The Red Menace

Rick Hertzberg has a great take on the whole bizarre socialism flap:

As a buzzword, “socialism” had mostly good connotations in most of the world for most of the twentieth century. That’s why the Nazis called themselves national socialists. That’s why the Bolsheviks called their regime the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, obliging the socialist and social democratic parties of Europe (and America, for what it was worth) to make rescuing the “good name” of socialism one of their central missions. Socialists—one thinks of men like George Orwell, Willy Brandt, and Aneurin Bevan—were among Communism’s most passionate and effective enemies.

The United States is a special case. There is a whole shelf of books on the question of why socialism never became a real mass movement here. For decades, the word served mainly as a cudgel with which conservative Republicans beat liberal Democrats about the head. When Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan accused John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson of socialism for advocating guaranteed health care for the aged and the poor, the implication was that Medicare and Medicaid would presage a Soviet America. Now that Communism has been defunct for nearly twenty years, though, the cry of socialism no longer packs its old punch. “At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives,” McCain said the other day—thereby suggesting that the dystopia he abhors is not some North Korean-style totalitarian ant heap but, rather, the gentle social democracies across the Atlantic, where, in return for higher taxes and without any diminution of civil liberty, people buy themselves excellent public education, anxiety-free health care, and decent public transportation.

The whole thing is, I think, totally meaningless as campaign rhetoric. But politics takes place on both mass and elite levels. And the socialism kick does illustrate something interesting about the divide among American political elites. To most liberal opinion leaders (including myself and, it seems, Hertzberg) the major Continental countries like France and Germany are models that have some admirable aspects along with some problems, and the smaller northern European countries like Denmark and the Netherlands are really admirable examples of a balance between individualism and dynamism on the one hand, and economic security and social equity on the other. “Socialism” and “social democracy” are not words we use or want to see used in mass politics because they’re not part of the American political vernacular, but the latter at least represents a reasonable aspiration.

Conservative elites, by contrast, are absolutely convinced that France and Germany are dystopian cesspools and that Scandinavia can no more exist than a round circle. If the government starts giving people health care and building trains, next thing you know we’ll all be . . . well, it’s not clear exactly what we’ll all be like. But it won’t be good!