We have finally discovered something President Trump fears. “Here in the United States, we are alarmed by the new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” he said last week in his State of the Union address.
And his audience of Senators and House representatives booed.
“We are born free and we will stay free,” the President said. “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”
And the building erupted in applause and chants of, “USA! USA!”
Well, if the President is frightened that the Democratic Party in his country is moving to the left on the political spectrum, he’s right. But liberalism is notsocialism. And being called a “socialist” is notas insulting as it once was. Remember this: Most millennials, those reaching adulthood in the 21st century (and by the way tomorrow’s decision-makers), have no concept of socialism of the Soviet variety (the USSR collapsed in 1989). And at least two generations of Americans (and as many Canadians for that matter) have no idea what the term “Cold War” means. For them socialism is not the same as communism, something they took in history class a million years ago. Socialism is not nearly the threat that Trump (or for that matter Premier Doug Ford) claims it is.
More accurately, I suggest, socialism has given western democracies more than Trump capitalists are prepared to give it credit. I mean America’s very founding – the Revolutionary War – was a social declaration against colonialism. Furthermore, the U.S. Constitution’s preamble states, “We the People, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…” At the very least, such a statement is democratic socialism. Indeed, most U.S. Constitutional scholars agree that “I the individual” cannot function unless a scattered society elevates itself to “a unified republic.”
Constitutional poetry aside, all Western societies – including the American one – employ socialism to varying degrees. If Americans cannot accept any form of control over their lives – i.e. socialism – why do their cities, states and federal jurisdictions allow public libraries, public works systems, social security, the military, fire departments, police, family courts, and health care?
And we on this side of the border would be wise to acknowledge some additional social safeguards that have served Canada well too – for example – a regulated banking system, which largely protected us from financial collapse in 2008; a public health system, whose nurses prevented the political bungling by a provincial government around the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak from becoming an epidemic; social input by veterans to review the pension buy-out strategies of the federal government in favour of fairer life-long support; and a transfer payment system, that at least in some times past prevented economic and societal collapse on the Prairies and in Newfoundland.
In a recent post following Trump’s “never be socialist” rant in the State of the Union, one American pundit commented: “Americans feel overwhelmingly the need to be free. Free to be poor, to be shot at, build ugly cities, consume whatever unhealthy foods they want and ruin the planet.”
I think that’s rubbing Americans noses in it. But in an unprecedented era of divisiveness and extreme political rhetoric in a divided States of America, I find it odd and frightening that Republicans have attacked everything that Democrats want as socialism. Trump and his base call modest tax increases on the wealthy, socialism. They call regulations to lower carbon emissions and reduce the risk of climate catastrophe, socialism. They claim health-care reform which maintains some private insurance, but which also includes stronger protections for consumers, socialism.
In other words, anything that’s more liberal than either Trump or what the Republican Party would prefer, is socialism. And they make it seem – as in the Joe McCarthy era – as if considering such socially conscious initiatives means that we’re “allowing the communist hordes in through the gates.” History has shown Americans that the Red Scare was entirely fabricated, indeed the manic rants of a misguided politician. There’s little to support the current president’s claim that Democratic Party politics promote, in his words, “government coercion, domination and control.”
But I come back to the millennials. A recent Gallup poll in the U.S. showed among Americans younger than 30, that 51 per cent of them have a positive view of socialism. They may have very little experience understanding socialism, but if young American families are suddenly facing thousands of dollars of debt, little or no hope of health-care coverage for themselves and their children, and even less prospect of good wages or a home of their own… then unbridled capitalism, at least of the Donald Trump variety, may not be so attractive.