I want my country back!
By Joe Klein
A specter is
haunting the Democratic Party the specter of socialism. A question is being asked mostly by Republicans but also by MSNBCs Chris Matthews: What is the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist?
Debbie Wasserman Schultz got it last July and ever the robotic partisan answered by saying the more important difference was between Democrats and Republicans.
Senator Chuck Schumer said it depended on how you define the two and then refused to define the two. And most significantly
Hillary Clinton said Well I can tell you what I am … Im a progressive Democrat."
Now this is not a difficult question to answer. Websters says socialism is a social system or theory in which the government owns and controls the means of production." Democrats tend to believe in free enterprise. They think government should regulate the means of production not own it. They have taken great pains to separate themselves from socialism which has always been a poison word in American politics.
And yet according to a Des Moines Register poll 43 of Iowa Democrats describe themselves as socialists. What gives?
Well theyre not really socialists. Theyre European-style social democrats who believe in a robust redistribution of wealth (from each according to her ability to each according to his need") and government control of some of the means of production like the health care system.
The question of how much government should redistribute has been the central argument in American politics since the passage of the graduated income tax in 1913. Even the vast majority of Republicans believe in Social Security and Medicare.
So were talking about 50 shades of socialism here but the gradations are still important.
Take health care: Bernie Sanders is proposing socialized medicine and Hillary Clinton isnt. The majority of Americans get their health insurance from their employers through private insurance companies. Its a clunky system and Sanders wants to eliminate the middlementhe insurance companies. Clinton believes government should help those who cant get insurance through their employersthe poor (Medicaid) the working poor (Obamacare) the elderly (Medicare).
There couldnt be a clearer difference between liberalism and socialism and yet Clinton refused to describe it that way in the Jan. 17 presidential debate; in fact she empretzeled herself with a weak attack on Sanders saying his plan would jeopardize the advances that Obamacare has brought. Her campaign has charged that Sanders would raise taxes on the middle class to pay for it. (True but hed eliminate insurance premiums a net gain.)
In fact the best argument against Sanders health plan is the essential case against socialism which Clintons supporters raised after the debateand its next of kin redistributionism: it dampens incentives which dampens creativity which leads to poverty. It is the difference between the fairer" but more lugubrious European economies and our riskier but more dynamic way of doing business. At their best Democrats are like European conservatives leaning toward more fairness and wary of government control.
Sanders is in favor of some very good things like breaking up the big banks. (There are even fastidious conservatives who agree with him because of the moral hazard" involved.) His notion of a tax on hyperspeculative Wall Street gaming would be a more effective reform than the bramble of incomprehensible regulations comprised in the Dodd-Frank bill.
His support for huge infrastructure spending is good too; it would make our free market more efficient and provide some nice muscle work for less-educated laborers. But each of those ideas is more progressive" than socialist."
It is still far more likely that Clinton wins the Democratic nomination than Sanders but even Bernie should worry about his party strolling into the general election unwilling to distinguish itself from socialism. Indeed the Democrats should worry about their attachment to big government which in America has come to mean more unaccountable bureaucracy like the Department of
Veterans Affairs; more inefficiency like the weird tangle of federal job-training programs each more irrelevant than the last; and more perverse incentives like welfare programs that ask for nothingno personal responsibilityin return from their recipients.
Big government is the way I was treated at the post office this afternoon.
So we have this strange election: Republicans race toward know-nothing nativism and Democrats stumble toward socialism. Both are reactionary discredited ideas.
I want my country back!
