Pissing with Laughter: "We Are All Socialists Now," says Newsweek
Source: Obama Reboots CapitalismIn the 1930s socialists and communists both spoke of nationalizing all major industries and abolishing private markets and the wage system.
Today, it's impossible to find a left-leaning party anywhere that has such demands.
"We are all socialists now," says Newsweek.
"Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff," says Mike Huckabee. We are witnessing the Obama-era phenomenon of "European socialism transplanted to Washington," says Newt Gingrich.
What's striking is the absence of advocates of socialism, at least as the term was understood by those who carried that banner during the capitalist crisis of the 1930s.
Then, socialists and communists both spoke of nationalizing all major industries and abolishing private markets and the wage system. Today, it's impossible to find a left-leaning party anywhere that has such demands.
Within the confines of socialist history, this means that the perspective of Eduard Bernstein — the fin de siecle German socialist who argued that the struggle to humanize capitalism through the instruments of democratic government was everything, and that supplanting capitalism altogether was meaningless — has prevailed.
But in the United States, conservatives have never bashed socialism because its specter was actually stalking America.
Rather, they've wielded the cudgel against such progressive reforms as free universal education, the minimum wage or tighter financial regulations. The result:
We have the world's highest health care costs, nearly 50 million Americans have no coverage — but at least we don't have socialized medicine.
Give conservatives credit for their consistency: They attacked Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a socialist as they are now attacking Barack Obama, when in fact Obama, like Roosevelt, is engaged not in creating socialism but in rebooting a crashed capitalist system.
The spending in Obama's stimulus plan isn't a socialist takeover. It's the only way to inject money into a system in which private-sector investment, consumption and exports are locked down.
If Obama realizes his agenda, what emerges will be a more social, sustainable, competitive capitalism.
His more intellectually honest and sentient conservative critics don't accuse him of Leninism but of making our form of capitalism more like Europe's.
Laissez-faire American capitalism is about to be supplanted not by socialism but by a more regulated, viable capitalism.
For conservatives searching for the culprits behind this transformation: It was your own system.