What Is Socialism in 2009? - It seems that whatever President Obama talks about — Whether it’s overhauling health care, or regulating Wall Street, or telling schoolchildren to study hard

Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency Thousands protesting on Sept. 12 in Washington against President Obama's health care proposals.

It seems that whatever President Obama talks about — whether it's overhauling health care, or regulating Wall Street, or telling schoolchildren to study hard — his opponents have called him a socialist. "Socialism" was an epithet on many placards at protests in Washington over the weekend. What does the word mean today, nearly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall? What role has the label played in American political history?

• Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor, The Nation
• Andrew Hartman, historian
• Terence Ball, political scientist
• Steven F. Hayward, scholar, American Enterprise Institute
• Charles Dunn, professor of government

Stoking Irrational Fears

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor of The Nation, which published a forum in March called "Reimagining Socialism" with Barbara Ehrenreich and others.

When any American reform leader takes on the status quo, he or she confronts a ferocious, well-organized and reactionary opposition. Is it any surprise that right wing groups now compare President Obama to Hitler and liken his pragmatic health care reform to socialism?

It's offensive and troubling. But it's worth invoking history and remembering that Franklin Delano Roosevelt confronted the American Liberty League which called him a socialist and a communist. And he faced down Father Coughlin, the demagogic priest who was a cross between Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh in a Roman collar.

Social democracy is about government having a role in improving people's lives –as it does with Medicare.

History again: the rabid protesters calling President Obama a socialist are representatives of a long national tradition which features an irrational and well-stoked fear of a strong central government. (Mr. Obama has found it more difficult to turn away from the fanatical right than his reform predecessors partly because conservative ideology has been in the saddle for three decades and the recession began too late in the Bush administration to sufficiently discredit its free-market fundamentalism and those who still speak on its behalf.)

Mr. Obama himself acknowledged parallels with previous battles for reform. He said last month, "These struggles always boil down to a contest between hope and fear. That was true in the debate over social security, when F.D.R. was accused of being a socialist. That was true when L.B.J. tried to pass Medicare. And it's true in this debate today."

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I head to Moscow this Sunday to interview the former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Moscow, I know that those who follow our politics are shocked that an educated nation (that's us) can attack a moderately liberal president for being socialist. My friends e-mail me and ask: What is this complaint socialist-hating Americans have about the Obama administration having too many czars? Old-style Soviet Communism has been discarded, in these last years, in favor of flat taxes, capitalist corruption and oligarchs. Meanwhile, most enlightened Russians, like Gorbachev or his colleague Dmitrii Muratov, the editor of Moscow's last oppositionist newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, seek A European-style social democracy.

America's Glenn Beck-inspired mobs would consider social democracy one and the same as socialism or communism. But there is a difference; and it is one which our history textbooks and our media have for the most part failed to fill us in on. So, now we are in a vacuum, and misinformation and mendacity fills it. At our peril. Isn't social democracy — or call it socialism with a human face — all about a healthy and thriving public sphere in education, health care, transportation, libraries, parks, childcare? Isn't it about government programs that improve the conditions of people's lives? If that is socialism, then Medicare is our America variant of socialism.

We are poorer today for the divisions unleashed by those who would lash the label "socialism" around the neck of a moderately liberal president in order to cripple efforts by government to play a smart and humane role.

Conservative Principles and Anxieties

Andrew Hartman is an assistant professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of "Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School," and is currently researching a book on the culture wars.

Recent denunciations of Obama's proposed health-care plan as "socialist" have taken some observers by surprise, especially since the foreign threat of socialism receded two decades ago when the Soviet Union imploded. But, as historians should know, the degree to which conservatives invoke the specter of socialism has always been more calibrated to domestic anxieties than to foreign threats.

"Socialism" as a stand-in for modern threats, from feminism to federal health care.

Elizabeth Dilling's 1934 catalogue, "The Red Network: A 'Who's Who' and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots," serves as an instructive prototype. Many of those listed were never members of the Communist or socialist parties, yet made their way onto a list of people who composed "the Communist-Socialist world conspiracy." The list included Eleanor Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, John Dewey and Jane Addams.

What did they do to merit being labeled socialist? In various ways, they represented the changes of the 20th century: feminism, civil rights, decolonization, relativism and progressive education. For people like Dilling, "socialism" became a stand-in for these modern threats to tradition. Obama and universal health care represent something similar in 2009.

This is not to say that all or even most of the recent howls about socialism are rooted in unconscious anxieties about modernity. For many, the label serves as an effective, if cynical sledgehammer. In a nation with a long history of anti-socialist sentiments, if health care reform can be associated with "socialism," that's good strategy.

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For others, there are very real philosophical principles at stake. In his 1944 "The Road to Serfdom," the Austrian émigré Friedrich Hayek elaborated his laissez-faire economic principles by setting forth a political philosophy. In the shadow of Nazi totalitarianism, Hayek argued that any government intervention into the economy was a slippery slope to authoritarianism. This philosophy has carried the day for American conservatives, even after last year's financial meltdown seemingly proved laissez-faire capitalism more slippery than any government.

