Like, Socialism

"This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing," Todd
Akin, a Republican congressman from Missouri, told a McCain rally
outside St. Louis. "It's a referendum on socialism." "With all due
respect," Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said, "the man
is a socialist." At an airport rally in Roswell, New Mexico, a
well-known landing spot for space aliens, Governor Palin warned
against Obama's tax proposals. "Friends," she said, "now is no time to
experiment with socialism." And McCain, discussing those proposals,
agreed that they sounded "a lot like socialism." There hasn't been so
much talk of socialism in an American election since 1920, when Eugene
Victor Debs, candidate of the Socialist Party, made his fifth run for
President from a cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he
was serving a ten-year sentence for opposing the First World War.
(Debs got a million votes and was freed the following year by the new
Republican President, Warren G. Harding, who immediately invited him
to the White House for a friendly visit.)

As a buzzword, "socialism" had mostly good connotations in most of the
world for most of the twentieth century. That's why the Nazis called
themselves national socialists. That's why the Bolsheviks called their
regime the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, obliging the socialist
and social democratic parties of Europe (and America, for what it was
worth) to make rescuing the "good name" of socialism one of their
central missions. Socialists—one thinks of men like George Orwell,
Willy Brandt, and Aneurin Bevan—were among Communism's most passionate
and effective enemies.

The United States is a special case. There is a whole shelf of books
on the question of why socialism never became a real mass movement
here. For decades, the word served mainly as a cudgel with which
conservative Republicans beat liberal Democrats about the head. When
Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan accused John F. Kennedy and Lyndon
Johnson of socialism for advocating guaranteed health care for the
aged and the poor, the implication was that Medicare and Medicaid
would presage a Soviet America. Now that Communism has been defunct
for nearly twenty years, though, the cry of socialism no longer packs
its old punch. "At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so
admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives," McCain said
the other day—thereby suggesting that the dystopia he abhors is not
some North Korean-style totalitarian ant heap but, rather, the gentle
social democracies across the Atlantic, where, in return for higher
taxes and without any diminution of civil liberty, people buy
themselves excellent public education, anxiety-free health care, and
decent public transportation.

The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference
between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between
a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal
income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would be under
Obama's proposal, what it was under President Clinton, and, for that
matter, what it will be after 2010 if President Bush's tax cuts expire
on schedule. Obama would use some of the added revenue to give a break
to pretty much everybody who nets less than a quarter of a million
dollars a year. The total tax burden on the private economy would be
somewhat lighter than it is now—a bit of elementary Keynesianism that
renders doubly untrue the Republican claim that Obama "will raise your
taxes."
. . . .
For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama
"Barack the Wealth Spreader," seems to be something of a suspect
character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of
what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that
she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge
levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds
finance the government's activities and enable it to issue a
four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state.
One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added
an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year's check, bringing the
per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for
Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of
this magazine—that "we're set up, unlike other states in the union,
where it's collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the
wealth when the development of these resources occurs." Perhaps there
is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and
sharing it ("collectively," no less), but finding it would require the
analytic skills of Karl the Marxist. ♦