Because of things I have done on behalf of justice to the workingman, I have often been called a Socialist. Usually I have not taken the trouble even to notice the epithet. I am not afraid of names, and I am not one of those who fear to do what is right because some one else will confound me with partisans with whose principles I am not in accord. Moreover, I know that many American Socialists are high-minded and honorable citizens, who in reality are merely radical social reformers. They are oppressed by the brutalities and industrial injustices which we see everywhere about us. When I recall how often I have seen Socialists and ardent non-Socialists working side by side for some specific measure of social or industrial reform, and how I have found opposed to them on the side of privilege many shrill reactionaries who insist on calling all reformers Socialists, I refuse to be panic-stricken by having this title mistakenly applied to me.
Oh, those wacky Socialist Republicans who – you know, weren’t.
The term “socialist” has been bandied about like the way “tubular” was used when I was in high school – only “tubular” meant “awesome”, which meant “cool”, while when it’s said by Republicans, “socialist” refers to “person who is going to take all of your money, rape your children, and force you to watch ‘Two and a Half Men’.”
For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.
Right now, McCain’s stuck in the “throw the kitchen sink” moment of the political campaign – and much like Senator Clinton, it’s getting the same result: Obama is still ahead nearly every poll.
The question is: is it working? Is any of it working? Again, by all of the polls so far – no.
Why?
Senator Obama and Senator McCain has been running for almost 2 years now, and people have heard their plans. They’ve heard Obama repeat a bajillion times “I’m not going to raise the taxes of anyone who makes less than $250,000 a year, and I’m going to raise taxes on the 5% of the country that makes more than $250,000 a year.” Over and over and over again. Three debates where he said the same thing.
So does Senator McCain really think that with 14 days left to go, all he has to do is say “Ignore everything you’ve seen, heard, or read about Senator Obama – he’s really a terrorist palling socialist who wants to take all of your money after all”? Evidently, he does – and if by appealing to the populist vote of the Joe the Plumbers out there, that’s what he’ll do.
Wait – I thought only socialists tried to whip up the populist vote. Wait a second….
First, we selected a cadre of crusty punks from the streets of Seattle, stripped off their Che T-shirts, suited them up in Armanis and wingtips and introduced them to the concepts of derivatives and dental floss. Then we shipped them to Wall Street with firm instructions: Make as much money as you can, as fast as you can, and as soon as the money starts rolling in, send it out to make more money by whatever dodgy means you can find–subprime loans, credit default swaps, pyramid schemes–anything goes. And oh yes: Spend your own earnings in the most flamboyantly gross ways you can think of–$10,000 martinis, fountains of champagne–so as to fan the flames of class resentment.
My goodness – and with the $700 billion bailout, it looks like they’re plan may be succeeding. Truly, socialists are scarier than we ever knew.
OpenLeft has an article that introduces the Republican socialists of America who used the power of “redistribution” to alter the balance of wealth in the country, like Theodore Roosevelt: