This is from John Wahl, the chair of the Alabama Republican Party:
The mainstream media wants us to think of ourselves as a democracy because that leads to socialism.... Even our Republican elected officials call us a democracy far too often, and we are not.
This is interesting, but not for the obvious reason. What's interesting is that it really ought to be true. There are way more low-income voters than rich people, so it should be easy and common for them to band together and soak the rich as a way of providing themselves with more bennies.
And to some extent this does happen, more in some countries than others. But what's remarkable is how little it happens. Every adult gets to vote in America, but it's hard to convince low and middle income voters to unite for something as simple and useful as universal health care, let alone free universities or childcare for all. As for really soaking the rich, forget it. Nobody in the world is serious about it. Hyper egalitarian Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the US. The current richest person on earth, with a net worth of $200 billion, hails from social democratic France. In Switzerland, being rich is practically the national religion.
The inability to turn democracy into socialism is a longtime puzzle. When World War I started, socialist leaders were shocked to find that class solidarity vanished instantly to be replaced with patriotic nationalism. It was, in a way, the original version of What's the Matter with Kansas? Why did the proles all join up to fight a war for wealthy interests? Why do so many low-income Americans vote for a party that's so clearly an arm of the rich? In both cases, it was because class interests are surprisingly fragile compared to culture, religion, country, family, and race.
So Wahl doesn't really have anything to worry about. America is a democracy, but all that does is provide a modest counterweight to the interests of the rich. They're the ones who still provide the marching orders.
What is his end target if he's given up on democracy? Like, what makes America what it is than democracy?
See my comment below. It's dogwhistle for "things were a lot better prior to 1964."
i think what you're saying is the gop would prefer a country ruled by botha.
Many Bothans died for that?
Because (as many non-left-of-center types remind us) America is not a democracy but a republic. Our elected representatives, not the population directly, vote on public matters. Originally we didn't even vote for our Senators directly.
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
~ Ronald Wright
Exactly
In trying to explain why so many dirt poor southerners willingly died to preserve a system that benefitted them only marginally more than it did slaves some historians have argued that the CSA volunteers fantasized that they could be the next wealthy slave owners and hence fought to preserve a system that in reality was detrimental to them
I've never bought either of those explanations.
They can't explain the jubilation Southern boys felt when they signed up in 1861 and German boys felt when they signed up in 1914.
You might say the one war is different than the other war, but the ecstasies are too similar.
Seeing it from the inside: Girls, girls, girls. I kid you not and say this with deadly seriousness. Where's Lysistrata when you need her?
My take is this about one's identity, and whom you identify as Us and whom you identify as Them. Both men and women are subject to it, and both men and women act to enforce their groups boundaries - albeit in quite different ways.
So, I more or less think you are right, but not quite general enough.
it's like our team vs theirs and of course we'll win and be home by christmas. one southerner is worth 10 mercenary yankees was the refrain. neither side, the south in this case, or the germans ahead of WW I had any idea of the horrors that awaited them.
This ignores people like Stonewall Jackson who opposed slavery but still fought and died for the south.
Did he?
He was also responsible for more Confederate deaths than many Union Generals...
i was going to say... how desperately can you really oppose something if you're willing to die for it?
is this like the fireorg defending one's right to yell the n word in a crowded theatre?
Reminds me of Joe the Plumber during the 2008 election. Would have benefitted from Obamas tax plan but was convinced it was socialism that would impact him sometime in the future when he finally became rich.
In the end it never happened and died without never getting there.
Wasn't a Plumber, either.
i still get a kick out of the fact that toledo, oh, famous samuel wurzelbacher is buried in little ol' campbellsport, wi.
next time i'm heading up hwy 41 to visit the alma mater, i intend to pop into a bar there & have a coupla cold ones, then void my plumbing on the alleged plumber.
I really don’t want to be part of a political system which includes Alabama. Should trump win in the “landslide” which some predict, the federal government might just become the enemy. Won’t that be a hoot? The south did win.
On the question of socialism, I guess they mean that lazy, shiftless, degenerate voters will, if given the chance, vote themselves free stuff at the expense of working people. They think of the social safety net as socialism.
