What Is Democratic Socialism?
Presentation by Stuart Elliott
a recent Newsweek cover proclaims that We are All Socialists and uses France as the poster child for socialism. Not Norway, not Sweden, not Denmark, but effete France. Radio commercials for Rush Limbaugh say that we have a choice–give power back to the corporations or have an economy run by "Marx, Lenin, and Stalin."
Congressman Todd Tiahrt recently announced on a Christian radio station that he was opposing the expansion of the State Children Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) because it was part of Obama's plan to impose centralized, state planning on the American economy. Kansas Senator Pat Roberts, a non-ideological conservative, took to the floor of the Senate to denounce the President's recovery plan saying it would mean adopting an American brand of socialism. Republican Party Chair Michael Steele pushed for an official party resolution to call the Democratic Party the "Democrat Socialist Party." Notice that he followed the peculiar tic introduced by Bob Dole and now almost universal and even got t the real name of the party wrong.
A recent issue of Dissent, explained what democratic socialists really believe.
Socialists think that political liberty must be grounded in social and economic citizenship. We were Bolshevism's first foes. We think that vast discrepancies of wealth wound democracy; that markets are means, not ends; and, as one of those terrible "liberals" once said, that sick people should be treated according to their illnesses, not according to wages on a labor market. We (call us socialists, leftists, social democrats, whatever) think America should cast aside right-wing bromides, not just bail out Wall Street.
IS SOCIALISM UNAMERICAN?
Much of the right-wing and mainstream not only rejects the values expressed in that Dissent comment, that say that those values are un-American. That is not the case.
Madison outlined the government's distributive purpose in 1792, asserting the "great object" of securing the republic means' withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few to increase the inequality of property " and requires "the silent operation of laws which, without violating the right of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort."
For Jefferson and Madison, the Republican social objective of securing a relatively equal distribution of productive property was paramount in their thinking about about what government should or should not do.
Wealth is more concentrated today than it was at the time of independence. Those in the richest one percent today hold about three times more than the share hold by their counterparts in the late 18th century.
A pattern of increased concentration of wealth was visible by the 1820s and it led to the formation of Workers Parties in New York and Philadelphia–the first parties of their kind in the world.
By the 1860s, the richest 1 percent held 29 percent of the wealth, and by 1912 they held 56 percent. After bottoming out in the late 1970s at 22 percent, today the richest Americans hold nearly 40 percent of the wealth.
By the 1830s, as property requirements for voting were gradually abolished in most states, popular pressuree for anti-charter laws, labor laws, and land policies policies favorable to free-hold settlements resulted in the downfall of egalitarian laissez-faire and the rise of a new egalitarian vision of active government. This was not a rejection of the nation's founding principles, but an adaptation to the time.
The Jacksonian reform Orestes Brownson called it "social democracy," the same phrase adopted by the European left. Writing in the Boston Quarterly Review in 1841 he delcared that a social democrat is in fact a "Jacksonian Democrat" because he seeks to direct the workings of government economic domination, so that the "actual condition of men in society shall be in harmony with their acknowledged rights as citizens."
Denouncing egalitarians as "un-American," adherents of a "foreign" doctrine is nothing new. It predated the World War I red scare and it did not require the presence of Poles, Hungarians, or Jews. It is how William Allen White treated the Kansas populists. He denounced them as "anarchists" "socialists" and "communists"
There had arisen in recent years, Allen wrote, "the un-American doctrine of state paternalism." It was opposed to laissez-faire and according to Allen the "two theories are violently antagonistic–one is American, Democratic, Saxon." The other is European, Socialist, Celtic."
In fact, socialists were able to have a great impact on American society because or perhaps when they true to the American roots. Eugene Debs and the Oklahoma socialists are two prime examples. In the Northern Plains states the socialist-influenced Non-Partisan League was able to have a major influence by working amazingly enough through the Republican party. That's why North Dakota is the only state with a state bank. In California, Upton Sinclair was almost elected Governor on his EPIC (End Poverty in California) program.
And, we shouldn't forget that three giants of the civil rights movement A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King were democratic socialists.
INVISIBLE SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
In 1959, Texas Congressman Alger congratulated AFL-CIO President George Meany on his anti-Communism and then said
"The only thing that troubles me deeply is this–when I analyze the legislative program of the AFL—I cannot determine in my thinking the difference between your program and what is honestly-to-goodness socialism."
Meany in reply said
"I still do not know what socialism is, despite the things that I have read. But if socialism means that under a democratic system, this republican form of government that we have, there are people who desire to secure for the great mass of the
people, the workers, the wage earners, the farmers, and others, a better share of whatever wealth the economy produces, and that, by providing this better share we provide a broad base of purchasing power to keep the economy moving forward–if that is socialism, then I guess I am a Socialist, and have been a Socialist all my life. I do not figure that, but if that is what socialism means, that is the sort of thing I am interested in."
Our task today is to make it clear that that is what democratic socialism (in part) is about.
As Michael Harrington observed, Meany's definition of socialism was very much in line with that of contemporary social democrats in Europe.
SOCIAL DEMOCRACY DEFINED
Here is a definition of social democracy from the 1970s by Richard Lowenthal, a close advisor to German Chancellor Willy Brandt
the Social Democrats regard a classless and stateless society as utopian in the sense of being strictly impossible in modern technological conditions. They consider the preservation of individual liberties as equally important with the socialist goal itself, and a pluralistc democracy as a precondition both for the defence of individual liberties and for effective social control. They therefore reject a programme of total nationalization and collectivization that could be imposed only by a revolutionary dictatorship and seek to exercise social control of the economic system in the direction of the socialist goal by reforms within the framework of a political democracy such as the sue of techniques of public planning, the expansion of public enterprise, and educational measures aimed at equality of opportunity and a transformation of social values. They..need governmental power for this program, but will seek it only in democratic conditions where the continued existence of rival parties makes it precarious and impermanent.
SOCIALIST VALUES
And here is a statement of socialist values from the sociologist Tom Bottomore
..the creation of a social order in which there is the maximum feasible equality of access, for all human beings, to economic resources, to knowledge, and to political power, and the minimum possible domination exercised by any individual or social group over any others.