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What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?
Jonah Goldberg — May 2010
The assertion that is a socialist became a hallmark of the 2008 presidential campaign.
His opponent, , used Obama’s own extemporaneous words to an Ohio plumber as Exhibit
A: “When you spread the wealth around,” Obama had said, “it’s good for everybody.” That, McCain
insisted, sounded “a lot like socialism,” as did Obama’s proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy and high
earners for the explicit purpose of taking better care of the lower and middle classes with that
redistributed money.
Republicans believed they had hit a rhetorical mother lode with this line of argument in 2008, but their
efforts to make hay of Obama’s putative socialism proved unedifying, if not outright comic. The National
Committee of the Republican Party even formally considered a resolution on whether the Democratic
party should change its name to “the Democratic Socialist Party” of the United States. The stunt was
shelved infavor of compromise language lamenting the Democrats’ “march toward socialism.”
Fourteen months into his presidency, in March 2010, Obama succeeded in muscling through Congress a
partial government takeover of the national health-care system. That legislative accomplishment followed
Obama’s decision a year earlier, without congressional approval, to nationalize two of the country’s Big
Three automobile companies. In the intervening months, he had also imposed specific wage ceilings on
employees at banks that had taken federal bailout money—the first such federal wage controls since an
ill-fated experiment by Richard Nixon in 1971. Obama also made the federal government the direct
provider of student loans, and did so by putting that significant change in American policy inside the
larger health-care bill. In a September 2009 press conference, Obama suggested that a publicly funded
health-care system might help “avoid. . .some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies
by profits and excessive administrative costs”—thus mistaking the act of making money, the foundational
Barack Obama
John McCain
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cornerstone of capitalism itself, with the generation of unnecessary expenses.
Given his conduct and rhetoric as president, we have every reason to reopen the question from 2008
and ask, quite simply, What kind of socialist is Barack Obama?
_____________
Now, when conservatives dare to suggest, tentatively or otherwise, that Obama or his party might be in
the thrall of some variant of socialism, they are derided for it. In the wake of health care’s passage, for
example, a Salon article mocked conservatives for thinking that Americans now live under “the Bolshevik
heel.” When the RNC was debating its resolution in 2008, Robert Schlesinger, the opinion editor of U.S.
News & World Report, responded: “What’s really both funny and scary about all of this is how seriously
the fringe-nuts in the GOP take it.”
Similarly, in a May 2009 interview, Newsweek editor mocked the president’s critics for
considering Obama to be a “crypto-socialist.” By these lights, socialism is a very sophisticated, highly
technical, and historically precise phenomenon that has nothing to do with the politics or ideas of the
present moment, and conservatives who invoke the term to describe Obama’s policies and ideas are at
best wildly imprecise and at worst purposefully rabble-rousing. And yet when liberals themselves
discuss socialism and its relation to Obama, the definition of the term “socialist” seems to loosen up
considerably. Only four months before Meacham’s mockery of conservatives, he co-authored a cover
story for his magazine titled “We’re All Socialists Now,” in which he and Newsweek’s
(grandson of the six-time Socialist-party presidential candidate ) argued that the growth
of government was making us like a “European,” i.e. socialist, country. At the same time, a host of
Left-liberal writers, most prominently E.?J. Dionne and Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post, were
floating the idea that the new president was ushering in a new age of “social democracy.” The left-wing
activist-blogger Matthew Yglesias, echoing the Obama White House view that a crisis is a terrible thing to
waste, said the Wall Street meltdown offered a “real opportunity” for “massive socialism.”
In an April 2009 essay published in Foreign Policy, John Judis modestly called “prescient” a prediction
he himself had made in the mid-1990s: “Once the sordid memory of Soviet communism is laid to rest
and the fervor of anti-government hysteria abates,” he had written in a symposium in the American
Enterprise, “politicians and intellectuals of the next century will once again draw openly upon the legacy
of socialism.” In his Foreign Policy piece, Judis claimed vindication in the age of Obama: “Socialism,
once banished from polite conversation, has made a startling comeback.” For Judis, today’s resurgent
socialism isn’t the totalitarian variant we associate with the Soviet Union or Cuba but rather that of the
“Scandinavian countries, as well as Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, and the Netherlands,
whose economies were shaped by socialist agitation.” This is “another kind of socialism—call it ‘liberal
socialism,’” Judis explains, and it “has a lot to offer.”
