Back on December 9th, in a post entitled "Fox Fair and Balanced" on Health Care Debate.....NOT!" I pointed out how the Fox News Network had deliberately tried to skew the national discussion on health care reform in such a way as to discredit the concept of a public option. Well just yesterday The Saint Petersburg Times' Pulitzer Prize winning affiliate, PolitiFact.com published:"PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'A Government Takeover of Health Care". This article pointed out how, when the facts are objectively analyzed, that for all of the rhetoric surrounding health care reform as being Socialist, it was in fact far from it .
Well with the health care debate behind us and with those facts on the table, the folks at PolitiFact's.com have detailed the inaccuracies of this conservative claim, labeling it the political lie of 2010. This falsehood was second only to Michele Bachmann's bizarrely absurd claim that Barack Obama's trip to India would cost 200 Million Dollars a day. Politifact.com deconstructs the logic behind the argument that "ObamaCare" represents a "government takeover of health care" with the following facts:
"Government takeover" conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees. But the law Congress passed, parts of which have already gone into effect, relies largely on the free market:
• Employers will continue to provide health insurance to the majority of Americans through private insurance companies.
• Contrary to the claim, more people will get private health coverage. The law sets up "exchanges" where private insurers will compete to provide coverage to people who don't have it.
• The government will not seize control of hospitals or nationalize doctors.
• The law does not include the public option, a government-run insurance plan that would have competed with private insurers.
• The law gives tax credits to people who have difficulty affording insurance, so they can buy their coverage from private providers on the exchange. But here too, the approach relies on a free market with regulations, not socialized medicine.
PolitiFact reporters have studied the 906-page bill and interviewed independent health care experts. We have concluded it is inaccurate to call the plan a government takeover because it relies largely on the existing system of health coverage provided by employers.
It's true that the law does significantly increase government regulation of health insurers. But it is, at its heart, a system that relies on private companies and the free market."
This very argument was raised last February when the renowned health care economist Uwe Reinhardt published an article entitled: "A Government Takeover of Health Care? Reinhardt came to the following conclusion: "A common refrain among critics of the health reform bills passed by the House and the Senate is that they constitute a "complete government takeover of 17 percent of the American economy."How could this be so? Start with the $950 billion price tag over the next decade for federal subsidies toward the purchase of private health insurance. Divide that amount by $34 trillion, the current projection for total national health spending over the next decade even in the absence of health reform. You will get 2.8 percent. Does that, then, constitute a government takeover of our health system?" Reinhardt concluded that the proposed reforms at the time, while certainly representing a major intrusion by the Federal Government into the health care process, were necessary as the system was "wasteful and unwieldy" and "would require substantial intrusion of government into the system, as evidently the system cannot correct itself."
Thus with the benefit of hindsight and with the 2010 elections where "ObamaCare" was certainly a topic of discussion now history, the question arises: To what extent have the American people been misled, if not outright bamboozled by the ultra right campaign against health care reform and it's conflating of that topic with the conjured up "specter of creeping Socialism?" To my mind the conservative attack on health care reform fits very neatly into a pattern of history that stretches all the way back to Theodore Roosevelt's first mention of the need for some type of national health care system. Since that time, health care reform has dovetailed neatly into more than one of the "red scares" that have accompanied this debate and that of progressive reform in general. Then like now, health care reform was seen as something that was tied to a decline of freedom in America and its replacement with that European import labeled "Socialism." Remember how Ronald Reagan once told us that the enactment of Medicare would bring about the decline of freedom in America and how we would all one day tell our grandchildren what it was once like to live in a free country? And just like then, these claims have now been proven by facts to be far fetched at best and fictitious at the very worst. Thus have those Americans who bought into this rhetoric of fiction and fear become nothing more than the "useful idiots' for those on the far right who have a vested interest in the status quo? Have they in so doing sacrificed their own best interests so as to avoid a "Socialist" threat that doesn't even exist in today's America? Or, have just so many Americans become fooled by the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh as to be unable to distinguish fact from fantasy and what does that say about the future of American Democracy?
[What's This Election About, Anyway. Special Last Minute Edition.]
