In his State of the Union speech, Donald Trump resurrected an old menace -- socialism:
“Here in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” the president said, adding, “Tonight, we resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”
And he points to Venezuela as the bogeyman, But what, Paul Krugman asks, do conservatives mean when they use the word "socialism?"
Sometimes it means any kind of economic liberalism. Thus after the SOTU, Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, lauded the Trump economy and declared that “we’re not going back to socialism” — i.e., apparently America itself was a socialist hellhole as recently as 2016. Who knew?
Other times, however, it means Soviet-style central planning, or Venezuela-style nationalization of industry, never mind the reality that there is essentially nobody in American political life who advocates such things.
The trick — and “trick” is the right word — involves shuttling between these utterly different meanings, and hoping that people don’t notice. You say you want free college tuition? Think of all the people who died in the Ukraine famine! And no, this isn’t a caricature: Read the strange, smarmy report on socialism that Trump’s economists released last fall; that’s pretty much how its argument goes.
Trump and his acolytes are operating from their standard playbook. They're blowing smoke. But, when you cut through the smoke, what's really going on?
Some progressive U.S. politicians now describe themselves as socialists, and a significant number of voters, including a majority of voters under 30, say they approve of socialism. But neither the politicians nor the voters are clamoring for government seizure of the means of production. Instead, they’ve taken on board conservative rhetoric that describes anything that tempers the excesses of a market economy as socialism, and in effect said, “Well, in that case I’m a socialist.”
What Americans who support “socialism” actually want is what the rest of the world calls social democracy: A market economy, but with extreme hardship limited by a strong social safety net and extreme inequality limited by progressive taxation. They want us to look like Denmark or Norway, not Venezuela.
And in case you haven’t been there, the Nordic countries are not, in fact, hellholes. They have somewhat lower G.D.P. per capita than we do, but that’s largely because they take more vacations. Compared with America, they have higher life expectancy, much less poverty and significantly higher overall life satisfaction. Oh, and they have high levels of entrepreneurship — because people are more willing to take the risk of starting a business when they know that they won’t lose their health care or plunge into abject poverty if they fail.
Trump’s economists clearly had a hard time fitting the reality of Nordic societies into their anti-socialist manifesto. In some places they say that the Nordics aren’t really socialist; in others they try desperately to show that despite appearances, Danes and Swedes are suffering — for example, it’s expensive for them to operate a pickup truck. I am not making this up.
Trumpian economists have a hard time dealing with facts. Maybe they're not really economists.
Image: Quillette
10 comments:
Reminds me of a former resident of 24 Sussex Drive who also claimed to be an economist but really wasn't anything more than a political hack.
Cap
When you take a look at Global standard of living and Quality of life statistics it seems that all of the leading countries, Canada being one, seem to share a common denominator. Socialism, for lack of a better word, seems to be norm in a modern day compassionate society.
You're comment is right on target, Cap. Stephen Harper also had a hard time dealing with facts.
Exactly, zoombats. What we call socialism these days is actually social democracy.
Too many Americans are too easily wound up by a word, Owen. I wonder what they think police and fire departments are, expressions of free enterprise?
These days, Lorne, public service is an abomination -- particularly if you have to pay for it.
The Americans have always been told that Socialism = Communism. One would think that Dump would have no problem with that has he loves his Putin. Strange days, indeed, Moma!
Givien his Russian connections, you'd expect Trump to tout socialism, Mac. But he's a roiling cauldron of illogic and contradictions. So no one shuld be suprised by his huffery and puffery.
I am constantly amazed at the average American's appetite for myths. Much, if not most, of their national story is either false or mythologized.
Two, extremely entertaining books that bring home this reality are Chuck Thompson's, "Better Off Without 'Em," and Louisiana State prof. Nancy Isenberg's, "White Trash." I'm sure you can find them in your library and I commend them both to you. Thompson reveals what in reality are two countries struggling, without a lot of success, to live within the body of one nation. Isenberg explores America's white trash, the source of cheap labour for more than a century until they were displaced by slavery in the 18th century. They weren't quite as cheap to use as enslaved Africans.
Affluent Americans, i.e. the Founding Fathers, essentially outsourced the white trash jobs much as affluent Americans and the corporations they ran decimated the middle class by outsourcing manufacturing jobs starting in the Reagan era. Isenberg traces how this permanent underclass migrated and evolved until they rallied as a political force that was integral to Trump's victory.
Along the way, Americans have been fed a diet rich in horseshit - the land of opportunity, the self-made man, Christ and capitalism, American exceptionalism, patriotism and xenophobia - each, by degree, undermining the underclass to the point where they'll proudly vote against their interest, generation after generation. It takes time to reduce a population to that level of gullibility and they've done a masterful job of it.
All the time they've got this underclass to believe that "America is a land of opportunity." That kind of fraud is at the heart of the nation, Mound.
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