These ideas were given further empirical weight by an April 2009 Rasmussen poll that found “only 53
percent of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.” Of the remaining 47 percent, 20
percent preferred socialism to capitalism, while 27 percent were unsure. Meanwhile, adults “under 30 are
essentially evenly divided: 37 percent prefer capitalism, 33 percent socialism, and 30 percent are
Jon Meacham
Evan Thomas
Norman Thomas
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undecided.” Yglesias argued that the data “reflects the fact that on a basic level ‘socialism’ is good
branding. The whole idea is that we should put society first rather than capital, or money. That sounds
good!”
Harold Meyerson, who actually calls himself a socialist, wanted it both ways. In a March 4, 2009,
Washington Post column, he argued that anyone calling Obama a socialist didn’t know what he was
talking about: “Take it from a democratic socialist: Laissez-faire American capitalism is about to be
supplanted not by socialism but by a more regulated, viable capitalism. And the reason isn’t that the
woods are full of secret socialists who are only now outing themselves.”
But after the Rasmussen data came out the following month, Meyerson changed his tune. In a column
titled “Rush Builds a Revolution,” he argued that conservative attempts to demonize Obama as a
socialist had backfired and were leading Americans, particularly young Americans, to embrace the label.
“Rush [Limbaugh] and his boys are doing what and his comrades never really could,”
Meyerson wrote. “In tandem with Wall Street, they are building socialism in America.” Moreover, whereas
a more “viable, regulated capitalism” at first distinguished Obamaism from socialism, it now defined
Obama’s brand of socialism. “Today,” Meyerson observed, “the world’s socialist and social democratic
parties basically champion a more social form of capitalism, with tighter regulations on capital, more
power for labor and an expanded public sector to do what the private sector cannot (such as providing
universal access to health care).”
Surely if fans of President Obama’s program feel free to call it socialist, critics may be permitted to do
likewise.
_____________
But is it correct, as an objective matter, to call Obama’s agenda “socialist”? That depends on what one
means by socialism. The term has so many associations and has been used to describe so many
divergent political and economic approaches that the only meaning sure to garner consensus is an
assertive statism applied in the larger cause of “equality,” usually through redistributive economic policies
that involve a bias toward taking an intrusive and domineering role in the workings of the private sector.
One might also apply another yardstick: an ambivalence, even antipathy, for democracy when
democracy proves inconvenient.1 With this understanding as a vague guideline, the answer is certainly,
Yes, Obama’s agenda is socialist in a broad sense. The Obama administration may not have planned on
seizing the means of automobile production or asserting managerial control over Wall Street. But when
faced with the choice, it did both. Obama did explicitly plan on imposing a massive restructuring of
one-sixth of the U.S. economy through the use of state fiat—and he is beginning to do precisely that.
Obama has, on numerous occasions, placed himself within the progressive intellectual and political
tradition going back to Theodore Roosevelt and running through . With a few
exceptions, the progressive political agenda has always been to argue for piecemeal reforms, not instant
transformative change—but reforms that always expand the size, scope, and authority of the state. This
approach has numerous benefits. For starters, it’s more realistic tactically. By concentrating on the
notion of reform rather than revolution, progressives can work to attract both ideologues of the Left and
Gene Debs
Franklin Roosevelt
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moderates at the same time. This allows moderates to be seduced by their own rhetoric about the virtues
of a specific reform as an end in itself. Meanwhile, more sophisticated ideologues understand that they
are supporting a camel’s-nose strategy. In an unguarded moment during the health-care debate in 2009,
Representative Barney Frank confessed that he saw the “public option,” the supposedly limited program
that would have given the federal government a direct role as an insurer in competition with private
insurers, as merely a way station to a single-payer system in which the government is the sole provider
of health care. In his September 2009 joint-session address to Congress on health care, President
Obama insisted that “I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the
last.” Six months later, when he got the health-care bill he wanted, he insisted that it was only a critical
“first step” to overhauling the system. . was one of the relatively few self-described
moderates who both understood the tactic and supported it. “There seems no inherent obstacle,”
Schlesinger wrote in 1947, “to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of
New Deals.”