In a special Sunday edition of The Last Word Lawrence O'Donnell had leading members of four Tea Party-related organizations on his show, and in the course of trying to get to the bottom of what they are all about (a little late for that, one might think, but then, Sharon Angle is keeping her foreign policy under wraps until she's elected, after that... watch out Klingon Empire! But I digress....) he tried to get them to explain what they regarded as socialism that they wanted to get rid of in the federal budget. What about Medicare and Social Security? Are they socialism? He asked. They said, "No," he said "Yes":
Eventually, some of them were able to name some things they'd cut, but the connection to "socialism" wasn't particularly clear. The old "waste, fraud and abuse" mantra was heard. And dismantling the Department of Education. But the more they talked, the harder it was to find a correlation between "socialism" (whatever that is) and what they wanted to cut. Unless, of course, you just decide that "socialism" means "anything I want to cut, and am not afraid to say so on national TV."
Oh, by the way, what we so often hear regarding the Department of Education is that it's interfering with local decisionmaking. But we've got far and away the most decentralized education system in the world. (And funny how that never becomes the focus of attention amidst all the hysteria about how we're falling bhind Outer Mongolia!) So, since O'Donnell's quest for socialism turned out to be such a bust, why not take a little peak into the Department of Education, since it ended up getting the most prominent mention in the rest of the segment. Here's Wikipedia:
I went to a protest in Philadelphia this past Saturday, and it was more disheartening than anything else. It was against the wars and various other injustices, with a special focus on he recent FBI raids of peace activists and Pennsylvania Homeland Security spying on innocent civilians and activists.
By the end of it, I kind of just felt like going up to the megaphone and asking, "How much moral outrage can one person muster? There are more people handing out fliers here than not, and with this country committing so many disgusting, outrageous acts, I don't blame you." I won't lie, I handed a few out myself. Yet the contrast between the righteous causes featured in the speeches and on the signs and on the fliers and the, as a fellow protester said to me, "complete lack of solidarity" was striking.
I had of course heard about Dinesh D'Souza's (and Newt Gingrich's) pathetic arguments about Obama's anti-colonial socialism he picked up from his almost entirely unknown father, but I get very busy close to the elections and don't have time for reading fiction. However, I was lucky enough to see an op-ed length version of D'Souza's argument in the WaPo yesterday, and I enjoyed the read. I think Dinesh D'Souza may be the single funniest political writer I have ever read. While his arguments are too absurd to spend much time on, I do have to stop for a moment to write a little bit about his basic theme, because the entertainment value is just too good.
Anyone following politics closely knows the basic argument D'Souza makes: that Obama is just a chip off the old third world socialist dad block. He cites dramatic, compelling evidence like the fact Obama's first book, written in his 20s, was entitled Dreams FROM (!) My Father, not dreams of my father. Alrighty then. But clearly D'Souza's most compelling argument, the one he features and focuses on in his op-ed, is that because Obama is in favor of a system of progressive taxation, and calls for some measure of corporate accountability, that must mean he shares the Third World socialism of his father.
Now I don't want to be condescending, Dinesh, but I suspect that the reason you don't get the absurdity of this argument is that you have never studied a lick of American history. After all, you were, as you pointed out in your op-ed, raised in India, so maybe it isn't surprising you wouldn't have studied American history growing up. But let me just ask: did Tom Paine have a third world socialist father because he argued against big corporations having too much power and argued for a system of progressive taxation? How about Thomas Jefferson? Or Andrew Jackson? Or Abe Lincoln? Or William Jennings Bryan? Or Teddy Roosevelt? Or Woodrow Wlison? Or FDR? Or Harry Truman? Or the Kennedy brothers? Or Martin Luther King, Jr? Or the thousands of other politicians, writers, and activists who throughout American history have loudly and proudly advocated the same things Obama is advocating for today: reining in the power of big corporations and a system of taxation that follows the common sense principle that those who can afford to pay more should. These ideas are not from Africa; they are not socialist; they are not remotely foreign. They are as rooted in American history, traditions, and values as any set of political ideas out there. Conservatives who try to paint scary pictures of Obama's views as foreign and non-American contort and twist their arguments into such loony territory that they make funny caricatures of themselves.