In short, lumping socialism together with all things liberal has a long history. It's no surprise that such rhetoric has not gone the way of the cold war. As Whittaker Chambers wrote in his 1952 best-selling autobiography "Witness": "When I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialism revolution, which, in the name of liberalism … has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades."

Many conservatives would argue Obama and universal health care are the latest such ice storm.

Socialists as Patriots

Terence Ball is professor of political science at Arizona State University. He is co-author (with Richard Dagger) of "Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal" and co-editor (with Richard Bellamy) of "The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought," among other books.

Why are some — mostly older, overwhelmingly white — Americans so afraid of "socialism" and, by extension, "socialized medicine"? One explanation is that they don't actually know what socialism is, namely the public ownership and/or control of the major means of production (mines, mills, factories,
etc.) for the benefit of the public at large. Another is that many older Americans have vivid memories of the cold war and the dreaded U.S.S.R. (the second S standing for "socialist").

It's miraculous that Medicare got through Congress at the height of the cold war.

In hindsight it seems strange and almost miraculous that at the height of the cold war a limited form of socialized medicine —  Medicare — got through the Congress over the objections of the American Medical Association and the insurance industry, and made it to President Johnson's desk. (These special interests won't make that mistake again: they now have a veritable army of lobbyists assaulting Capitol Hill and every congressman there.)

But now the cold war is over. For those in their 20s and 30s, the cold war might as well be ancient history.

To many Americans "socialism" may sound vaguely "foreign" and "un-American." Those at rallies protesting health reform now may be surprised to know that "socialism" and "socialist" have a long history in American political thought and that those terms weren't always terms of censure.

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For the anti-socialism protesters, here's a quick quiz:

The author of the Pledge of Allegiance (1892), was A) a conservative, B) a liberal, C) a socialist.

The answer is C. Francis Bellamy was a socialist and a Baptist minister. (Yes, there actually were  Christian socialists, then as now.)

The "Pledge to the Flag," as it was originally called, was not descriptive of then current conditions, but it was aspirational: "One nation, indivisible" invoked a nation undivided by differences of race, class and gender. And "with liberty and justice for all" it envisioned a nation in which women could vote and African Americans need not fear rope-wielding "night riders" of the KKK.

Contemporary "patriots," I hope, agree with such aspirations, despite their distinctly socialist provenance. It is historically false that the only "real" Americans are conservatives and that people of other ideological persuasions are not or cannot be "real" Americans. After all, what's more American than the "socialist" Pledge of Allegiance?

In the Eye of the Beholder

Steven F. Hayward is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989."

There is a famous anecdote about the very first meeting in 1947 of the Mont Pelerin Society, the organization founded by Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and other famous free marketers who later won Nobel prizes and inspired Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, among others. The story goes that von Mises stormed out of one session declaring, "You're all a bunch of socialists!"

Margaret Thatcher effectively campaigned against "socialism" in Britain, even though it wasn't really socialism then, either.

None of the oral traditions recall what heresy prompted this extremely prejudicial accusation, for surely no one in that circle was actually advocating genuine socialism. Maybe Friedman wavered on whether there should be any public welfare provisions in the ideal free market state.

But that story has come back to me as I listen to the commotion about people calling Barack Obama a socialist. If we understand socialism in its strict definition — central economic planning and public ownership of the means of production — then the president is obviously not a socialist (with a mild caveat for the auto bailouts, the banks, etc).

But if we step back a moment and consider "socialism" more broadly as a step increase in political control of or intervention in the economy — whether it be through a revival of Keynesian-style stimulus and things like "cash for clunkers" subsidies, or through a government semi-takeover of the health care sector — then the charge appears more salient.

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The serious conservative critique of these socialist-like forms rests, in one sentence, on the cognitive barriers to government commanding or allocating resources effectively, which means we can expect very poor results, resembling the sluggish, centrally directed economy of Britain in the 1970s.

That wasn't exactly socialism either, but Ms. Thatcher effectively campaigned against it by calling it by that name, and it looks like we may need to sweep away those kind of shackles again a decade from now.

Fearing More Intrusions

Charles W. Dunn, dean of the School of Government at Regent University, served as chairman and vice chairman of the United States J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. He is the author of many books, including "The Enduring Reagan" and "The Future of Conservatism."

Conservatives argue that liberals through the New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier and Great Society have changed America from a responsibility-based society to a rights-based society. Where once the family, neighborhoods, churches and local communities solved problems at the local level, now the central government plays a far greater role.

Battles against the Great Society never spilled into the streets, but today people are fighting rising socialist intrusions.

Conservatives see President Obama's policy proposals as unwarranted extensions of government into the lives of individual citizens, creating greater citizen dependence on the government rather than fostering increased citizen independence and personal responsibility. The result: conservatives fear the loss of their historic liberties.

Because President Obama's health-care proposal is the crown jewel of his agenda, conservatives have seized the moment to stem the tide of increased government control over American society and the economy. They view this as a now-or-never, do-or-die battle. Since the New Deal, the battles over socialist or government intrusions into the lives of Americans have escalated, but now the fight is more intense than ever before.

Great Society battles over Medicare and Medicaid never spilled over into the streets, but today Americans have taken to the streets to fight against government intrusions into their lives, which they consider socialism.

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By The Editors
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/what-is-socialism-in-2009/?pagemode=print