They feel that when they get what they want, it's good, patriotic Free Enterprise American goodness. But, if some of their tax dollars go to someone else, it's “wealth distribution” Socialist Evil.
There's the self-interest of the few wealth hoarders.
for the white american, social security (even ssi) & medicare are earned benefits.
for everyone else, those are handouts devaluing work & creating generational poverty & sloth.
The social safety net is socialism. As is public education and medicare.
Wrong. Socialism is when the government controls the means of production. As long as there are private schools, public schools aren't socialist. As long as there is private health insurance, Medicare isn't socialist.
The only truly socialist institution in the US is the military.
I'm with you. Can we get the Supreme Court to overturn the Civil War?
don’t think the way I feel they should? What’s their problem?
Compulsive gamblers; shoplifters; alcoholics; working-class Republicans.
Sometimes people's irrational and self-destructive behavior is so plonkingly obvious that finding an explanation for it becomes a serious project.
i can't wait for clay travis' apoplexy when his chosen party resents him & questions his parenting when one of his son's comes out as gay, or it turns out his yungest is trans.
he's going to expect a special dispensation from the altright because he's on their team, & they won't be having it.
i won't either, of course, if he tries to comeback to the democrat party of his algore2000 volunteering roots, because... f*** that guy.
Define socialism. Better yet, define communism. Better yet, define capitalism.
Adam Smith's 2-volume "Capitalist Manifesto" includes The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776). Volume 1 is the founding principle, and Volume 2 is the method.
Karl Marx's Capitalist Manifesto opposes his own misconception of capitalism because he, like the people purporting to be capitalists, conveniently ignored the principle.
I don't know what socialism is except a word we use to avoid thinking about the capitalist principle, which is that we must treat the other person the way we would want to be treated if the shoe was on the other foot.
I do know what most people think capitalism is, which is do unto others before they do unto you. I also know that we all have an implicit understanding of the need to adhere to the real capitalist principle, which is the only reason capitalism works. That's why Adam Smith came up with the "moral sentiments" idea in the first place. He knew that on the day he was born. All he did was think about how that principle applied in the novel context in which he was living.
So, it's really not a mystery. We do well when we act like human beings. Then someone takes advantage of the situation, we get cynical, and then things go from bad to worse, and then someone (in this case, Adam Smith) says, in essence, "We must figure to get back to acting like actual human beings in this novel context." And then that person starts the process, and we do what we would have been doing all along if we hadn't become so cynical, and if we hadn't forgotten how important it is for human beings to treat human beings like human beings.
"D'oh." - Homer Simpson
I've always thought that "socialism" refers to a system in which the government owns the means of production. By that definition, public schools can't be socialism, because there are also private schools. Same with businesses, hospitals, etc.
The only example of socialism I can think of in America is the US military.
and conscription is enslavement for the good of the collective
Because like most americans, you are incredibly ignorant. Of course government run pubic schools are socialism. And for profit private schools are capitalism. The government owning all means of production is the most extreme version of socialism, (any manipulation of the means of production by the government (besides enforcement of contracts) is socialism just as laissez faire capitalism is the most extreme version of capitalism.
Wrong. Socialism is when the government owns the means of production. As long as there are private schools, public schools are not socialism.
By your definition, all government is socialism, and the only alternative to socialism is anarchy.
Smarter trolls, please.
Socialism is anytime the government engages in actions to improve/run the economy for the benefit of society. (Society being the root of socialism). As opposed to laissez faire capitalism . Pure socialism would be the government running the entire economy. Just about every existing economic system except N. Korea is a mixture of capitalism and socialism.
By your definition, the alternative to socialism isn't capitalism, it's anarchy.
Capitalism constrained by government regulation isn't a mix of socialism and capitalism, it's just capitalism.
Smarter trolls, please.
This is a bad response. Public services do not mean socialism. Accepting this framing is conceeding the argument to the Alabama Republican Party. Unforced error, an own-goal.
Government ownership provides where private interests cannot or won't serve the public. Think big things like interstate highways and airports or sea-going vessel ports. Think specialized things like scientific research centers or development of things to be used by the military.
