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Interesting read.
If Obama is a socialist, what was FDR?
Discuss away!
If Obama is a socialist, what was FDR?
TAMPA - The accusations come fast and furious on Web sites and talk radio: President Barack Obama is a socialist, a communist.
Is he? Is his health care proposal socialist?
"Yes. Next question," said Michael Steele, chairman of the national Republican Party, speaking to reporters in Washington on Monday.
"He has surrounded himself with people that have been for the redistribution of wealth. That's part of the communist mindset," said Ted Webb, a rightist Tampa radio commentator.
"'Communist' is not the correct word, and 'socialist' is debatable - the correct word is 'Marxist,'" said Rick Klepal, a Tampa commercial investment manager with an interest in politics.
If Obama is a socialist, there may be a lot of other political leaders in U.S. history who were, too, according to academics who study American history and politics.
The foremost candidate probably would be Franklin D. Roosevelt, several said.
Maybe Lyndon Johnson. John Kennedy? Thomas Jefferson? Bob Dole?
"The problem from the get-go is there are academic notions of what socialism is and there are political notions, which vary with the political culture," said Scott Paine, a Democrat and a political scientist at the University of Tampa.
The accusation of socialism, communism or generally destroying the American way of life tends to pop up whenever political leaders advocate ground-breaking legislation or government initiatives, said Richard Conley of the University of Florida.
"The American system is calibrated toward incremental change, not large-scale change," said Conley, a Republican who specializes in studying the presidency and says he's "on the conservative side of the spectrum and no big fan of Obama."
'Red Roosevelt'
In modern history, no president has been so excoriated as a socialist, communist and traitor to the American system than Roosevelt. His New Deal introduced half a dozen new types of government regulation and income redistribution.
In the 1930s, "the idea that the federal government would become involved not only in the economy but in social affairs was just unthinkable to many," Conley said. "It didn't represent what the U.S. was like until that point."
Today, some of those programs are among the nation's most widely accepted and popular - Social Security, mandatory bank-deposit insurance and regulation of securities sales.
But at the time, "the critics went berserk," said John Belohlavek, a political historian at the University of South Florida and a Democrat.
"They called him 'Red Roosevelt.' They said, 'This is communist Russia, the government taking over.'"
Father Charles Coughlin, a popular radio evangelist of the time with a populist, anti-Semitic philosophy, began as a Roosevelt backer but turned bitterly against him.
Coughlin, who combined the religious and political influence of Billy Graham and Rush Limbaugh, called Roosevelt "a Communist in the chair once occupied by Washington" and "anti-God," and said the New Deal was mired "in the Red mud of Soviet communism."
Republican opposition to Social Security didn't completely fade until the 1960s, Belohlavek said.
Other programs that drew fire against Roosevelt - welfare and agricultural subsidies, for example - have remained controversial but are not viewed as "socialism."
Roosevelt's Agricultural Adjustment Act, the beginning of farm subsidies, inspired some of the sharpest criticism. But conservative Republicans from wheat and corn states, including former senator and presidential contender Bob Dole of Kansas, fight for the subsidies.
Dole was also one of the main architects of the 1983 Social Security rescue plan, which dramatically increased taxes to save the income redistribution program.
When then-President Lyndon Johnson proposed a Medicare program, it drew the same criticisms as Obama's plan, Belohlavek said.
"It was called 'outrageous,' 'socialized medicine' - senior citizens would be mistreated and maltreated and wouldn't be able to choose their doctors. It was incredibly controversial."
Today, "not that it isn't flawed, but I can't imagine anybody arguing that we should give it up," Belohlavek said.
FDR's New Deal was just as much an experiment as critics say Obama's plan is, Conley said.
"In hindsight, we stopped the run on banks, got seniors Social Security so they didn't become paupers," he said. "But from the vantage point of the 1930s, the outcome was anything but certain."
Conley said a proposal for national regulation of health care takes government activism into a more intimate and controversial arena.
"It's one thing to regulate the fat cats on Wall Street, but very different to start talking about regulating decisions you make with your family, your spiritual adviser or your doctor," he said.
"That's part of the president's problem right now."
U.S. political culture
Debating whether Obama - or Roosevelt or Johnson - is a socialist is meaningless, Paine said.
"It's not about the definition of the word; it's about the connotation of the word in our political culture," he said.
In general, "socialism" means controlling production and distribution of goods and services to make the benefits less dependent on ability to pay for them, Paine said.
Depending on how you interpret that, a public school system, a graduated income tax, or even Tampa police service could be "socialist," he said.
Public schools - begun by the "common school" movement of the 18th century and led by Jefferson before the term "socialism" was coined - are available at no charge and paid for by property taxes based on the value of an individual's assets. Sso is police protection.
Income tax takes a greater percentage from the rich than the poor.
"Any system that provides services to people who can't pay, or who pay less than it costs, and the subsidy comes from people who can afford to pay more, could be considered socialist," Paine said.
But most of those who criticize Obama's plan aren't thinking about that academic definition. "A socialist is someone that believes that the state should tell you how to live, what kind of insurance you should have, what kind of car you should drive," Webb said.
Klepal said socialism is "when the government seeks to control the economy by controlling methods of production."
He said health care differs from other government programs that redistribute money or regulate economic activity.
"It's life and death. ... I don't want to have the federal government in that process."
But if socialism means placing the good of society ahead of the good of the individual, there could be few better formulations than Kennedy's:
"Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."
Discuss away!
if I have to pay more for government-funded programs that costs more than private. This is America. What's unique about it is PRIVATIZATION. we pay for tax that funds library, police, and road. It does not make any sense to me to pay for tax if we are not allowed or cannot use that library, police, and road. It does not make any sense to me either when paying tax for police if it costs more than having your own bodyguards.
Corporate socialism, you say? That's Obama... with GM under 60% government ownership. None of corporate-government ownership occurred under Bush.