I'll close on this personal note. As a white kid from Nebraska, raised by Republican and Christian parents whose families have been in America for over a century, I grew into my views about reining in the power of big corporations and progressive taxation not because I was reading Karl Marx but because I was reading about those American heroes from our history, and even more importantly because I was reading my Bible. I read that the rich should sell their possessions and give them to the poor. I read that I would be judged by God on how I treated the poor and the suffering. I read the Old Testament prophets railing about societies being destroyed because the wealthy were doing nothing for widows and orphans and the poor. Now, I know that Jesus and the prophets came from a third world colony of a powerful empire far away from America, but I don't actually think those ideas and values are very foreign to American ideas and values today. D'Souza's scare mongering is as funny as political writing gets, because it is based on nothing but right-wing fantasies about ideas that are as all-American as you can get.
Americans are known, for better of for worse, for their strong support of “capitalism” and hesitancy towards “socialism.” A recent poll by Pew Research Center confirmed this notion, although perhaps not with the intensity one would expect. When asked what their first reaction to the word “socialism” was, 59% gave a negative response and only 29% responded positively. Their reaction to the word capitalism was exactly the opposite, 52% gave a positive response, and 37% responded negatively.
In a recent diary by Cassiodorus, one point of his in particular struck me:
Thus the comparison between the Great Depression and the current Great Recession falls flat, because the popular upheavals of the 1930s are only in evidence today among the least helpful segments of the population. This of course is a major reason why we can expect no FDR-like President to save us from the...economic collapse...
...During the 1930s...intellectual figures such as John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Kenneth Burke, and Richard Wright were actual socialists and not just mere liberals offering occasional plugs for John Kerry.
Another prominent socialist, albeit a bit later than the Depression, was Albert Einstein. He was an all around brilliant man, someone whom I admire greatly. And he wisely said this, although today it would probably be considered way too radical for anyone respectable to utter:
After seeing Capitalism: A Love Story today, I thought I'd give my own review in response to the one by metamars.
Two big criticisms are made against the otherwise excellent film, only one of which stands up under scrutiny. Yes, Obama is left virtually unscathed by Moore's damning critique of Congressional acquiescence to Wall Street's fear-mongering. As we all witnessed during last year's debacle, Obama was one of the chief proponents of the Wall Street bailout in the U.S. Senate, pushing for the no-strings-attached version that ultimately passed. That Obama is as responsible as any other player in the nation's economic meltdown and the massive swindle that accompanied it cannot be ignored or denied, and Moore's acknowledgment that Wall Street contributed heavily to Obama seems like a punch undeservedly pulled.
The second big critique is that while the film's message rouses outrage, little or nothing is given in the way of what can actually be done about all of it. Having now seen the film myself, I can see all kinds of ways in which We the People can fight back - not the least of which is using the power of the vote. But there's more, much more, that can be done, and Moore illustrates them with great relish.
Factory workers denied their final paychecks when the company shut down its site took barricaded themselves inside and refused to leave until they got the money owed to them.
People whose home was foreclosed upon found aid in the form of an organization formed to keep families in their houses by way of squatting. Police were called out, only to leave without enforcing the order to vacate after it became clear that no one was leaving.
I saw a bread-making factory, a co-op, meaning that each employee owns a piece of that factory and helps run it through a democratic process. The CEO has no more or less say in how the company is run than anyone else, and surprisingly (or so Moore depicts) everyone makes at least a somewhat decent wage.
Last, and by no means least, is the power of the ballot. Moore calls for a democratic revolution in Capitalism: A Love Story, the kind expressed at the ballot box. Yes, We the people do have the power of the vote, and therefore wield far more power collectively than the top one percent of Americans. Why else do you think there is such massive effort expended to disenfranchise us at the polling station? Why else do you think we are encouraged to self-segregate ourselves along racial, religious, and class lines? Why else do you think we are discouraged from even mentioning forming and using third political parties as a means of reshaping the two major ones? It's because the powerful know that if We the People were to truly rise up at election time and vote in genuine representatives to replace the corporate whores, their days of power would be over. Sure, they have the military and gobs of money, but if they were to drop the pretense of democracy by going all-out in their war against us, the rich would lose their only real weapon: our compliance.
Resistance through noncompliance worked for India. It can work for us - if we have the will to use it.
