Politico Magazine calls FDR's nomination for a second term in June 1936, "the pinnacle of American socialism," which I chose for the title of this post. I found their 2019 article, "What FDR Understood About Socialism That Today's Democrats Don't" after a discussion with my girlfriend about communism, socialism and democracy during the Cold War. We don't often discuss politics, but with the attempt on the 45th president's life, we were waxing more that way than usual this week.
I like what David Brooks, a New York Times Opinion Columnist, said in Dec 2019, "The best version of socialism is defined by Michael Walzer’s phrase, 'what touches all should be decided by all.' The great economic enterprises should be owned by all of us in common. Decisions should be based on what benefits all, not the maximization of profit." Full disclosure, his opinion piece was promoting capitalism, as he had become one after years of promoting socialism. Still, his former ideals are on full display in this quote, above.
If you read Brooks' piece or simply Google, "Why is Socialism Bad," as I did, you'll get a litany of conservative groups, media organizations and political think tanks that talk about the failures of socialism, like in countries that have tried it. But Canada, our neighbor to the north, is a democratic socialist country and they haven't failed. Their citizens aren't flocking to their southern border to try and escape the horrors of socialism by seeking refuge in capitalist-crazed America. No, quite the contrary, they mock us for our backwards, non-progressive politics.
Other hits will talk about how the ideals never live up to the reality and, in fact, undermine individual's motivation to learn and work hard. And yet, we can clearly see how people were VERY motivated and actually put back to work by FDR's post-Depression policies during the "pinnacle." The very short-sighted articles you'll see in the Google search don't even explore FDR and Socialist America. They only want to look at contemporary folks, who they call neosocialists, like Bernie Sanders and the "redistribution of wealth."
Well, let's think on that a minute, the actual distribution. The top one-percent gets to keep most of it, while dividing the rest of us with capitalistic rhetoric, all while their oversized Florsheims are firmly on our necks. Those "one percenters" aren't going to have to work themselves to death at age 75 or 80, nor are their children or grandchildren. We just have to keep working to support them. The way capitalism has rigged the system in this country is that the rich just keep getting richer, pass down their wealth (avoiding the high cost of estate taxes through loopholes) to their successors, who also never have to work, etc., etc., etc. That's the "American way," the status quo as it's been in this country for decades, at least since Reagan took office. Where is the "trickle down" effect, Ronnie? As Reich, who I mention below, put it succinctly, "In the mid-1980's, the bottom 90 percent of Americans together held 36 percent of the nation’s wealth. Now, they hold less than 23 percent." (Source: RobertReich.org)
Robert Reich, an American economist, wrote in 2014, "The richest Americans hold more of the nation’s wealth than they have in almost a century...the richest one-hundredth of one percent of Americans now hold over 11 percent of the nation’s total wealth. That’s a higher share than the top .01 percent held in 1929, before the Great Crash. We’re talking about 16,000 people, each worth at least $110 million." He's comparing today's uber-rich to those in FDR's time, during the "Great Crash" of 1929, aka The Great Depression.
In FDR's America, the Politico article says, "The rich were subsidizing the poor," at a tax rate of 75 percent. And by and large, people were okay with this type of socialist redistribution of wealth because the working class were starving in our streets. Those of the upper class who criticized the president, it says, "cloaked their greed in an affinity for capitalism." The same can be said today. Socialism, they claim, is a dirty word because it is anti-capitalist, meaning bad for their bottom line.
Roosevelt said back then in his famous "Rendezvous With Destiny" speech, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and Constitution stand for," while he stood "against dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.” The very same could be said for the flag-draped, neoconservatives today whose real allegiance is to The Almighty Dollar, and not to God, country or Constitution.
FDR's "New Deal for America" Socialism was, in fact, so popular it won him four terms as president and became the basis for today's term limits. He served from 1933 until his death in 1945. His socialist programs that encouraged unions and established Social Security and the Works Progress Administration were wildly popular. In fact, socialism got us out of the Great Depression. To argue otherwise is foolhardy and blind. Yet, still today, socialism is treated like a dirty word, and it's proponents, like Sanders and AOC, mocked. How quickly we forget. Our grandparents' generation never forgot. Many of them grew up in Depression-era America. It drove them to become what some call "America's Greatest Generation," but don't let the neoconservative rewriters of history tell you it was something else. It was FDR's socialist policies that created that generation. You can argue this all you want, but the fact remains, he was the longest serving president in our history. His brand of socialism was popular in this country. And now it's a dirty word. That's counter-intuitive and sad.
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