Adventures in Late-Stage Capitalism #3: Red-Baiting in the 21st Century

In my previous post, I discussed Bernie Sanders' June 12th speech about democratic socialism as the guiding philosophy of his political career. The response to Bernie's speech from his more conservative rivals for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination was predictable. From Brian Slodysko of the Associated Press:

Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado, "said Sanders was "wrong" to call for policies such as "Medicare for All" that would dramatically increase public spending and government involvement in Americans’ daily lives. Hickenlooper called for less expansive changes to the "regulated capitalism that has guided this country for over 200 years."

"Democrats must say loudly and clearly that we are not socialists. If we do not, we will end up helping to reelect the worst president in the country’s history," he said in Washington. "Socialism is the most efficient attack line Republicans can use against Democrats as long as (President Donald) Trump is at the top of the ticket.""

Hickenlooper's attack seems disingenuous since he, like Sanders is calling for Medicare to be expanded. To be fair, he's just doing what rivals for the Presidential nomination who are trailing in the polls always do: make headlines by attacking the front-runners. Putting those things aside, let's unpack the other reasons Hickenlooper is attacking Sanders and democratic socialism.

1. "(R)egulated capitalism... has guided this country for over 200 years". True. And in 1860, slavery had guided European settlement in North America for longer than that. Just because a country has been doing a thing for a long time doesn't necessarily mean that thing is good. Once upon a time, one could make the argument that American-style capitalism had created the highest standard of living in the world. But that's no longer true; as we reviewed in the first part of this series, today the US has a quality of life substantially below that of other leading industrialized countries. The "we've always done it that way" argument for American capitalism is part of the idea of "American exceptionalism", a philosophy that suggests among other things that laissez-faire economics are part of what America has to give to a backward world. More on that later.

2. "Socialism is the most efficient attack line Republicans can use against Democrats".
Possibly that's true; time will tell. Republicans are in fact churning out a lot of propaganda demonizing Democrats as socialist. They're so in love with the idea, they this attack use for things that have nothing to do with socialism. For example, Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell recently called the Democratic party movement to make Puerto Rico a state, "full-bore socialism", which is a line of logic I can't follow.

Red-baiting is the act of attacking or persecuting a person or idea as a Communist or as communistic. Red-baiting has been used by the right in America for more than a century to attack anything even vaguely leftist or collectivist or anything done by Democrats really as leading us on the path to an autocratic, dystopian nightmare. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, during the first Red Scare, US Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up, jailed, or deported thousands of suspected radicals, stoking fear that they were trying to import Communism (or anarchism) to the United States.

Red-baiting in the US reached its pinnacle during the 1940s and 50s when, (from Peter Dreier of The Nation), "another wave of hysteria swept the country during the Cold War, when politicians like Martin Dies, Joseph McCarthy, and Richard Nixon engineered witch hunts to identify and blacklist progressives and radicals in government, schools and universities, Hollywood, labor unions, and the media, alleging that Communists were infiltrating key institutions in order to undermine the American way of life. (McCarthy’s top witch-hunting assistant was Roy Cohn, who would later become Trump’s attorney and political mentor.) Anyone who questioned the nuclear-arms race, supported racial integration, or called for higher taxes on the rich could be branded an anti-American Communist. Not even Martin Luther King Jr. was immune."

Red-baiting and "American exceptionalism" are the reasons why Americans didn't start enjoying the benefits of single-payer health care decades ago. In the 1940s, Republican Governor of California Earl Warren introduced a single-payer plan for the state which initially enjoyed tremendous support but was done in by an advertising campaign which suggested, "We have enough regimentation in this country now. Certainly we don't want to be forced to go to "A State doctor" or pay for such a doctor whether we use him or not."

President Franklin Roosevelt had heard the same kind of arguments in attacks on the New Deal a few years earlier. In response he said, "A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it ‘Fascism’, sometimes ‘Communism’, sometimes ‘Regimentation’, sometimes ‘Socialism’. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical."

So it goes with the American right-wing, arguing the same thing into a second century:
1. Liberals want to do a thing.
2. That thing is something that socialists and communists support.
3. Socialist and communist countries are bad places to live.
4. So the thing liberals want must be bad by definition, and if we tried that thing, America would turn into a failed state.

Example, here's an excerpt from a 2018 letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times:
"How can we guarantee that a democratic socialist takeover of the Democratic Party will not descend into the same chaos we see currently in "socialist" countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua? How can we be sure that the rhetoric of class antagonism will not devolve into outright class hatred? Or that "Medicare For All" won’t result, as it has in Venezuela, in hospitals that can’t even provide bedsheets?"