I saw Michael Moore's new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story last weekend. It did not disappoint.
In one way, Capitalism is like Moore's other films. He frames his arguments with witty Cliff's Notes-style history lessons, highlights personal stories that are at turns devastating and inspiring, and sprinkles satire over the whole thing. You're clinching your teeth, ready to storm the barricades alongside some of the people on the screen, then your laughing out loud at the utter ridiculousness of the thing he's criticizing. That's his brand, and he does it well.
But Capitalism is also bigger, scarier, and more exhilarating than anything else Moore has done. From the start, you get the feeling that he's playing for keeps. You get the feeling that people will leave the theater and take action, that stuff might happen.
Moore describes Capitalism as the culmination of all his other films. It might be more accurate to say that he finally makes the intellectual leap and chases down the logical conclusion of what he's been getting at all along. Finally, we're not just talking about the gun lobby (Bowling for Columbine), or the military industrial complex (Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911). We're not just talking deadly insurance companies (Sicko) or a lying president (um, all of his films, I think). As powerful and necessary as a single-issue focus can be, it's too often just a game of "whack-a-mole." Whack the gun lobby and mercenary corporations pop up. Outlaw the mercenary corporations and we're suddenly in a death spiral toward war with Iran. Get out of Iran and Goldman Sachs operates the Treasury Department.
The media, and the permanent political class in general, tend to treat these things as separate, unrelated issues. To the extent that they acknowledge them as problems at all, they cast them as individual cases of "a few bad apples." Well, dare we ask why we're sitting beneath this tree eating these crappy apples?
With Capitalism, we're finally stepping back to examine the sick tree--the tree that gives us Enron, Blackwater, and Gilded Age inequality for its fruit.
What's Moore's diagnosis? He says the disease is capitalism itself. In nearly every area...
Too few people have too much power.
Shrug it off as some hackneyed radicalism. Laugh it off as a lame echo of the Sixties. And then read it again, because it's not going anywhere. (And it's going to get louder.)
Too few people have too much power.
How is this possible if we are a democracy, with "one person one vote?" Because too few people and too few corporations have too much money. And money means power. And people abuse power. The idea that we can have political democracy alongside economic royalism is folly. One will always eat the other. Perhaps the most inspiring thing about this film is the suggestion, hinted throughout the picture, that the royalists have gotten fat and lethargic and the democrats are hungry.
So what's Moore's cure for capitalism?
Democracy.
And this is the strongest aspect of the film. "But wait! One's an economic system and the other's a political system," critics will object. Well, maintaining that artificial division has been an important strategy for the capitalists. "You can keep your democracy over there," they say. "Just don't touch the good stuff." We are allowed to elect American Idols while they decide what the richest nation in the history of the world does with its money. The truth is, democracy is a decision-making system. And it's the system that distributes power as evenly as possible over the widest group possible. It's the perfect medicine for what's killing us:
Too few people have too much power.
But isn't a democratic economy some form of SOCIALISM?!?! And here's where the whole discussion could devolve into a battle of competing definitions for words like capitalism and socialism. (One of these words make us think of Stalin and Mao!) Moore does a good job of navigating this minefield. He removes the mystique of the S-word by interviewing a real, live socialist sitting in the U.S. Senate. He pokes fun at how the word has been used recently. He looks at what made America a strong middle-class nation in the middle of the last century and then at how our broadly-shared prosperity was systematically dismantled.
Then, somewhere in the middle of the movie, it strikes you. This thoroughly radical movie--rebellious in the true sense of the word--is playing on thousands of screens across the country. How did this become possible? Then you'll see a scene of George W. Bush giving an awkward speech defending capitalism itself. And this is when you start to wonder, does Moore's movie say more about where we are heading or about where we already are? Then cut to scenes of families squatting in their own homes to fight eviction, of radical labor activism, of prosperous democratically owned and operated factories. You start to think, it's not just that stuff might happen. Stuff IS happening! Democracy is rising up against capitalism all over the place. And we can be a part of it. We have to be a part of it.
There's a thought provoking article in the new Vanity Fair by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist, which evaluates what the current financial situation >throughout the world means to America's position in it.