Government regulation governs with regulations where private interests can and will serve, but only in a crappy unfair damaging way. Think of most food & drugs or quality of service things or financial services (including local banking), think of insurance as for healthcare, and many others.
Defining these cases can be quite imperfect and political.
Yes of course, agreed. There is no, perfectly defined, black and white prescription for 'socialism' or 'capitalism' or 'democracy'.
Accepting the framing that public investment = socialism is not a good way to rebut the Alabama GOPs argument.
But not defending it means accepting their framework that all public investment is bad. It lets them define the terms.
Its possible to both defend public investment and completely deny that public investment = socialism.
Kevin didnt do that. He agreed with the framing, said we should expect democracy to lead to socialism, but it hasnt happened in America.
Puzzlingly bad way to counter the GOPs argument.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^ this
yup.
I think that's accepting their framing that all public goods are bad, though.
A public service like the courts and the military are generally not socialism (unless you believe in the possibility of a private market judicial system as in some 1950s sci-fi. The military, police powers and judicial system are generally not considered related to the means of production and were core government functions in pre-historic times. But education and the health care system are more obviously related to the economy and existed prior to government involvement.
The military is the closest thing to socialism in the US. The government owns the legitimate projection of violence. You obviously don't understand the meaning of the word "socialism."
Smarter trolls, please.
The GOP is full of conservatives who, like Mr. Wahl, claim that a republic is not a democracy. In the US, they're right, because the Republic that was established contained so many anti-democratic features. So we ended up with an oligarchy in most states and in the federal system as a whole. It's nice that Mr. Wahl and his ilk are still afraid of democracy, I suppose.
The US is a representative democracy, or if you prefer, a democratic republic.
Of course, what the GOP craves is single-party autocracy, which is the real reason they hate democracy.
A “democracy” is where the public governs itself, perhaps with selected individuals. But, if we were only a “republic”, then we might be governed by someone from outside our ranks -- perhaps someone like a new immigrant, Vladimir Putin. This is why birthright citizenship and immigration and our definition of what we are “Democratic Republic” is very important and not just a historical footnote.
Both points, bingo!
"…a single-party autocracy,…" Nearly every "Republican" (rich person) I know have no idea what they advocate nor do they know consequences of such.
i bet they'll love living in an ungodly combo of porfirio diaz' mexico & kim il sung's korea.
wonder when it will hit haley & de santis that as long as donald trump, sr., has heirs, neither of them, nor any other republican (hawley, cotton, brian kemp, katie britt, et. al.), will even have a chance to maybe be president.
Yes. Kevin's reply is more thoughtful than Wahl's remark deserves.
What I inferred from Wahl's statement is that Alabama GOP leader is a job that even a doofus could do.
Republic means representative democracy. So when one says the US is a republic, one is literally saying it is a type of democracy. Conservatives say the US is not democracy but a republic do so because they want to document they are complete imbeciles.
"Republic" means "not a monarchy". Cuba is a republic; so is China. The UK is a representative democracy but very definitely not a republic.
man, you gotta layoff the peyote.
More Republicans are playing footsie with this "we're not really a democracy" stuff because then they can fuck around with voting rights. If we're not a democracy, then who cares if some "less worthy" groups -- women, Blacks, college students -- are disenfranchised? They'll just have to settle for "virtual representation" in our great Republic, amirite?
The irony being that the MAGA rabble are exactly the people the founders wanted excluded from voting
the not owning property piece.
God, I was pontificating just that the other day. Only the discussion was about those useless, deadbeat leftists who think their vote has to 'earned' and can't be arsed to, you know, knock on doors, write postcards, donate, etc.
to be fair, do we really want altleftists going door to door? (other than to alert the neighborhood that a sexoffender --- cough, virgil texas, cough cough -- has moved in.)
What you misunderstand is that to Mr Wahl socialism is anything vaguely left wing that he doesn’t like. So in his mind democracy does in fact equal socialism.
Basically, the right uses "socialist" (and "communist") as an epithet, not as a description of a government or economic system.
Exactly. To them, "socialist" and "communist" are just scare words for anything they don't like.
