Editor’s note: This commentary is by Paula Schramm, of Enosburg Falls, who is retired and likes to visit the Statehouse to support things like universal health care.
[R]ecently, my local newspaper ran an op-ed cartoon that got me to fulminating. The cartoon pictured an eagle with “Freedom” printed on its breast, an angry, perplexed look in its eyes, and some fleas or mosquitoes overhead, a line of which have landed on the eagle’s back, and seem to be feeding. Each of these has a letter on its body, spelling out “Socialism” in neat, marching order. The cartoon’s caption beneath it says in italic script, “How Democratic Socialism Really Works.”
The trouble I had with this conceit is with the word “freedom” being placed on the bird, while at the same time “socialism” is depicted as parasitizing the bird. This cartoonist has completely misunderstood democratic socialism. In my view, this bird would not have the word “freedom” on it if it were not for democratic socialism. While this might seem laughable it is true. Democratic socialism is the philosophy, the basic theory, that a democracy is no real democracy if that democracy is applied to just the few at the top of the economic strata.
Democratic socialism realizes that people are not free when they are stressed to death working two or three jobs, like so many of us do in Vermont, and living from paycheck to paycheck. Our Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, whose democratic socialistic stance we’ve come to know so well over the decades, once described what Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw when he looked out over the American landscape at his inaugural address in 1937: “He saw tens of millions of its citizens denied the basic necessities of life. He saw millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hung over them day by day. He saw millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children….”
Roosevelt acted against the ruling oligarchs of his day, the incredibly rich of the “gilded era.” His democratic socialistic New Deal and its Social Security allows elderly citizens to be a part of the freedom of democracy. It works with market economies, not against them, to reward the producers of the goods as well as the owners of capital, and that is what puts the word “freedom” on that eagle. Those bugs on the eagle’s back with socialism on them, should instead have the word “oligarchy” or something similar. That is what is sucking the lifeblood out of the eagle, and holding that eagle down.
The democratic socialism being espoused is none other than those popular programs that we know and count on, like Social Security, Medicare, veterans health care, schools, etc., including what used to be, back in my youth, the free tuition offered by the state college system.
The democratic socialism being espoused is none other than those popular programs that we know and count on, like Social Security, Medicare, veterans health care, schools, etc., including what used to be, back in my youth, the free tuition offered by the state college system.
I mention Sen. Sanders only because he is probably the only politician in this day and age who dares to call himself a “democratic socialist.” My favorite lefty philosopher/scientist/writer Noam Chomsky, has called Sanders a good “New Dealer,” whose beliefs go back to FDR’s New Deal programs to pull people out of the devastation of the Great Depression, and even to that good Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, with his “trust-buster” efforts. This way of looking at the economy was so mainstream that good, moderate Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose military leadership got us through World War II in Europe, stated that anyone was against the New Deal shouldn’t be in politics. And good old Ike was the prescient wise man who warned us in 1959 to beware of the power of the “military-industrial complex” … what we can now recognize as a global corporate elite that has taken over so much power that they are in many ways running the country.
Even with Ike’s top tax rates of 90 percent, and even when dropped to 65 percent during JFK’s presidency, we had a booming economy, and people were able to afford the basics of life, own a house and send their kids to college, often on the income of just one working member of the home. An economy creating a large middle class that had money to spend — that was the “job creator” in the 1950s and ’60s.
Radical right-wing ideology has taken us so far to the right that we are all trained to regard what used to be mainstream as something to fear and loathe. But look at who has been benefitting from this transition: not the shrinking middle class, and not the struggling working poor, and not the destitute who have lost their homes and jobs. It’s the very wealthy who see almost all the benefit from our “rigged” systems, while the rest of us tread water.
Let’s work to keep and strengthen the kind of democratic socialism that benefits all of us, and creates an economy where needs are met and people can be happy. (Just look at the general prosperity, entrepreneurial vigor and “happiness quotient” of those Scandinavian countries that we seem hold in such low regard !)
In a more accurate, realistic cartoon the eagle marked “freedom” stands on its sturdy nest of “socialist values,” giving it strong protection against any marauding “capitalist vultures”!
