If it’s a tag-team match between Hitler, Stalin and the Boogeyman on one side, and Santa, Jesus and Bernie Sanders on the other, I stand with the latter trio.
“Ho! Ho! Huh?” you say?
The connection is socialism.
I don’t mean “National Socialism,” dictatorial ruthlessness or the mythical monster that’ll get you if you don’t watch out, but the economic system that has a group working together to provide for themselves.
Sanders, the U.S. Senator from Vermont and democratic socialist, is running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. president, and it’s Christmastime, a fine time to reflect on socialism.
This fall, Sanders conceded he needed to clarify that socialism means basic fairness, not some authoritarian takeover of private property.
“Democratic socialism means democracy,” Sanders told an Iowa crowd. “It means creating a government that represents all of us, not just the wealthiest people.”
One problem is the stereotype.
“Socialism has been branded a system of state control, and as such it has not been able to gain a foothold,” said lawyer Michael Steven Smith, co-host of the radio program “Law & Disorder.”
But as ideas like free tuition at public colleges and an adequate jobs program gain favor, so does socialism – which exists anyway. There are public or consumer-owned cooperatives providing utilities, from water and sewer systems to dams and a network of electrical service to rural homes. Socialism is public education and libraries, fire and police departments, military and veterans benefits, price supports to farmers and Social Security.
Most people support democratic socialist ideas, like a single-payer health-care system (like Medicare) or that “money and wealth should be more evenly distributed,” according to a CBS News/New York Times poll. Young Americans favor socialism 49 percent to 43 percent (compared with 46 percent favoring capitalism), according to the Pew Research Center, and 59 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats favor socialism, as do 55 percent of African Americans.
Columbia University historian Eric Foner recalls socialist ideals in U.S. history, from Founders such as Tom Paine and the People’s Party of the 1800s to socialism’s widespread acceptance at the turn of the 20th century and the Progressive movement, which featured populist Republicans such as Wisconsin’s Robert LaFollette and Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, Peoria newspaperman George Fitch was elected as a Progressive to the state House of Representatives in 1912, the year when not only Teddy Roosevelt ran as a Progressive, but socialist and labor leader Eugene Debs ran. (Roosevelt got 4.1 million votes and Debs got 900,000, losing to Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s 6.2 million and Republican William Howard Taft’s 3.4 million.)
Socialists were elected to more than 1,000 offices before World War I. It was so prominent that Milwaukee for decades had socialist mayors, such as Emil Seidel (whose aide was young journalist Carl Sandburg). Socialists were key founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO); they’ve included C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Day, Helen Keller and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Baptist pastor Francis Bellamy (author of “the Pledge of Allegiance”) and contemporary activist/author Cornell West.
Albert Einstein said socialism is a way “to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development.
“Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones,” Einstein said in a 1949 essay. “The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature.”
Its had Christian adherents, too.
“Socialism is as much a moral idea as an economic one,” Foner wrote in The Nation, “– the conviction that vast inequalities of wealth, power and opportunity are simply wrong and that ordinary people, using political power, can produce far-reaching change.”
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a democratic socialist, wrote Douglas Sturm in a 1990 article for the Journal of Religious Ethics: “Contrary to the implications of some recent interpreters who have focused on transformation and radicalization in King’s thought, King’s democratic socialism was rooted in his formative experience of the black religious tradition.”
Such roots include, generally, the New Testament’s Book of Matthew quoting Jesus as saying, “No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon,” and specifically, recounted by gospel writer Luke, Jesus advising, “Whoever has two tunics should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.”
Indeed, King in 1967 wrote, “The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism.”
Finally, George Lansbury, head of the UK’s Labor Party in the 1930s, summarized its appeal: “Socialism means love, cooperation and brotherhood in every department of human affairs, the only outward expression of a Christian’s faith.”
Merry Christmas.