Liberals Need to Get Their Story Straight About the “S-Word”

Let me tell you a story that dates back to last year’s presidential campaign.

Remember this famous moment?

In retrospect, the funniest thing about Joe the Plumber’s 15 minutes of fame is that Obama supporters actually attacked the guy because he owed back taxes. Today, if he were a Democrat, he could be Secretary of the Treasury. But I digress.

One day last year shortly after this made news, I had separate conversations with two of my friends at work—both great, great guys who are highly intelligent and very, very liberal. In the morning, I talked to Friend #1, who asked me what I thought of the exchange with Joe the Plumber. I said that, as a conservative, it obviously concerned me greatly that America was on the verge of electing an admitted socialist for President for the first time.

Friend #1 was genuinely mystified by my statement. He challenged me to explain why I thought Obama was a socialist.

I responded that it’s all right there in the Joe the Plumber video, particularly right at the end when Obama says: “I think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.” Government redistribution of wealth is the essence of socialism, and is fundamentally incompatible with free market capitalism.

Friend #1 laughed off my argument. He said that I was being paranoid and alarmist. Obama is certainly a capitalist, he argued, but one that just wants to “tweak” the market to “protect” people.

As always, Friend #1 and I went round and round for a while, but eventually we agreed to to disagree.

Later in the day, I ran into Friend #2. By way of background, Friend #2 is a Scottish national who has lived and worked in the United States for the last 15 or 20 years. He comes from a very modest working class background in Scotland and has made it very far because he is brilliant guy with a big booming Scottish personality and a sometimes incomprehensible Scottish brogue (I often describe his speech pattern as “Shrek on speed”).

I asked Friend #2 what he thought of Obama, and without hesitation he said: “I can’t vote in this country, but I’m a socialist, so of course I love him.”

“Do you think Obama is a socialist?” I asked.

“Of course he is,” Friend #2 responded. “What the hell do you think he is?”

I told him that I agreed, but then related my conversation with our mutual Friend #1 from earlier in the day. Friend #2 responded by laughing heartily.  “American liberals are still squeamish about admitting that they’re socialists, aren’t they?”

I relate this story because I think it is a microcosm of a larger debate that is playing out on the national stage. For example, shortly after President Obama was sworn in, Glenn Beck started doing “Comrade Updates” on his Fox News show (he had been doing them on his radio show for more than a year). During the Comrade Update, Glenn reoprts on the current events in the United States from the point of view of an old Soviet communist who hopes to topple capitalism through creeping socialism.  “Comrade, good news from the Western Front. They’re nationalizing banks!” The first time Glenn did this on television, it became a viral hit on YouTube.

On February 5th, unabashedly-liberal Salon.com (think Friend #1) published a blurb about the Comrade Updates entitled: Does Glenn Beck even know what socialism is? It began as follows:

Over at How the World Works, Salon’s Andrew Leonard has a post about Sean Hannity calling the stimulus package “the European socialist act of 2009.” Which, even for Hannity, is pretty ridiculous. But now I understand why he did it — clearly, he was just trying to keep up with his newest colleague, Glenn Beck.

Two days later (February 7th), unabashedly-liberal Newsweek (think Friend #2) published the following cover story:

Unabashedly-liberal Newsweek writers Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas (who knows a thing or two about socialism since his grandfather was Norman Thomas) began their victory-lap essay as follows:

The interview was nearly over. On the Fox News Channel last Wednesday evening, Sean Hannity was coming to the end of a segment with Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, the chair of the House Republican Conference and a vociferous foe of President Obama’s nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill. How, Pence had asked rhetorically, was $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts going to put people back to work in Indiana? How would $20 million for “fish passage barriers” (a provision to pay for the removal of barriers in rivers and streams so that fish could migrate freely) help create jobs? Hannity could not have agreed more. “It is … the European Socialist Act of 2009,” the host said, signing off. “We’re counting on you to stop it. Thank you, congressman.”

There it was, just before the commercial: the S word, a favorite among conservatives since John McCain began using it during the presidential campaign. (Remember Joe the Plumber? Sadly, so do we.) But it seems strangely beside the point. The U.S. government has already—under a conservative Republican administration—effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries. That seems a stronger sign of socialism than $50 million for art. Whether we want to admit it or not—and many, especially Congressman Pence and Hannity, do not—the America of 2009 is moving toward a modern European state.

We remain a center-right nation in many ways—particularly culturally, and our instinct, once the crisis passes, will be to try to revert to a more free-market style of capitalism—but it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly. People on the right and the left want government to invest in alternative energies in order to break our addiction to foreign oil. And it is unlikely that even the reddest of states will decline federal money for infrastructural improvements.

If we fail to acknowledge the reality of the growing role of government in the economy, insisting instead on fighting 21st-century wars with 20th-century terms and tactics, then we are doomed to a fractious and unedifying debate. The sooner we understand where we truly stand, the sooner we can think more clearly about how to use government in today’s world.

In less than 48 hours, liberal conventional wisdom about the European Socialism charge went from being “pretty ridiculous” to being “where we truly stand” “whether we want to admit it or not.”

But this cognitive dissonance about the S-word is nothing new. Perhaps my all-time favorite example of it happened back in 2005 when the late Tim Russert asked the then-DNC Chairman Howard Dean about self-avowed Socialist Bernie Sanders:

According to Chairman Dean, Sanders “is not a socialist, really” but instead “basically a liberal Democrat.” The problem is that Sanders himself disagrees. A year after Mr. Dean’s appearance on Meet the Press, Sanders described himself as “an unapologetic socialist and proud of it.”

To further complicate things, socialist Sanders is not the most left-leaning member of the United States Senate. According to National Journal’s 2007 vote ratings, Bernie Sanders was only the fourth most liberal member of the Senate. The most liberal was Senator Barack Obama. The third-most liberal was Joe Biden.

So, what’s my point with all this? Well, I really have three points.

First, there is no litmus test for socialism. Capitalism, socialism, and communism exist on a continuum. People of good will can disagree about where any particular policy, or any particular country for that matter, lies on that continuum.

Second, liberals need to stop crying demagogue and hysteric every time a conservative equates liberalism with socialism. There is ample evidence, including admissions from card-carrying, “good” liberals, that the two are actually one in the same.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, liberals need to come to terms with the socialism question within their own ranks. As is probably clear from the discussion above, I happen to believe that modern liberals are socialists, but are afraid—either consciously or unconsciously—to admit it. After all, socialism comes with a lot of historical baggage. It has been tried and tried again. At its worst, it has led to genocide (see, e.g., Stalin). At its best, it has led to economic mediocrity and stagnation (see, e.g., contemporary Europe). If I am right and American Liberalism and European Socialism are cousins with different surnames, then liberals need to explain why they believe that is the right path for our country.

If, on the other hand, I am wrong and there is some heretofore undiscernable but otherwise meaningful distinction between liberalism and socialism, then liberals need to explain what that differnce is. I honestly don’t know.