It is worth reading and thinking about, since it lays most of the responsibility on a "free-market economy" as foisted on the world by a greedy and thoughtless Wall Street, which set very different standards for other countries than it adopted for the U.S. This from the article:
Earlier today, in an attempt to develop a thumbnail metric for how socialist and capitalist a national economy is, I examined where 26 counties fell in a public-private mixed economy continuum. While much of the discussion on the story involved whether this was the proper use of the term "socialism" (some people can get really sensitive over which broad, vague signifiers should be applied to abstract concepts), the lead item of the story remains powerful. Namely, over the last two years, public expenditures as a percentage of GDP has risen dramatically in the United States, from 35.5% in FY 2007 to a projected 44.7% in FY 2009. Outside of World War Two, this is the largest the public sector has been in the US relative to the nation's GDP. The two-year increase of 9.2% is also great than any experienced outside of World War Two. Here is a graphical illustration of trends from 1900 through 2009:
There have been similarly rapid increases in the past, though perhaps not a single, 7.7%, jump that was not directly related to war, which we experienced from 2008-2009.. From 1929 to 1933, public spending rose from 11.3% to 22.4% of GDP. From 1948 to 1954, public spending rose from 20.5% of GDP to 29.3%. On a slightly smaller scale, we went from 30.2% to 34.0% from 1974 to 1976. The sharp, upward climbs punctuating long eras of stability are shown on the graph by the black line and the red arrows.
The two previous, sharp upward gains, from 1929 to 1933 and from 1948 to 1954, were never reversed. The pre-1930 status quo of 11-12% was erased permanently by post-1929 spending. The pre-1948 status quo of around 20% was erased permanently by the 1949-1954 spending increase. The upward movement in the mid-1970's was also never reversed, as we stayed in the mid-30% range for the next 30 years. As such, one of the main question for our times is whether the recent upward shot into the mid-40% range will ever be reversed.
I think that it is important to consolidate our new status in the mid-40% range as, combined with a shift in public expenditures, it would allow us to enter a Western European realm of social investment. Consolidating this upward increase will require finding new sources of government revenue that are easier, from a political perspective, than cutting down the size of the public sector. There are avenues through which that can be achieved, and I will explore them tomorrow (hint: expanding Social Security revenues by eliminating the income cap is both very popular and lucrative). For now, it should suffice to note the historic shift that has occurred, and also the tremendous opportunity it presents the American left. Given that it has been about 60 years since a shift of this magnitude last occurred, it is possible that we won't get another opportunity like this again in our lifetimes. As horrible as the economic downturn has been, it really is a crisis / opportunity point for the American left.
Ever since the financial sector bailout process started seven months ago, there has been quite a lot of talk about socialism. Over the past 30 days, Google News records 8,251 matches for "socialism" or "socialist" within American media outlets along. Most of this talk has been extremely naïve and uninformed. The most frequent abusers of the term, conservatives, have lobbed the charge around as though there was a switch governments flip in order to change from "capitalist" to "socialist." The general presumption seems to be that an economic system is either socialist or capitalist, and that the two systems are mutually exclusive.
This is, of course, hogwash. Every economic system in the modern world has elements that are both capitalist (private ownership and / or administration) and socialist (public ownership and / or administration). The two co-exist alongside each other, as they have done in every economic system since the beginning of time. Unless you want to make the postal service, police and fire departments, military, and education 100% private, then you are proposing a certain level of socialism. The fundamental ideological debate over economics is not whether the economy should be socialist or capitalist, but what proportion of it should be capitalist and what proportion should be socialist.
Currently, the best available projections for 2009 are that the United States will be 44.7% socialist, and 55.3% capitalist, for the year. This is determined by the following formula:
(total projected 2009 public expenditures minus intra-governmental transfers / projected 2009 Gross Domestic Project)
Now, one area where the conservatives are not wrong is that we are witnessing an increase in socialism in America. Last year, America was only 37.0% socialist, and 63.0% capitalist. From 2002-2007, the standard range was 35.3%-35.7%. In 2000, the year before Bush took over, the USA was only 33.0% socialist. Since the mid-1970's, public expenditure a as a percentage of GDP has consistently hovered in this 33%-36% range, no matter which parties controlled Congress and the White House, and no matter if there was split or single-party government. However, with the various government bailouts, the jobs / stimulus package, and President Obama's expanded budget, the last year has seen a break with a longstanding 65%-35% capitalist / socialist split in America. Currently, we are roughly a 55%-45% capitalist-socialist country, with future numbers probably settling around 60%-40% capitalist-socialist, as our various bailouts and wars (hopefully) wind down, and (hopefully) economic growth picks up again. (Yes, socialism can also be right-wing, even if it means war spending funneled to private contractors.)
