Barack Obama makes jokes every year at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner about the rightwing accusations that he is a socialist, a Muslim and foreignborn. This year, he mentioned Senator Bernie Sanders running for president.
“I like Bernie. Bernie’s an interesting guy,” Obama said. “Apparently, some folks want to see a pot-smoking socialist in the White House. We could get a third Obama term after all.”
Sanders really is a socialist (the only one to run as a major party presidential candidate), and he says he has smoked some pot. But he has been a pragmatic workaholic as a public official. For eight years, he was the mayor of Burlington, the largest city in Vermont (population: 38,000). Peter Dreier and Pierre Clavel note that he worked with local Republicans and the business community to create “more affordable housing, more locally owned small businesses, greater community engagement in planning, and job development.”
Dreier and Clavel say that thanks to Sanders and his allies, “the city’s largest housing development is now resident-owned, its largest supermarket is a consumer-owned cooperative, one of its largest private employers is worker-owned, and most of its people-ori ented waterfront is publicly owned. Its publicly owned utility, the Burlington Electric Department, recently announced that Burlington is the first American city of any decent size to run entirely on renewable electricity.”
In 1990, Sanders decided to take his fight for a better society to Washington, D.C. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for 16 years. In 2006, he became a senator.
In his D.C. office, he has a portrait of Eugene Debs on the wall. Debs was the Socialist Party candidate for president several times in the early days of the 20th century. In those days, the Socialist Party was rapidly growing in popularity. In 1912, Debs won nearly a million votes, 6 percent of the total.
That year, the party held 1,200 public offices in 340 cities, including 79 mayors in 24 states including Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Butte, Flint, Reading and Schenectady. In 1912, the Socialist Party claimed 323 English and foreign language publications with a total circulation in excess of two million.
Ralph Easley, executive director of an influential business group called the National Civic Federation, was alarmed by the “menace of Socialism” not just among workers but also in “colleges, churches and newspapers.”
The Socialist Party was rebelling against the robber barons of a ruthlessly competitive capitalism. They pushed for progressive reforms to improve working conditions and the social wellbeing of workers.
Soon class-conscious businessmen like Easley and leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties also started arguing for reforms, albeit milder. At the same time, the socialists faced repression particularly when they opposed U.S. entry into World War I. Socialists were persecuted merely for being anti-war — leaders (such as Debs) were jailed, elected officials were suddenly removed from office and publications were closed down.
When revolutionaries overthrew the Russian czar and created the Soviet Union, many members of the U.S. Socialist Party left and formed a rival Communist Party. The Russian Bolsheviks said they were creating the first socialist state out of a feudal dictatorship of uneducated peasants. But Karl Marx had argued that socialism could emerge only out of a fully capitalist society where a working class majority had learned to assert itself as an independent force in a democracy.
Historian James Weinstein once wrote that “socialism has meant the fulfillment of the promise of American democracy” to him. He mourned the fact that “the Russian Revolution inspired a worldwide political movement that not only split the left, but also redefined socialism in the popular mind to mean (at best) a lower standard of living minus democracy.”
Out of the Progressive era and the New Deal, a more stable and socially responsible capitalism would emerge with unions, social insurance and tough financial regulations. We have had three decades of policies that cut taxes for the wealthy while privatizing and shrinking the public realm. The old, nastier and more irrational capitalism has been returning. We are in a new Gilded Age of grotesque income inequality and widespread poverty wages.
Imagine Bernie Sanders’ old hero, Eugene Debs, waking up in today’s America. He would find our country quite recognizable.
But come hear some good news. On Sunday August 23, University of Denver economist Tracy Mott will speak from 3 to 4:30 pm on “Bernie 2016: Democratic Socialism As An Alternative to Mainstream Economics” in the Boulder Creek Room (first floor) of the Boulder Public Library at 1001 Arapahoe Ave. The lecture is free and there will be a question session and discussion afterwards. It is sponsored by Democratic Socialists of America.
This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
