This website and this blog are dedicated to those interested in basic political questions and more especially in questions about the nature of our economic system. I recently published a book entitled Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline and the Attempted Revival in the United States, which addressed the economic issues exhaustively.
In the book I speak of President Obama as a voice for socialism. Many have not been aware of his family heritage, his boyhood mentors, his college training and interests, and his brief professional life as a community organizer (preparing communities for socialism). In all those things he was well schooled in socialism and trained to be an advocate. Aside from his public political persona, he would doubtless confirm that he is at heart a socialist. I have on occasion referred to him as a “stealth socialist,” since during the campaign he did not reveal his preferences and ideological bent, desiring to appear for political purposes as a rather ordinary, old-fashioned progressive.
A word needs to be said about Obama’s performance as president. Some analysts have reviewed his record in office and concluded that he was not much of a socialist, since he accomplished few long-term socialist goals. One must remember that the country was already quite divided as socialist sentiment became more and more prominent in the Democratic Party. Legislative gridlock was well in place and the constitution’s mandate for a division of powers placed constraints on the judicial branch, in spite of strong “progressive” representation. Congress was starkly divided, hardly in a position to legislate the extreme left agenda with which President Obama had long since been indoctrinated. But he did make it clear that his objective was fundamentally to transform our system. He took to his pen and his telephone to implement his socialist preferences so far as possible through executive orders. Finally, socialist initiatives would have emphasized greater control over the economy rather than Obama’s diversion into divisive integration and immigration issues, but Obama left the economy to his regulators in government agencies and after the failure of the huge and useless stimulus package, neither he nor other democrats had any idea what in the world should be done about the stuttering and sputtering economy. Not that the president really minded the lack of economic growth, justice, or success of the economy. He was more concerned with strangling large sectors of the economy to reduce it’s “carbon footprint” on the world stage. A continuation of such policies would have truly required a magic wand to have brought back economic growth.
Thus, Obama’s socialism was mixed with legislative constraints and diverted objectives that kept him from focusing single-heartedly on pure and fundamental socialist policies. Finally, a preference for golf and extensive vacationing kept him from being the driven and committed socialist that would have been an even greater devastation for our country.
Many Americans, especially those closer to my advanced age, would consider the socialist label as a negative thing, perhaps an outright insult. But to many, especially younger Americans, socialism has recently lost its traditional stigma. Europeans have long considered socialism a positive. So when I use the term “socialist” I am not doing so in order to insult anyone. I am happy to insult and denigrate most socialist policies, since I have made a study of those over a whole career as a systems economist. But socialists are usually people with a strong emotional attachment to the goals of eliminating poverty and achieving social equality. Those ideals appeal to most of us, although there are strong differences among us as to how they could or should be achieved.
We saw vivid evidence in the last presidential campaign of how many young people enthusiastically followed Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist.” Those who follow politics at all would have known by the time that President Obama was running for reelection that he favored socialistic income redistribution, solution of major economic problems by government intervention and heavy governmental regulation of the private sector. In other words, by his social policy predilections it is clear that he is a socialist. For electoral purposes, of course, he wished simply to appear “liberal.”
Speaking of socialism or of socialists is appropriate in contemporary America, and it is not to be done with the disdain that might have seeped into the conversation at an earlier period in our history. We need a dialog about the subject, as is apparent in my book. You can find on the pages of this site some basic information about Socialism, and confirm that after a long career of teaching and researching comparative economics I favor market solutions to our economic problems. I started out as a democrat when liberals merely believed in a basic safety net and in Keynesian economics. But as the democrats grew increasingly radical I could not obstinately follow simply because I had always been a democrat. I had come strongly to believe that Adam Smith got it right and that Karl Marx was decidedly a dealer in flawed and specious principles of economics.
Incidentally, I also believe that an economic system should provide a good life for all our country’s citizens. I also share the religious values of many Americans who believe that poverty should be eradicated. That won’t happen through socialism in spite of its admirable economic objectives as I show in my book. But the well-being of all the planet’s inhabitants should be pursued because our universal creator taught that it should be so.