Socialist Anxiety Disorder

The other day, I plugged my earphones into my laptop at my co-working office in Center City Philadelphia and indulged myself in the rants of a madman. A priest and prophet in a time of fiscal meltdowns at home and the ominous threats of dictatorships abroad, the man heaped blame on a wide range of bogeymen for casting their curses on an America in decline. One bogeyman outshone the rest as the ultimate source of domestic evil.

It's that damned Socialism.

You'd probably be surprised to know that the madman to whom I refer is neither Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, nor the ultimate pariah of the airwaves, Michael Savage; neither did these rants arise in the aftermath of 11/4. The madman was the populist Father Charles Coughlin, and the year was 1937.

It's a banality, I know, to suggest that history does repeat itself. Then again, I've watched an awful lot of Lost over the course of the last year, and as a result I'm convinced that time really is more circle than line. Once upon a time, large swaths of Depression-afflicted Americans suspicious of FDR's New Deal imbibed Coughlin broadsides with titles like "Somebody Must Be Blamed", and the nation neither slipped into "socialism" nor civil war. I have to remind myself of this every time I stroll down the road and spot an otherwise well-intentioned patriot clutching a copy of Glenn Beck's irony-inspiring Arguing with Idiots.

Or, more appropriate to 2010, when I read some of the status updates of my conservative friends on Facebook, the agora of our time. They often raise legitimate concerns over the lack of fiscal discipline or accountability in Washington. Unfortunately, I find a good number of their arguments to be simplistic, reductionist, and alarmist. Forget a real discussion over how government can effectively be utilized to curb excessive risk taking on Wall Street or to contain the swelling costs of health care. Far too often, they speak in shorthand, with "socialist" or "socialism" the blunt weapon of choice.

"Obama is turning this country into a socialist dictatorship!"

"The health care reform bill is socialism, pure and simple!"

Aside from the decibel level, there are two real problems with the over-misuse of the word "socialism" in any debate over the policies of our 44th President. The first is that Obama is not a socialist. Ask any actual socialist. Fiscal policy is not a binary choice between unfettered market libertarianism on the one hand and centralized state ownership of your cats on the other. In between lies a vast middle area that recognizes property ownership and entrepreneurship as the foundation of a free and efficient economy, but also understands that free economies can only exist with a reasonable exercise of government oversight of and, dare I say it, participation in the economy.

Imagine an America with no free public education system, in which the intellectual development of the next generation of workers were left to the whims of the "free market". Public education is, at a theoretical level, antithetical to the abstract idea of the market; yet it is wholly irrational to call it "socialist", unless you believe that Thomas Jefferson was America's first socialist. Or imagine an America in which investment banks trade risky securities in the shadows, away from government oversi....sorry, I know. That one hits a little too close to home.

The second problem with the conservative overplay of the S-card is more basic, and it can be resolved by opening the dictionary. The primary definition, according to my Apple dashboard app:

"a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."

In other words, the primary producer, distributor, and seller of goods is the government. That is the dictionary definition of socialism. Over the past century, the cultural definition has become more fluid, but that only augments my point. To peg Barack Obama as a socialist is akin to crowning him the Queen of England - it is a title with no real meaning, save for creating the false impression that the Obama Administration wants to trade your guns for a sickle and hammer.

So I pose this challenge to my conservative friends - and I do indeed call you friends. If you agree to stop dropping the S-bomb, I'll agree to let you all in on the little known secret that Adam Smith decried the concentration of wealth and that the New Deal did not impose socialism, but actually saved capitalism from it.