They insist that "democracy" and "republic" are opposites while failing to distinguish between "socialism" and "communism" (granted, communists helped by calling themselves "socialist").
that has been true for 90+ years
except nowadays, reactionary centrists also like to throw around the socialism smear too.
Truman, in 1952
Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.
Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan "Down With Socialism" on the banner of his "great crusade," that is really not what he means at all.
What he really means is "Down with Progress--down with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal," and "down with Harry Truman's fair Deal." That's all he means.
And a decade plus later Medicare was also "Socialism." And so on.
Many years ago I was in Canada talking to some guy about why Canada had some liberal policy the US didn't. His exact words: "We don't have a South." By that he meant the former Confederacy. (If you hear a reference to "the South" you probably don't think of San Diego, do you?) Not a shocking concept, but kind of crystalized our biggest problem.
The South is a third world country. Alabama isn't at the bottom of any lists, but is second highest in smoking rate, 11th in obesity, and 44th in educational attainment. And proud of it.
i love that, should puerto rico ever attain statehood, mississippi would still rank last on several metrics of state wellness.
I learned something odd in the discussion of the recent UK election - if the UK became a US state, it would have the lowest per capita GDP in the US, below even Mississippi's. It's ~$46K/person as opposed to $50K in Mississippi. The discussion revolved around how badly the UK has done in recent years, with large deficits, no growth, and failing public services. They still get a lot more public services than Mississippi does, and their life expectancy is better, but it was shocking to see. Yep, that's what 14 years of Conservative rule have accomplished.
RE Mississipi: the comparison with the UK also shows that the USA is so dominant that its poorest subdivision is a superpower.
google search median income MS vs UK
median income MS 28,732 USD
median income UK 45,410 USD (34,963 GBP)
Yeah, did they mix up average? Or white?
GDP per capita and median income are only weakly correlated.
but you told me it all trickles down!?
ever been to Alberta?
There are varying percentages of The South in every state and province.
Alberta is, by Canadian standards, pretty well crammed with RWNJs. However, Canadian standards and American standards on such things are quite different. For instance, even in Alberta no mainstream politician would dare run against universal health care. The standard Canadian response, in Alberta as in other provinces, to any suggestion of adding any additional free enterprise component to the health care system is "you wanna be like the Yankees"?
Plenty of Albertans says "yes" to that. I grew up there and have family still there
In any discussion of "socialism" its important to think of it as a verb, not a noun.
As in some things get "socialized" -that is, brought under public control and ownership.
Using the term that way allows us to see that vast parts of all modern economies have been socialized- Utilities being the obvious example, transportation systems, often medical systems, pension systems, emergency services- All socialized, owned and operated y the government.
And further, the socialization of these sectors is wildly successful and popular.
If the proletariat don't rise up and demand government seizure and ownership of fast food chains or nail salons, maybe it isn't a breakdown of class consciousness so much as the proletariat see that these things seem to be working just fine as they are.
In my view the fact that somebody can become a billionaire at all is a market failure and in a large number of cases it is a government created market failure through enforcement of patents and copyrights.
!!THIS!!
Because Republicans aren't getting what they want from democracy, they are doing their best to undermine it. As David Frum predicted.
has frum flipped back to gop/trump following the debate?
Frum remains anti-Trump all the way. He has a piece in The Atlantic today in which he appears to conclude, reluctantly, that the best shot at stopping Trump is for the Democrats to replace Biden on the ticket.
Good for being anti-Trump. Otoh, I think the past two weeks is strong evidence of my theory that a necessary trait for having a career in political punditry or reporting is having the kind of mind that cannot possibly understand how elections work and how voters vote. There will be no replacement. Joe Biden is the guy. He's more likely to win than not.
+1 Why why why do so many commenters here not get this? Is this an age thing 😉
Outstanding, Kevin. Pithy and true.
". . . class interests are surprisingly fragile compared to culture, religion, country, family, and race."
This is a really profound statement. The question is whether this deeply human trait can ever be overcome. I think it's rooted in our primate ancestry where tribalism based on DNA was an essential feature of whatever creature preceded both humans and similarly violence-prone chimpanzees. "Culture, religion, country, family, and race" are all facets of the same thing: loyalty to the tribe and the alpha male.
