The S-Word

Socialism. That’s right. I said it. I know; I’m a bad, bad girl for saying such a dirty, dirty word. How do I know it’s dirty? Well, because McCain and Palin told me so, of course. Towards the end of the presidential campaign, they started throwing the S-Word around at Republican rallies like an overused “yo momma” joke. Whether it was McCain’s indirect method of attributing insults like “You see, [Obama] believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that help us all make more of it. Joe, in his plainspoken way, said this sounded a lot like socialism” to Joe (the Plumber) Wurzelbacher or Palin’s more direct statements like “Now is no time to experiment with socialism,” the point was to deliver a punch to Obama’s gut, to make his campaign hurt, to turn the country against him.

Of course, there are some problems with these accusations.
1. The statement on which they’re based – Obama’s comment to Joe Wurzelbacher that he “think[s] when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody” – was taken completely out of context. As a CNN fact check confirmed, “McCain’s remark was an oversimplification of a five-minute-long conversation. Obama replied in great detail about his tax plan, and the “spread the wealth” remark was one small part of the conversation.”

2. They’re just wrong. According to the Columbia Encyclopedia, socialism is a “political and economic theory that advocates a system of collective or government ownership and management of the means of production and distribution of goods.” More importantly socialism is NOT capitalism. It is self-consciously anti-capitalist. You know capitalism? Free market? Private ownership? Imagine the exact opposite. That’s socialism. In order to get to socialism, capitalism must be completely dismantled. The two cannot co-exist. I hardly think Obama wanting to cut taxes for the middle and lower classes and raise them for the wealthy (in order to improve social services like health care and education for everyone) even remotely resembles the socialist desire to completely demolish the capitalist system.

3. They’re hypocritical. As Fox News’s Chris Wallace said to John McCain in an interview, “But, Senator, you voted for the $700 billion bailout that’s being used partially to nationalize American banks. Isn’t that socialism?” Well, yes and no. Asking the general public to subsidize banks, to put their own private money into them, is putting the national banks in the hands of the general public. It is a type of collective control that resembles socialist objectives. However, the American people aren’t actually going to own or control the banks. They’re really just loaning out the money. So, it isn’t exactly socialism. But it is certainly a lot closer to it than Obama’s tax plan.

Also, a lot of American public services are already socialized. The police, the fire department, Emergency Medical Services, and public schooling are all socialized services (paid for by the public, and available to all for free). They’re also all great and humane services that any ‘civilized’ country should provide its citizens. So, what exactly is the problem with socialism? Why is it such an insult to be associated with it?

My personal problem with socialism is that it’s an unrealistic ideology. Oh sure, it sounds nice. Of course it would be great for everyone to have equal economic, political, and social power, for everyone to have equal opportunities, to be equally as well off as everyone else. However, for a society like that to exist, all its citizens would have to agree with the ideology and act accordingly to sustain such egalitarianism. And I’m sorry socialists, but it’s just not going to happen. People aren’t good. People aren’t fair. We’re selfish, greedy, ambitious, opportunistic. We are. We just are. Which is why socialism in practice often turns into dictatorship or authoritarian rule (think Cuba, China) – most of the time, people just aren’t going to do right unless they’re forced to. And no matter how you slice it, I’m pretty sure the lack of civil freedoms associated with authoritarianism is a far cry from socialism’s ideals. (I’m not saying democracy in practice matches its ideals either, but I do think the disconnect is less wide than socialism’s.)

I don’t think America’s problem with socialism is the same as my personal one though. America’s problem with socialism is twofold. On a superficial level, we’re just a very nationalistic country, so much so that this is not really that far-fetched. We think we’re the best. We think everyone should be like us. We take difference of opinion (and even just difference itself) as a personal offense. It is as Richard Wright said in Black Boy, “America […] insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black […] It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.” Don’t believe me? Go look up the Salem Witch Trials, Sand Creek Massacre, the Immigration Quota acts, Jim Crow, the Red Scare, Stonewall, miscegenation laws, the KKK – you know what? Just go look up American history. The point is, the U.S. just doesn’t deal well with what’s different.

On a deeper level though, the problem is the nature of America itself. The country is based on two separate, often conflicting, ideologies – democracy and capitalism – and we’ve never really decided which one we’re more dedicated to. Sure, we like to say we’re all about freedom, liberty, equality. I mean, it’s right there in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed […].” But if that’s what we really believe – that everyone is equal, that everyone is entitled to health, freedom, and the pursuit of money (no really, that’s what they meant by “happiness”), that government exists to ensure those rights, and that the government’s power derives from the people – then we wouldn’t have a problem with socialism because (call me crazy but), when you put it that way, democracy and socialism, though not the same, sound pretty damn similar. We don’t go around hating constitutional monarchies for not being exactly our brand of democracy, so you wouldn’t think we’d go around hating socialism either.

But the truth is, in practice, America doesn’t care all that much about its pretty, democratic ideals. It cares about making money. Its exemplars are tycoons and entrepreneurs: Horatio Algiers, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller; Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Donald Trump. What really rankles the U.S. is not injustice, poverty, genocide, or suffering, but obstacles in the way of its money-making grind. So, not only is socialism intolerable because it (shock! horror!) cares more about citizens than wealth, but it also often happens to be taken up by non-White, non-European countries who don’t care about the U.S., don’t particularly like the U.S., and certainly are more interested in taking care of themselves than kissing the U.S.’s ass and lining its pockets (think Venezuela, Hugo Chavez). Those countries, those people, that don’t toe the U.S.’s line, don’t cough up the oil, don’t bolster America’s economy, well, apparently those countries are so bad, so horrible, so evil, so sinful, that even the word used to refer to them has become a curse. Sociali—shhh, don’t say it! It’s the S-Word now y’all.