Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
[T]hat Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist is not news to Vermonters, who for decades have been electing him to office by wide margins. In the context of Vermont, Sanders’ socialism is not much different from the kind of mainstream 20th century Democratic politics that was forced into retreat by the laissez-faire Republicanism of Ronald Reagan and his increasingly radical successors.
As mayor, congressman and senator, Sanders’ recipe for success was simple: Take on the special interests in the defense of the common good.
In the context of today’s Republican politics, however, to label oneself a socialist is something else, inviting fear-mongering, name-calling and the willful distortion of history. It wasn’t so long ago that Democrats were afraid even to call themselves liberals; to be called a socialist would be even more damaging — tarred as a communist, a dupe, a weirdo, a subversive — or worst of all, un-American. In the 20th century, communists and socialists were jailed, deported, blacklisted and put to death.
Today’s democratic socialism is far more benign than the radicalism of Emma Goldman, Big Bill Heywood or Eugene Debs. Sanders often points to Scandinavia. Sweden, which is one of the most prosperous and happy places on earth, has long practiced a form of socialism characterized by democratic politics, a generous social safety net, high taxes and a prosperous economy. Other prosperous democratic allies have venerable traditions of socialism in one form or another, including Britain and France. It is a label that Democrats of the Sanders variety feel far less compelled to flee from.
That hasn’t stopped the Republicans from seeking to paint the most exaggerated picture of what socialism means, portraying Democrats candidates as dangerously alien. Still, the battle over terminology is indicative of actual differences between Democrats of the left and the center. Thus, voters will consider how fully the candidates embrace “Medicare for All” or the Green New Deal. Meanwhile, moderate voters and their preferred candidates cite pragmatic reasons for eschewing the socialist label and pursuing a more incremental approach to policy.
One way for Democrats to protect themselves from the deeply ingrained American fear of socialism is not to get hung up on labels. For one thing, they need not call themselves socialists at all, democratic or otherwise. No one, not even Sanders, is proposing to resurrect the old socialist platform — no one wants to nationalize the banks or seize the means of production. Plenty of Democrats want to crack down on the banks, the tech companies, the oil companies, the drug companies and others, but they propose doing so for the same reason that Franklin Roosevelt pursued an activist progressive agenda: to save capitalism from itself.
What most Democrats favor might as well be called democratic capitalism, and one Democratic House member has already embraced that term.
Rep. Stephanie Murphy came to the United States after her family fled Vietnam, and she’s not inclined toward a sentimental view of socialism. “This term carries historical baggage that can evoke painful feelings in Americans whose families experienced communism or socialism in its darkest form,” she wrote in The Washington Post. “It’s not easy for me to explain to my Florida constituents who escaped Fidel Castro’s Cuba or Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela that the socialism proposed by several of my colleagues is different than the socialism they endured.”
Her version of democratic capitalism emphasizes both parts of the phrase. She does not reject the dynamism of capitalism, but she wants to make it democratic. “The best way to blunt the appeal of socialism in the United States is to improve capitalism so it works better for everyone,” she wrote. Franklin Roosevelt might have said the same thing.
A more progressive version of the same idea appeared in a recent opinion piece by Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University. Stiglitz pointed out that 90% of American workers have experienced stagnant wages in the last 30 years, which he said is not surprising in a nation with the highest economic inequality and the lowest level of social mobility of all the advanced nations.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, and his solution is what he called “progressive capitalism.”
Stiglitz pointed to the regulatory reforms of the Reagan era, which were supposed to energize the economy by reducing government constraints. Instead, he said, the opposite happened, and growth slowed.
“One can get rich either by adding to the nation’s economic pie or by grabbing a larger share of the pie by exploiting others,” he said. The reforms of the past 30 years have aided and abetted the grabbing.
Politics has worsened the situation. “Markets don’t exist in a vacuum; they have to be structured by rules and regulations,” he wrote. Deregulation of the banking sector enabled massive exploitation and economic catastrophe. Some people got rich during and after the Great Recession, but millions of people lost their houses and their jobs.
If we had maintained constraints on exploitation, we could have averted the recession and other crises, such as the opioid epidemic, he wrote. “If we had done more to blunt the power of oligopolies and strength the power of workers, and if we had held our banks accountable, the sense of powerlessness might not be so pervasive and Americans might have greater trust in our institutions.”
Progressive capitalism fortifies the public sector, creating public options, greater competition in the marketplace and lower prices. It serves the people. It seeks to constrain what Stiglitz called the “rampant dishonesty” of Wells Fargo, Volkswagen and the Sackler family, who lied about the opioids they were selling. Capitalism unconstrained is not about wealth creation, but wealth grabbing, according to Stiglitz.
Capitalism exists in many forms — from the gangster capitalism of Russia to the dictatorial capitalism of China, to the relatively orderly and managed capitalism of Western Europe. America has a kind of free-wheeling capitalism whose failures have become all too visible, given the rampant inequality and stagnation of the past few decades.
“Progressive capitalism,” Stieglitz wrote, “is based on a new social contract between voters and elected officials, between workers and corporations, between rich and poor, and between those with jobs and those who are un- or underemployed.”
What American capitalism needs is a dose of democracy — making the system work, not for the few with the means and the shamelessness to grab what they can, but for the larger good, so that the future is a welcoming place for new generations seeking education, opportunity and renewed hope.