Given that we are only talking about a temporary, 10% increase in socialism in America, and a long-term 5% increase, one might wonder what all the brouhaha about socialism is these days. However, if you consider that the entire range of mainstream socialist vs. capitalist debate in all wealthy democracies on Earth is over where whether we should be 29% socialist (South Korea), 61% socialist (France), or somewhere in between, a 10% shift in one year is a pretty big deal. As I show in the extended entry, the recent shift noticeably alters the location of the United States in the socialist-capitalist continuum relative to other major nations.
It has been so easy lately for anyone who disagrees with anyone else in politics to label them as radically as possible. In the past week or so, for instance, I've heard Obama, with his handling of the Economy and his goals for healthcare and education, called a "socialist", a "communist", a "fascist" and other things, some too nasty to mention.
Both parties (the major, parties, that is... the hundreds of mini-parties, those single-issue groupings of certain individuals, are prime offenders at name calling, but have relatively little effect) are guilty of this kind of stuff... and they do it to themselves as well as the other side (just look at what Republicans are doing to Michael Steele and what Paul Krugman is pumping out about Obama.)
At multiple book parties for my new book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, people have asked the question about how to frame the progressive message on the economy given Republican frothing at the mouth about Obama's socialism. What I've noted, though, is that Obama's message (which I'm delighted to say is continually rooted in America's history of struggle for big change, especially in the midst of crisis which is the same argument that I make in The Progressive Revolution) is working extremely well. David Sirota noted this during the closing weeks of the campaign, and it remains true today: in spite of all the Republican cries of socialism, Obama's message and policies remain consistently popular.
If having the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, investing in education and health care and green jobs and infrastructure, and more regulation and accountability for the book is socialism, people are saying, apparently socialism isn't so bad. As many writers and pollsters have documented, this notion that we are a center-right country is a dog that just doesn't hunt. That is especially true since the tectonic plate shift that I describe in The Progressive Revolution that happened in 2005- Katrina, the Social Security privatization fight, Terry Schiavo, Jack Abramoff, and the mismanagement of the Iraq War- consumed a strong and steady majority of Americans that Bush-style conservatism didn't work. And now with an economic crisis unmatched by any crisis in American history outside of the Great Depression, people are ready for big, progressive change the careful cautious Democrats in the U.S. Senate that I wrote about the other day better not stand in the way of real change, or history's tide will roll over them.
In the closing days of the 1880s, beset by far reaching societal change, the Indians of the American West embraced a messianic practice called the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance religion, put forth by a Paiute medicine man named Wovoka, foretold of the destruction of the existing world and its replacement with the old order where only the Indians would occupy the landscape. The buffalo would return in great numbers and those Indian warriors who had died fighting the white man would be resurrected. This new world order would be hastened by the performance of the Ghost Dance ritual and the wearing of shirts blessed to repel the bullets of the American Army.
