Socialism is not un-American

Let’s get something straight. Socialism is not un-American. It’s as old as the poor laws brought over from England and practiced in the original colonies.

We’re talking here about “democratic socialism,” not the state-mandated type of socialism or communism we know from totalitarian regimes like Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba or Chavez’s Venezuela. To identify democratic socialism as synonymous with this other type is fake news. Democratic socialism is the type that has historically developed in such countries as Canada, the United Kingdom and Sweden.

Democratic socialism has a long and glorious history in the United States. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Socialist Party of America was instrumental in securing workers’ rights to organize and strike, the eight-hour day and 40-hour week, a minimum wage, women’s right to vote and the graduated income tax. Socialists were also among those who advocated for racial equality and justice, called for an end to child labor, and supported universal health care, free education and job training, old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.

The New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in the 1930s (specifically, Social Security, public work projects and financial reforms) and the Great Society of President Lyndon Johnson’s administration in the 1960s (Medicare, Medicaid, Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts) built on and extended the social welfare programs promoted by the earlier socialists. These programs were not forced upon Americans by “big government.” They were implemented by elected officials carrying out the will of the people.

And that’s the difference between democratic socialism and totalitarian, state-directed socialism. Whether democratic socialism will thrive and advance in the United States will be determined by the voters.

I believe it will thrive and advance, necessarily so. When the top 1 percent of our population controls more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, when our middle class has virtually disappeared, when 80 percent of our workers live paycheck to paycheck, when one in three Americans have no retirement savings, when poverty and poor health persist at intolerable levels — one doesn’t have to be a genius to understand that a socioeconomic revolution is required, and soon.

If Eugene Debs, the great American who ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket in the early 1900s, were still around, I’d vote for him in a heartbeat. Since he is not, I’ll probably vote for a Democrat. For me to consider any Republican candidate, the party would have to demonstrate the “compassionate conservatism” that it once espoused but never embraced.

Robert Hamblin of Cape Girardeau is a retired English professor who taught at Southeast Missouri State University.