As populist of the right
and left pull American political discourse away from a pragmatic center, we
are hearing warnings from each side that many on the opposing side trade in
ideas that are fundamentally un-American. Bernie Sanders nearly won the
Democratic Party nomination in 2016 while proudly proclaiming himself a
democratic socialist. He successfully tugged the base of the party to the left around
issues such as taxes, health care and access to higher education. President Trump
signaled in his State of the Union address that a creeping socialism is taking
over the Democratic Party and that such ideological thinking is un-American.
Already we see front-running Dems such as Elizabeth Warren proclaim that she is
a capitalist, and Kamala Harris declare that she is not a democratic socialist.
From the left many journalists
and activists have called President Trump a racist because of his vitriolic
rhetoric toward Latinos and Muslims on immigration issues and his reference to
Africa as “shithole countries.” And
recently two newly-elected Democratic congresswomen, Rashida
Tlaib of Michigan, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, boldly
asserted that the president is a racist. No elected official has yet called
Trump a fascist, but many voices, not all of them from the far left, have
started to do so. According to conventional wisdom, one of the ways that
America has been exceptional historically, is that we prefer pragmatism,
believing in what works in the everyday world, to abstract and un-American ideologies
like fascism and socialism. So hearing our president and leading contenders
from the other party be described in such extreme ideological terms is
distressing.
The United States is in a
period of crisis that is one of the most serious in our history. The twin
challenges of the browning of America and the hangover from the Great Recession
have shaken the post-Cold War political consensus and severely wounded the
establishment of both major parties who signed onto it. The combined pressures of populist forces
such as the Tea Party from the right and the Occupy Movement from left combined
to make 2016 a year for shaking up the political establishment. Both sides felt
the shock from the Recession and wanted to make corporate America more
accountable to the people. The culturally conservative sections of the right
were still also smarting from eight years of a Black president and fearful of
the oncoming minority majority. The populist left, mobilized by massive
pro-immigration rallies in 2006, the Black Lives Matter movement from 2014 and
the Standing Rock anti-pipeline movement until 2016, included the imminent
majority so feared on the right.
Both parties saw vigorous
populist challenges to the status quo in the 2016 primaries. Bernie Sanders
loudly proclaimed his socialism and nearly won the Democratic nomination.
Donald Trump, who I will say is a fascist,
did win the Republican nomination and the presidency. But what is socialism,
and what is fascism? And how un-American and dangerous are these ideologies?
Socialism is a system in
which the collective welfare is prioritized over the welfare and rights of
individuals. It has a rich and wide-ranging history. At one extreme is the
state socialism of the communist Soviet Union and Maoist China in which private
enterprise is eradicated and the state owns and controls the economy toward the
end of the redistribution of wealth. At the other is the social democracies that
emerged in Western Europe that created cradle to grave welfare states featuring
high levels of taxation, but what most Europeans would say is a higher quality
of life than ours. Private enterprise still exists in these systems, but is
much more highly regulated than in this country. Bernie Sanders’ version of
socialism is parallel to the Western European model, not Soviet-styled
communism.
Fascism is an extreme
form of nationalism. For fascists, the nation is composed of a mythical
“people” who are culturally homogeneous. Those who are not viewed as part of
the nation are scapegoated and can be targets of violence. Fascism first
appeared between the two world wars in places like Italy and Germany. In
differing ways each country was humiliated during World War One and faced
severe political crises thereafter. Mussolini and Hitler were able to harness
that collective trauma and turn it into a sense of victimhood. Behind the
charismatic leadership of those men political elites who were said to be
corrupt were targeted and ultimately pushed from power (again in very different
ways). Political institutions and established practices were also pushed aside
and the only relationship that came to matter was that between “the leader” and
“the people.” Fascism as a system of practices is made possible when the
political status quo is in crisis. Donald Trump is a fascist and a racist,
because he divides the American public between real Americans and the others.
From the day he announced his candidacy it has been clear that the others were
primarily people of color, though progressive white people are also not his
Americans. He is also fascist, because he trashes any traditional institution, practice
or politician that opposes him and he seeks to communicate directly, with his
people, the real Americans. And he implores them to listen only to him.
So Trump is a fascist and
America is in the midst of a political crisis. But unlike interwar Germany and
Italy, the United States has a set of political institutions featuring checks
and balances that have endured for over 200 years. They are democratic
institutions. So Trump may be a fascist, but the system is not. The push back
that he has received from the media, the courts and most recently, the mid-term
elections are proof of that.
Bernie Sanders is a
democratic socialist. America is also not a socialist system. Despite our
penchant for pragmatism and what works, most students of intellectual history
and political philosophy would say that our dominant ideology is liberalism: a
set of ideas advancing individual rights and equality of individuals before the
law. There are right and left versions of liberalism, which approximate the
principles behind our Republican and Democratic parties. The left version of
liberalism, or what philosophers call social liberalism, promotes the
regulatory welfare state and favors high taxation very much like democratic
socialism. In fact, in terms of real policy preferences the two are almost
indistinguishable. Then there is the fact that we have had a state that
regulates capitalism, offers minimum wages and the 40 hour work week and
delivers socialized K-12 education. Most American conservatives as well as
liberals support these policies today, but beginning in the 19th
century, socialist were some of the earliest proponents of these policies. So
we have long had elements of socialism embedded in our socio-economic system.
So I ask my fellow
Americans which ideology is most un-American, and which is most dangerous to
the stability of the country?
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