Listening to the rhetoric flowing out of CPAC 2009 one could conclude that the Conservative Movement has embraced its own version of a 21st Century Ghost Dance, led by its own modern day Wovoka in the person of Rush Limbaugh. It is as if by reiterating ideology, invoking the memory of Reagan and maligning the Obama recovery effort as "socialist", that Conservatives will somehow forestall imminent political change. In an attempt to heighten alarm Limbaugh lays claim to the idea that life, liberty and freedom are under assault. He states that Barack Obama will eliminate capitalism and individual liberty as the cornerstone of American life. Limbaugh makes such a claim in spite of the historical fact that the government has been intimately involved in economic affairs since 1819 with no appreciable loss of personal liberty to date. Nonetheless Limbaugh has put the failure of the Obama recovery program at the top of his personal political agenda because he thinks that such failure will bring about a return to a glorious (imagined) past. Limbaugh defiantly rejects the 2008 election as proof positive that Americans want a change in direction because the electoral results don't square with his vision of America. All this from a man who, somewhere on the spectrum between ideological purist and buffoon, doesn't know the Declaration of Independence from the Constitution when it comes to a quote regarding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Somehow talk of "true patriotism" rings hollow coming from a man who had more draft deferments during the Vietnam War than some soldiers had combat action medals. As CPAC continued, Mike Huckabee claimed, "Lenin and Stalin would love the Obama program" leading one to believe that the former presidential candidate knows less about history than does Sarah Palin. Anyone who thinks that the Obama recovery plans bear any resemblance to Soviet economic polices of the last century is either irresponsibly playing with words for the sake of incitement or just lacks the background required to engage in intelligent political discourse.
Beyond Limbaugh and CPAC the hysteria over the "slide into socialism" continues unabated in conservative media. Harry R Jackson, Jr. intones that: "a war for the soul of the nation" is raging. Pat Buchanan declared the Obama budget a "declaration of war on the Right." The latest piece from Dick Morris is entitled "Waging War on Prosperity." Limbaugh's own brother David has gone so far as to say that media attacks leveled at Rush are really aimed at those who support him, the "true patriots" that oppose Obama's "Marxist agenda and Stalinist tactics." Newsmax suggests some on the Right may consider armed violent resistance to the Obama Administration, which to me represents a new high watermark in rightwing hysteria surpassing the previous one left behind by the Terri Schiavo case. The "patriot game" was of little use to Republicans in the last election cycle and except for the low- information voter should prove equally useless this time around.
Progressive political thinkers might ask themselves what intellectual ammunition would be of use in countering this 21st Century Ghost Dance. My suggestion is to start with facts. Socialism is defined as the "collective or government ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods." That definition encompasses the entirety of economic activity. While the present breakdown in the economy has necessitated a large degree of government involvement in economic affairs, nowhere is there any evidence that Barack Obama is advocating government oversight of economic activity beyond those sectors where the free market has failed. Ironically, it was House Republicans that advocated a partial socialization of banking in the financial bailout of 2008. How hypocritical to oppose the very ideas they once promoted. Having dispensed with the allegation that the Obama Administration aims to affect a wholesale socialization of the economy we can skip past the Stalinist / Leninist rhetoric altogether.
Conservative media is obsessed with the idea that Barack Obama wants to punish success and has declared a war on prosperity. For all of the Conservative rhetoric regarding government policy and the economy, it is an established fact that in the post World War II period the economy has generally done better under Democrats than Republicans. Democratic administrations have outperformed their Republican counterparts across the board on average in terms of annualized job creation, GDP and GDP per capita growth rates. Despite all of the talk of taxing the wealthy and its effect on the economy, under Democratic administrations the wealthiest have done almost as well as they have under Republicans. It is noteworthy that Barack Obama won the majority of those earning over $200,000.00 in spite of the fact that Republicans constantly warned voters of the prospect of higher taxes. While Conservatives bend over backwards in arguing for lower tax rates for the rich and businesses, they remain silent on the subject of tax fairness. In 1980 the amount of national wealth received by the top one percent of wage earners was eight percent of the total wealth created in the United States whereas in 2008 it was twenty six percent. Changes in tax laws since the Reagan era have led to the shifting of the national tax burden from wealth to labor resulting in the largest redistribution of wealth upwards since the 1920s. Likewise, the past eight years have seen the percentage of national wealth that accrues to the working American fall to the lowest percentage on record. Median family income, based on Census Bureau findings, actually declined between 2000 and 2007 when adjusted for inflation while at the same time productivity, profits and executive compensation registered strong gains. That said, what are the real arguments to be made for maintaining the status quo with regard to tax policy and the distribution of income as it relates to the economic well being of the people who actually go to work every day and create the goods and services of a modern economy? Somehow, Conservative thinking as it relates to tax policy and prosperity has either missed or ignored eighty percent of the population while obsessing on the well being of the business community and entrepreneurs. Owing to the fact that the "prosperity" of the past eight years was largely fueled by financial engineering, debt accumulation and the housing bubble rather than income growth, where in this time period can we find evidence of the validity of a conservative economic theory which promotes growth through lower taxes?
