, they are beyond useless.

Meanwhile, neoliberal "centrist" capitalism has given the US the beggar-on-every-corner economy. Somehow, the non-beggar success of Scandinavian democratic socialism remains unmentioned, and certainly the sabotage attacks by "democratic" USA visited on Cuba merit no comment. 

Back here on planet Earth, professor, despite your unhappiness with socialism, some economies appear to do better when not guided solely by profit. Socialized medicine in Canada is inarguably cheaper and provides better health outcomes than the US variety of medical care. Compared to Canada's socialized medicine, US medical care produces shorter life expectancies, worse infant mortality, and, among other things, more than half a million medical bankruptcies annually. 

The joke goes like this: When the fire department puts out the fire at your house, that's capitalism. When the insurance company denies your claim, that's capitalism.

In an odd coincidence, I've had political conversations with those shocked by the mere mention of democratic socialism in publicly-owned buildings. One such building was in the midst of a publicly-owned park to which we had all driven over publicly-owned roads. We all drank water from publicly-owned water districts, and our sewage was processed in a publicly-owned regional sewer plant. Several of us enjoyed public sector pensions and (socialist!) Social Security, never mind the (socialist!) single-payer healthcare for the elderly we call "Medicare."

The idea that something so ubiquitous as public ownership would be taboo, even shocking, is simply bizarre. Yet, that is the current state of play in the US. Anti-socialism rhetoric like your column, professor, has been so heavily marketed that many people simply can't conceive of something good coming from public ownership. 

During big emergencies--World War II is a good example--government takes over large swaths of the economy. In WWII government took over roughly 50% of the US economy. The supposedly unaffordable Green New Deal would only consume 5% of the current economy.

Incidentally, the neoliberal Democrats who advocate those "centrist" ideas laid a lot of the foundations of the public's disgust with the current economic system that rewards the plutocrats, but leaves the public at large in debt peonage. Here's a quote that puts it quite succinctly:

“Trump will not be defeated by educating voters.... Highlighting what’s wrong with him is futile; his supporters didn’t elect him because they mistook him for a competent administrator or a decent man. They’re angry, not stupid. Trump is an agent of disruption — indeed, of revenge.....Workers now sense that economic justice — a condition in which labor and capital recognize and value each other — is permanently out of reach; the class war is over and it was an absolute rout: insatiable parasites control everything now, and even drain us gratuitously, as if exacting reparations for the money and effort they spent taming us. The economy itself, and the institutions protecting it, must be attacked, and actually crippled, to get the attention of the smug patricians in charge. Two decades of appealing to justice, proportion, and common decency have yielded nothing." - Thomas Greene (Noteworthy): 

One cannot remedy these systemic problems without enterprises that include public benefit, not just personal profit, in the calculations that guide them. Professor, you may call what you're proposing "centrist," but it sounds like more of the flapdoodle Ronnie Reagan would endorse to me.