This prospect haunted the great economist and philosopher of liberty Friedrich von Hayek. There was
little prospect, Hayek wrote, of America or the Western democracies deliberately embracing what he
called the “hot socialism” of the Soviets. “Yet though hot socialism is probably a thing of the past,” he
wrote in the preface of the 1956 edition of his masterpiece, The Road to Serfdom,
some of its conceptions have penetrated far too deeply into the whole structure of current
thought to justify complacency. If few people in the Western world now want to remake
society from the bottom according to some ideal blueprint, a great many still believe in
measures which, though not designed completely to remodel the economy, in their aggregate
effect may well unintentionally produce this result.
The non-hot socialism Hayek was describing often goes by the name of “social democracy,” though it is
perhaps best understood as an American variant of Fabianism, the late-Victorian British socialist
tendency. “There will never come a moment when we can say ‘now Socialism is established,’” explained
, Britain’s leading Fabian, in 1887. The flaw of Fabianism, and the reason it never became
a mass movement on the Left, is that the revolutionary appetite will never be sated by its incrementalist
approach. The political virtue of Fabianism is that since “socialism” is always around the corner and has
never been fully implemented, it can never be held to blame for the failings of the statist policies that
have already been enacted. The cure is always more incremental socialism. And the disease is, always
and forever, laissez-faire capitalism. That is why George W. Bush’s tenure is routinely described by
Democrats as a period of unfettered capitalism and “market fundamentalism,” even as the size and
scope of government massively expanded under Bush’s watch while corporate tax rates remained high
and Wall Street was more, not less, regulated.
Early in the 20th century, Webb drafted Clause IV of the Labour party constitution in Great Britain, which
described its ultimate aim thus:
To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most
equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership
of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of
Arthur Schlesinger Jr
Sidney Webb
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popular administration and control of each industry or service.
Clause IV was “holy writ” for British Labourites, to borrow a phrase from Joshua Muravchik’s
indispensable history of socialism, Heaven on Earth. Former Prime Minister Harold Wilson compared
amending Clause IV to excising the book of Genesis from the Bible. But in the late 1990s, , a
leader in Britain’s Christian socialism movement, successfully pushed through a revision to the holy writ.
His new version read, in part:
The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our
common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us
the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth
and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few.
Blair’s revision of Clause IV elicited numerous denunciations. A leader of the miners’ unions said the
changes amounted to tearing up the . Even though he hailed from the Right of the
Labour party, , a former deputy party leader, complained that Blair was abandoning the
“bedrock. . .principle” of “redistribution of power and wealth.” But Blair stuck to his guns. He argued that
while he rejected doctrinaire “socialism,” he was committed to what he called “social-ism.”
Blair’s hair-splitting got at an important distinction. Socialism, sprawling and inchoate as it may be, is still
a doctrine. “Social-ism” is something different. It is an orientation, a way of thinking about politics and
governance—it is oriented toward government control but is not monomaniacally committed to it as the
be-all and end-all. Social-ism is about what activists call “social justice,” which is always “progressive”
and egalitarian but not invariably statist. As a practical matter, “social-ism” works from the assumption
that well-intentioned leaders and planners are both smart enough and morally obliged to, in Obama’s
words, “spread the wealth around” for the betterment of the whole society in general and the
underprivileged in particular.
But at a far more important level, “social-ism” is a fundamentally religious impulse, a utopian yearning to
create a perfect society unconstrained by the natural trade-offs of mortal life. What Blair’s doctrinal
revision recognizes is that public ownership of the means of production—the central economic principle
of socialism—is not necessary as long as private interests and private businesses can be compelled to
follow the designated road to utopia.