In their nostalgia for the Reagan era, Conservatives have adhered to an image of the man based on his rhetoric as opposed to his actual record in office. The federal government actually grew under Reagan as he added a new cabinet level department and various other executive level bureaus. While he argued the virtues of limited spending he embarked on a massive military buildup, much of it in excess of what the threat level of that time required. Large-scale military buildups are public spending just the way bridge and highway projects are, it's only the products that differ. Both ultimately aid overall economic activity. In spite of supposed strength of conservative economic theories, the recession of 1981-1982 was the worst downturn since the Great Depression, until today, with unemployment topping ten percent. While Reagan talked tough with the Soviets he reached out to them and successfully concluded an arms treaty. He was far more bipartisan than are the Republicans of today. He was largely silent on the issue of abortion.
While those in the pro-Obama mainstream media, along with Rahm Emanuel and his Democratic allies, will continue to publicly bait Limbaugh for their own obvious benefit, there is a growing chorus of concern among Republicans inside and outside of government as to how to defuse the extremists on the far right. Former Republican Congressmen Tom DeLay and Vin Weber have been quick to point out that Limbaugh is not the head of the GOP nor is he its spokesman. Former Republican Congressman and talk show host Joe Scarborough has pointed to a need for the GOP to formulate a constructive strategy for the future and to ignore Limbaugh altogether. Former RNCC Chairman Tom Cole of Oklahoma summed up the GOP's current predicament with the following observation: "The politics of the country are changing profoundly and rapidly, much as they did in 1932 and 1980." While Rush Limbaugh intones that Conservative principles are essentially unalterable and forever, moderate Republican observers will argue that those principals need to be modernized or else Republicans are looking at a future with their party in permanent minority status.
Limbaugh and his CPAC acolytes argue that "Americans are conservative by instinct", but empirically it is hard to make such an argument. A November 2008 poll by Pew Research would show that only 38 percent of Americans identify as conservatives. More importantly the most recent NYT/CBS tracking poll of political identification shows only 28 percent of Americans consider themselves Republican. On a county-by-county basis the 2008 presidential election reveals a significant shift towards the Democratic Party, even in many of the states that went for McCain. With the exception of an arc running roughly from Oklahoma through Arkansas, Tennessee and into Appalachia, most of the rest of the country shows an overall rise in the numbers of people who voted Democrat. Current opinion polls also show that in the face of stubborn opposition from the Right, Obama's overall approval ratings remain high. With a 60 percent favorable rating overall, the President does even better when polling becomes more specific. On topics like withdrawing from Iraq or whether the economic crisis is his fault or inherited, his ratings exceed 80 percent, whereas for Republicans 56 percent of respondents say they are playing politics rather than standing on principles. In terms of the direction the country, 41 percent say it is on the right track, up from 12 percent who felt that way in October of 2008. Currently, Congressional Republicans have an approval rating below that of their Democrat counterparts. Meanwhile among those below the age of 40, Mr. Limbaugh receives a paltry 11 percent approval rating. His audience and his appeal among independent voters is essentially nonexistent.
While this modern day Conservative Ghost Dance wends its way across the political landscape, its ultimate destination remains a mystery. Given the current political climate it does not seem that Rush Limbaugh, his acolytes and his defacto, if not unwilling, Republican allies will return to majority status or the seat of power anytime soon. While Conservatives are venerating an imagined past, the number of people identifying with the Republican Party or willing to vote for its program is shrinking. The GOP is seen more and more as the party of the South and one that is only gaining adherents among the less educated living in the most rural regions of the country. While the core beliefs and principles of the Right seem out of date or inapplicable in this current climate of worldwide economic crisis, there has to be more to the movement than the politics of obstruction. Absent a new message and a program that attracts independents, the only hope that Conservatives and Republicans have is to bank on Democratic failure, which is neither creative nor compelling in the eyes of the voters. Beyond this paucity of new ideas the more immediate concern is that Limbaugh, the Radical Right and the politics of obstruction will derail the GOP's electoral chances altogether in the next election cycle. After all 2010 will be here before we know it.
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