I've been hearing a LOT about socialists.
In fact, I know people who voted solely out of fear of dangerous socialists who would destroy our country and make it just like Venezuela.
I'm a bit baffled at the reference to Venezuela.
And also baffled at the socialist accusations against obvious capitalists like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Socialism is one of those words that shifts and morphs, depending on who uses it and why.
Here's one generally accepted definition: "a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
By that definition, there are very few genuinely socialist nations. Cuba, China, Laos, Vietnam, and even those don't qualify as pure socialist nations. There are other countries with varying aspects of socialism along a continuum of cooperative production. Some mention socialism in their constitutions, some don't. Some have majority parties that identify themselves as socialist: Democratic Socialist, Christian Socialist, Labor parties, Green parties, Working Family Party.
They all seem to mean different things.
What does Venezuela have to do with it?
It's both sad and amusing to hear people say "you don't want that to happen to us!"
What is the "THAT"?
I've asked but am still not sure of the reply. Venezuela's is a familiar story about capitalism run amuck, over-dependence on extractive industry, various forms of corruption. It has little to tell us about socialism and almost no bearing on US politics. If that's really of interest, you can find a summary here.
More interesting to me is how we think about what we share.
Pennsylvania is a commonwealth, formed with reference to the ideals of government by the people for the common good. Penn's woods were blessed with more miles of streams and rivers than any other region in the country, all held in common, all used for the common good. Fueled by those waterways and abundant coal and timber, Pennsylvania became the greatest manufacturing state in the nation and held that title well into the 20th century.
Is it socialism to hold means of production and distribution in common? If so, PA was socialist from the start, with everyone dependent on those flowing waterways that fueled forges and mills, carried timber and food downstream and aided travel to central parts of the state.
We still share those waterways, kayaking, fishing, generating energy.
There are many other things we share. I'm thankful for many:
The US Postal Service.
Public libraries.
Public schools.
Public high schools were decried as a socialist endeavor when the idea spread in the early 1900s. In some sectors of conservative evangelicalism, that accusation resurfaced in the 1980s: public schools are apparently hotbeds of socialism.
I haven't seen that myself in my years of active volunteering in local schools, but I've been told by friends who would never enter a public school that they're godless places spewing socialism. Personally, I'm thankful for the great teachers my kids had in public school, thankful for my own public school education, thankful for dedicated teachers struggling now to educate safely in this strange pandemic time.
Would it be socialism to carry public education through the next level? Many countries have taken that step, arguing that a well-educated public is essential to good governance and economic stability. Since PA now spends more on incarceration than higher education, I think we'd be well-served to make college possible for kids from poor communities with no avenue out. Does that make me a socialist? I'll take the risk.
Roads.
Bridges.
Public parks.
The US was the first country to officially set aside wide tracts of land for public use. In some countries, communal lands have been used for hunting, gathering firewood. Capitalism in some places has decimated those public lands, allowing clearcutting of forests and criminalizing historic land use. Efforts to save public lands have often been led by socialist parties, insisting that common land be retained.
So -are Pennsylvania's vast tracts of state forest evidence of socialism?
If so, are our hunters and fishermen socialists?
I think about this when I kayak on Marsh Creek Lake. I love that that nearby, free-to-use state park is enjoyed by young and old, fishermen, boaters, picnicking families, a wonderful medley of languages exclaiming together over sunsets and bald eagles circling overhead.
Park users rarely worry about socialism. The socialism accusation seems most often triggered around the question of health care. As if there's something in scripture that ties health care to employment. As if a large percentage of US citizens don't already enjoy state-funded care.
National health insurance for all was first proposed by Teddy Roosevelt when he ran for president in 1912. Harry Truman fought for the idea throughout his presidency, arguing:
Healthy citizens constitute our greatest natural resource, and prudence as well as justice demands that we husband that resource. … as a nation we should not reserve good health and long productive life for the well-to-do, only, but should strive to make good health equally available to all citizens.The American Medical Association fought back, accusing Truman of socialism. In the first major advertising campaign of its kind, the AMA convinced the public that health insurance for all would destroy our freedom and lead us into communism.