_____________
As mentioned above, one of the key liberal techniques for fending off accusations of socialism, and
discrediting those who make the charge, is to equate Marxism with socialism and then insist (often
correctly) that since liberals aren’t Marxists, anyone who says liberals are socialists is a fool or a partisan
ideologue. But socialism preceded Marxism, and socialism has survived Marxism, in part because
Marxism was subjected to a real-world test for nearly a century and failed on an epic scale. Soviet
revolutionaries did not engage in Fabian incrementalism; they got their country and their empire and
their worldwide movement, and they worked their will without opposition.
The contribution Marxism made to the socialism from which it arose was to offer a pseudo-scientific gloss
Tony Blair
Ten Commandments
Roy Hattersley
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to the ill-defined urges and impulses of those who despised the rising system of capitalism and the
growing middle class to which it gave birth. Because Marxism was taken seriously as an economic theory
for so long, it gave socialism an empirical patina that it otherwise lacked. But at its core, socialism
remains a rationalization for a fundamentally tribal and premodern understanding of economics.
Indeed, the economic aspect of socialism was itself something of an afterthought. The French Revolution
was the birthplace of socialism, yet the unjust distribution of economic resources was not then its
immediate concern. “Whereas the core issue for the Americans in 1776 was political legitimacy,”
Muravchik writes, “for the French in 1789 it was social status.” Overturning the privileges of the
aristocracy drove the French quest for égalité. To that end, the French Revolutionaries actually
championed the imperative of private property for all citizens. Even the constitution of 1793, which
Muravchik calls “the formal expression of the most extreme phase of the Revolution,” held private
property to be sacrosanct.
It was the revolutionary rabble-rouser Francois-Noël Babeuf who first asserted in 1794 that true equality
would be impossible without the abolition of private property. The pursuit of private wealth was simply
the means of replacing one aristocracy with another, he argued. The true promised land required
abolishing such distinctions, inherited or earned. Babeuf’s “Conspiracy of Equals”—a precursor to
Lenin’s revolutionary avant-garde—sought to “remove from every individual the hope of ever becoming
richer, or more powerful, or more distinguished by his intelligence.” The goal, according to the Manifesto
of the Equals, was the “disappearance of boundary-marks, hedges, walls, door locks, disputes, trials,
thefts, murders, all crimes. . .courts, prisons, gallows, penalties.. .envy, jealousy, insatiability, pride,
deception, duplicity, in short, all vices.” To fill that void, “the great principle of equality, or universal
fraternity would become the sole religion of the peoples.” Say what you will about such an agenda, it is
certainly not focused on empirical economic theory.
Indeed, very few successful socialist propagandists ever bothered to focus on the empirical case for
socialism. Rather, when trying to sell socialism as a policy or a movement, its preachers testify about
“social justice,” “humane policies,” “fairness,” and “equality.” In short, socialism—be it Marxist, Fabian,
nationalistic, progressive—is merely one of many pseudo-empirical rationalizations of the deeper
psychological impulse of Blair’s “social-ism.” The true case for socialism is not to be found in GDP or
employment numbers, but in the promise of leaping out of History into a better society where we are all
loved and respected as members of the same family.
The spirit of “social-ism” takes different forms, both benign and malignant, in different eras. When God
“died” in the 19th century, “social-ism” took the form of materialist scientism (hence the philosopher
’s observation that under Marxism, “Christ the Redeemer is replaced by the steam engine as the
promise of the realm to come”). It’s worth recalling that both Marx and Engels came to their socialism via
their atheism, not the other way around. But in America in the early 20th century, “social-ism” most
powerfully manifested itself as Christian progressivism. In Europe, “social-ism” fueled a thousand
doctrinal factions. Arguably the most successful and laudable “living experiment” with socialism, the
Israeli kibbutz movement, could hardly be understood as an economic phenomenon.
The promise and purpose of “social-ism” are most obviously on display in the worldview of
Eric
Voegelin
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environmentalism. It is hardly a new insight that much of the environmental movement is a Trojan Horse
for socialist assumptions and ambitions (the British like to call environmentalists “watermelons”—green
on the outside, red on the inside). Three decades ago, recognized that environmentalism
was poised to become “the third great redemptive struggle in Western history, the first being Christianity,
the second modern socialism.” Western society, wrote Nisbet, was moving from “the Gospel of Capitalist
Efficiency to the Gospel of Utopianism.” One need not wade too deeply into the literature of a “steady
state” or carbon-free economy to see the wisdom in Nisbet’s prediction.
