Dan Edelstein: Republicans rewrite history in crying 'socialism'
[Dan Edelstein is an assistant professor of French at Stanford University. His book, "The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution" (Chicago), will be published this fall. He wrote this article for the Mercury News.]
There was a time when politicians thought they could learn from history. Today, history is used as a form of profanity.
The favorite historical curse word in Washington now is "socialism." Rather than buy into the rhetoric that "we are all socialists now," as a recent Newsweek article put it, the media need to call out politicians who rewrite the past. Distorting history is a dangerous game that poisons political debate.
Even before the current threat of bank and insurance company nationalizations, Republican leaders and right-wing commentators were hurling the epithet "socialist" at their Democratic opponents. John McCain repeatedly accused Barack Obama of harboring a socialist agenda on the campaign trail. Things have not changed much since.
House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, called Obama's policies an "American socialist experiment," the same day that Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., described the president as "the world's best salesman of socialism." Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee claimed that Obama was creating "the Union of American Socialist Republics," adding for good measure that "Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff."
Based on the latest Republican comments, one would think the painful history of the Soviet Union was caused by nothing more than the nationalization of a few banks. Of course, this was not the case. Socialism, as it was theorized in the 19th century and put into practice by the Soviets, was the nationalization of everything — all the "means of production": banks, yes, but also industries, farms, even private property. It was an economic philosophy that explicitly rejected the market economy and capitalism, seeking instead to have the state direct economic growth through "five-year plans" and other centralized measures.
Socialism breathed its final gasp in 1989, though it had been dying long before. Some commentators still call present European states (especially France) "socialist," but this claim is equally misleading. European socialist parties have long abandoned their old objective of nationalizing the economy.
Since François Mitterrand's aborted nationalization program in the 1980s, the French state sector has been steadily shrinking through privatization. The Scandinavian countries, sometimes celebrated as models of new socialism because of their cradle to the grave welfare net, have very few nationalized industries. We are all capitalists now, at least in the West.
We can, and should, have a debate about the role of the government in health care, education, welfare and social security. But this is not a debate about socialism; it is a debate about what kind of capitalist society we want to live in....
Read entire article at San Jose Mercury News
There was a time when politicians thought they could learn from history. Today, history is used as a form of profanity.
The favorite historical curse word in Washington now is "socialism." Rather than buy into the rhetoric that "we are all socialists now," as a recent Newsweek article put it, the media need to call out politicians who rewrite the past. Distorting history is a dangerous game that poisons political debate.
Even before the current threat of bank and insurance company nationalizations, Republican leaders and right-wing commentators were hurling the epithet "socialist" at their Democratic opponents. John McCain repeatedly accused Barack Obama of harboring a socialist agenda on the campaign trail. Things have not changed much since.
House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, called Obama's policies an "American socialist experiment," the same day that Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., described the president as "the world's best salesman of socialism." Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee claimed that Obama was creating "the Union of American Socialist Republics," adding for good measure that "Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff."
Based on the latest Republican comments, one would think the painful history of the Soviet Union was caused by nothing more than the nationalization of a few banks. Of course, this was not the case. Socialism, as it was theorized in the 19th century and put into practice by the Soviets, was the nationalization of everything — all the "means of production": banks, yes, but also industries, farms, even private property. It was an economic philosophy that explicitly rejected the market economy and capitalism, seeking instead to have the state direct economic growth through "five-year plans" and other centralized measures.
Socialism breathed its final gasp in 1989, though it had been dying long before. Some commentators still call present European states (especially France) "socialist," but this claim is equally misleading. European socialist parties have long abandoned their old objective of nationalizing the economy.
Since François Mitterrand's aborted nationalization program in the 1980s, the French state sector has been steadily shrinking through privatization. The Scandinavian countries, sometimes celebrated as models of new socialism because of their cradle to the grave welfare net, have very few nationalized industries. We are all capitalists now, at least in the West.
We can, and should, have a debate about the role of the government in health care, education, welfare and social security. But this is not a debate about socialism; it is a debate about what kind of capitalist society we want to live in....