I hear this exact argument all the time on social media: Expanding the highly popular and successful Medicare program to more people will transform American into a communist banana republic dictatorship. Never mind that every developed nation in the world has socialized medicine. Never mind that the United States already has socialized the military, police, fire departments, highways, education and dozens of other public services and yet somehow has avoided turning into North Korea.

In response to the L.A. Times letter cited above, another reader sent this response to the Editor:
"Why do people so often cite the failures of democratic socialism by cherry picking their examples? Why not cite Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, Japan, Australia, Italy, Canada, Norway, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Belgium, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland or the Netherlands — all countries that have successfully achieved a balance between capitalism and socialism? No country is perfect, but citing the worst examples does not move the conversation forward in any meaningful way."

An excellent summary. Next time I'll comment on what actually goes on in those scary "socialist" countries.

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Adventures in Late-Stage Capitalism #1: Juicero Versus the Working Poor

Welcome to a new series on politics and economy in America. Today we'll begin discussing the big questions: Can our dysfunctional society survive? Are jobs disappearing? Is American capitalism going to be replaced with something else? If so, what might come next?

As a brief introduction, I'd like to ruminate on two anecdotes that I think shed light on what's gone wrong in this country.

I. Juicero!
Like juice? Well, you could squeeze packets of fresh juice into a glass. Or, thanks to the Juicero company, you could spend $700 for a machine to squeeze the packets, somewhat more slowly than you could squeeze them yourself. The Juicero machine, an engineering marvel consisting of  four hundred of custom-machined parts, apparently cost more than $1,000 to produce, but the company sold them at a loss figuring to make up the deficit by selling you a lot of expensive juice.

My point here is that savvy investors calculated that the Juicero was such a good idea, they backed it with $120 million in venture capital. In other words they were betting on the idea that so many affluent Americans had so much money to burn, they could turn a profit on a system based around a superfluous $700 bag squeezer. And until journalists exposed the Juicero for what it really was (in a sort of "The Emperor has no clothes" moment so embarrassing that the company withdrew the product) those investors were actually correct - the very wealthy in America really do have that much money to burn.

Meanwhile...

II. Work for America's largest and most profitable corporations... and go on welfare.
Here's an excerpt from a post I wrote in 2015 about minimum wage and working in America:

"In late 2013, Nancy Salgado, a 27-year-old mother of two and employee of McDonald's made news for protesting the poor wages paid by her employer. After 10 years at McDonald's, she was making only $8.25 per hour, significantly below the poverty line for three people. Incredibly, the response by McDonald's to the inquiries of employees seeking information on making ends meet was to suggest that they apply for welfare. From Emily Cohn of the Huffington Post:

"McDonald's workers struggling to get by on poverty wages should apply for food stamps and Medicaid. That's the advice one activist McDonald's worker received when she called the company's "McResource Line," a service provided to McDonald's workers who need help with issues like child and health care."You can ask about things like food pantries. Are you on SNAP? SNAP is Supplemental Nutritional Assistance [Program] -- food stamps ... You would most likely be eligible for SNAP benefits," a McResource representative told 27-year-old Nancy Salgado, who works at a Chicago McDonald's. "Did you try and get on Medicaid? Medicaid is a federal program. It's health coverage for low income or no income adults -- and children.""

My reaction to this article was simple enough: McDonald's, a corporation that makes around $6 billion dollars per year in profits, should pay Ms. Salgado a living wage. Furthermore, it's wrong for large profitable companies to expect the taxpayers to subsidize their employees in the form of welfare benefits."

Some facts about American workers: We are among the hardest working and most productive in the world. Yet we live in the only leading industrialized nation that does not mandate universal health insurance, and also does not guarantee workers paid holidays, vacation and sick and maternity leave. One in nine U.S. workers are paid wages that can leave them in poverty, even when working full time.

A recent "Quality of Life" study conducted through the University of Pennsylvania compared leading nations according to essential ideas of broad access to food, housing, quality education, health care, employment and job security, political stability, individual freedom and environmental quality. This study found quality of life is better than that of the United States in twelve European countries as well as Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

What do these facts mean (beyond confirming that American workers are getting screwed)? Well, we as Americans have been taught since time out of memory that free-market capitalism is good, and that anything that falls under the rough heading of "socialism" is bad. But compared to other leading nations, one conclusion about life in the United States is inescapable: Our national economy is less centrally-managed and less socialized than other countries, but in every measurable sense our economic and political systems return poorer results than those same countries. And if Americans are hard-working and productive, and they're getting a raw deal, shouldn't we expect things to change?

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