Dwight Eisenhower ran in opposition to "socialized medicine," but also worried “Too many of our people live too far from adequate medical aid; too many of our people find the cost of adequate medical care too heavy.” His proposed solution was a form of subsidized insurance, very much like the current Affordable Care Act.
It would take a book to give the full history of the issue, but interesting to read the back and forth of accusations, propaganda, scrapped ideas, campaign rhetoric.
In 1965 Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law for Americans 65 and older, despite warnings that it opened the door to dangerous loss of freedoms. Ronald Reagan was widely quoted in his opposition to the program:
behind it will come other government programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day . . . we will wake to find that we have socialism.
I'll be 65 next month and looking forward to signing up for federally funded health care. I have many friends and relatives who reached that magic age with relief. I haven't seen them losing their freedoms. I'm not sure they'd call themselves socialists.
And I know many younger workers tied to jobs they'd like to leave because they fear the loss of heath care. I know many who fear loss of coverage of pre-existing conditions. I've seen the bind of friends struggling with mental illness, afraid to lose their jobs because they'd also lose their coverage. I've seen families lose loved ones who couldn't afford medical care and I've seen families lose their homes because the care they chose was more costly than they knew.
Most other nations provide universal health care for a fraction of the cost of our current multi-layered strategy. They cut out the middle layer of insurance, remove the frustration of insurance agents deciding what care we need. From every logical point I can see, universal care would be more accessible, less expensive and yield better results.
Loss of freedoms? Tel that to anyone struggling with insurance forms and medical bills while navigating serious illness.
There is no perfect economic structure. No perfect political system. Every human institution can fall prey to thugs, con artists, powerful, greedy people looking out for their own good.
But there will always be things we share.
And whatever the system, scripture is clear that nations, leaders, people themselves are responsible for how they treat each other. Any system that fails to care for widows and orphans, for strangers and workers, for the sick and oppressed will be held to account. The prophets make that emphatically clear.
There are books suggesting Jesus was a socialist.
There are others insisting he wasn't.
I stumbled today on a challenging essay in response to one of those books: Was Jesus a Socialist? by Lawrence Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education, a libertarian think tank.
Reviewer Dan Walden responds: "Was Jesus a Socialist? Well, he wasn't a libertarian," then goes on to explain that our modern understanding of individualism and property rights would have made no sense in Biblical times.
Jesus is not a modern person, and it is not immediately clear why it matters whether he subscribed to a modern political ideology.Walden explores and dismantles Reed's arguments, then concludes:
The response of Christians to the contemporary social order must necessarily look very different from our responses to previous ones: it must account for the particular evils of the present order and for our social capacity to rectify them.
Jesus was not a socialist. But socialists, I think, understand something about Jesus that libertarians, even Christian ones like Lawrence Reed, do not: that the world at which we aim, the kingdom whose coming Christ proclaimed, will not settle our debts and contracts but abolish them completely.
Our struggle is not to raise ourselves above our enemies, but to love them fully, because to abolish class means abolishing what makes them our enemies at all. This is a hard task, demanding of us a revolutionary discipline that puts the most hardened Leninist to shame; it is always easier to entertain fantasies of violent retribution in which those who oppressed us finally face the other end of the gun or the other side of a prison bar. But the world that we want to build, the society of love, calls us beyond these impulses. It demands that even rapacious billionaires not be sent to prison. It demands that the children of those billionaires go to good schools for free. It shames those impulses, which we often see as a desire for justice, because it shows us that justice demands not the reversal of exploitation but its end.
There's much to consider in that. And much to pray toward: a day when both capitalism and socialism are at an end, along with all forms of exploitation, and all forms of human need.
Until that day comes, my goal is to stand clear of labels that divide and distort, to serve my neighbors with love, not fear, and to enjoy as fully as I can all the good things we share.
 |
| Sunset over Marsh Creek Lake |