Our long-term survival hinges on transcending this ancient curse. It's been the mission of philosophers and spiritual leaders going back millennia, but here we still are. In this little corner of the world and this little slice of human history, it takes the shape of the Democratic and Republican parties. In a very real sense, the Democrats are the party of species survival and the Republicans are the party of the alpha chimp.
The evidence presented in Robert Sapolsky's Behave suggests that the tribalism is indeed baked in to humanity in a fairly deep way. We really, really want to classify other people as Us or Them.
What isn't baked in is how one makes those categories. It is decidedly not especially mandated by our biology that we construct it based on kinship (DNA).
Nor is it mandated that there's only one such division. Consider the tribalism of sports fans. Sometimes that tribal division doesn't pertain, and we don't use it, but instead use some other dichotomy.
Us and Them is not constructed biologically, it's constructed socially. That doesn't mean it isn't real, just that we have some wiggle room.
Goes back as far as Virginia aristocrat John Randolph of Roanoke: "I love liberty; I hate democracy." The liberty to do anything I want, untrammeled by the laws made by the common folk.
"From Coriolanus to Elon Musk: Discuss".
sounds like the libertarian party of new hampshire.
Ok
nytimes:
Some major Democratic donors have told the largest pro-Biden super PAC, Future Forward, that roughly $90 million in pledged donations is now on hold if President Biden remains atop the ticket, according to two people who have been briefed on the conversations.
There's an obvious solution for that. Get about a million people to cancel their NYT subscriptions for the next four months, send the money instead to our man Joe, and tell the donors to fuck off. Joe will have all the money he needs, and those million ex-subscribers will be better informed.
(The donors will come around in a few weeks. Remember when companies promised never to donate to pols who supported the insurrectionists of Jan 6. You can see how well their leverage worked that time out.)
you're absolutely right.
It's totally reasonable for Biden to resist stepping down. Quite rightly, he's reluctant to hand over the reins to Vice President Trump.
chupame las bolas.
"There are way more low-income voters than rich people, so it should be easy and common for them to band together and soak the rich as a way of providing themselves with more bennies"
William Barber has been saying this for years.
Yet here we are
the answer is K-St. Low income voters don't write PAC checks.
Why do conservatives love to advertise they are worthless imbeciles by claiming the US is not a democracy but is a republic. In this context, republic literally means representative democracy. (The only other definition of republic is not a monarchy, and is what is meant in the names peoples republic of North Korea or Saddam Hussein's republic of Iraq.
They're playing a long game to get people to accept undemocratic governance.
This, exactly.
They're fond of saying, "In a democracy, the majority, even if it's 50%+1, can trample on the rights of the minority," which no one is arguing for, or claiming is our current form of government.
But if you point out that the current system allows for a minority of people to rule over the majority and its preferences, whether via the electoral college, the Senate, a stolen and packed Supreme Court, etc., and ask if that is better, they are just fine with it, so long as it works in their favor.
imagine the 2000 election if gore had won florida by 537 votes but lost the national popular vote by a half million.
the gop would have been demanding faithless electors across all gore states, & the lamestream media would have largely been parroting that line, with the few apostate journos saying we have to honor the system this time, but must reform elections to make the presidential decision a factor of national popular vote NOT the electoral college going forward.
"Not a monarchy" is the only non-contradictory definition of "republic". The UK is a representative democracy, as are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and several other European countries, but none of them are republics.
It's curiously charitable to think Wahl is actually "worried", of course he isn't, he knows people are idiots and that this is the way to get them to vote against their own interests. If he was around in the 1700s he'd be a supporter of the king.
Conservatives have a thing for declaring the US is a republic, not a democracy. I have argued with many about this. It seems most can't really explain why. I say to them that the word democracy, as used in the modern world, also encompasses the word republic.
Here is a short, old, b & w video of some unknown guy explaining the difference. Virtually no one would disagree and insist we want a pure democracy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0tVcfJboLc
These folks who claim we're a republic, not a democracy, are the same people who make fools of themselves when Jordan Klepper probes them on their understanding of words.