_____________
Obama is no Marxist. This is a point lost on some who like to highlight the president’s indebtedness to
the ideas of the late radical , who was no Marxist either. Rather, Alinsky was a radical leftist
and a proponent of “social-ism” before Blair named it. He believed that all institutions, indeed the system
itself, should be bent to the needs of the underprivileged and the downtrodden in the name of social
justice. Bent, not broken. Like the progressives and various Marxists, Alinsky was a proponent of radical
pragmatism, using the tools available to change the existing order. This was the core of what the
, in a remarkable 1913 analysis surveying Theodore Roosevelt’s ideas in the wake of his
third-party campaign for president, dubbed T.R.’s “super-socialism”: “It is not the Marxian Socialism.
Much that taught is rejected by present-day Socialists. Mr. Roosevelt achieves the
redistribution of wealth in a simpler and easier way”—by soaking the rich and yoking big business to the
state. “It has all the simplicity of theft and much of its impudence,” the Times asserted. “The means
employed are admirably adapted to the ends sought, and if the system can be made to work at all, it will
go on forever.”
President Obama’s health-care plan is a pristine example of this approach. He is long on record saying
he would prefer a single-payer system if we could design one from scratch. But since he has to work
from within the confines of the existing system, he has given us ObamaCare instead—which, again, is
now merely a “critical first step.” It uses insurance companies as governmental entities, akin to utilities, to
provide a now-mandatory government service. The insurance companies will make nominal government-
decreed profits on top of government-decreed “fees” and “premiums” (the quotation marks are necessary
given that rates will be set by government and enforced by the ).
Obama still scoffs at the suggestion that he is a socialist largely to delegitimize his opponents. During
his address to House Republicans at their retreat in December 2009, Obama ridiculed Republicans for
acting as if his health-care scheme were some “Bolshevik plot.” In responding to the “Tea Parties”
organized to oppose the expansion of government, Obama has explicitly likened those who describe his
policies as socialist to the “birther” conspiracy theorists who foolishly believe he was actually born
outside the United States: “There’s some folks who just weren’t sure whether I was born in the United
States, whether I was a socialist, right?”
He reserves for himself the mantle of technocrat, disinterested, pragmatic, pushed to use the powers of
government by the failings of his predecessor and the madness of the free market. He is not interested
in ideology; he is interested in doing “what works” for the greatest number of Americans (he has often
said that his guiding insight to government’s role is the notion that we are all our brothers’ keepers).
Robert Nisbet
Saul Alinsky
New
York Times
Karl Marx
Internal Revenue Service
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Indeed, Obama goes further and often insinuates that principled disagreement with his agenda is
“ideological” and therefore illegitimate. In a speech on the eve of his inauguration, he proclaimed that
“what is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives—from
ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry.” In other words, to borrow a phrase from
, ideology is an irritable mental gesture.
Denying that you are an ideologue is not the same thing as proving the point. And certainly Obama’s
insistence that ideology is something only his critics suffer from is no defense when stacked against the
evidence of his actions. The “pragmatic” Obama is only interested in “what works” as long as “what
works” involves a significantly expanded role for government. In this sense, Obama is a practitioner of
the Third Way, the governing approach most successfully trumpeted by Blair, who claimed to have found
a “third way” that rejected the false premises of both Left and Right and therebylocated a “smarter”
approach to expanding government. The powerful appeal of this idea lies in the fact that it sounds as if
its adherents have rejected ideological dogmatism and gone beyond those “false choices.” Thus, a
leader can both provide health care to 32 million people and save money, or, as Obama likes to say,
“bend the cost curve down.” But in not choosing, Obama is choosing. He is choosing the path of
government control, which is what the Third Way inevitably does and is intended to do.
Still, the question remains, What do we call Obama’s “social-ism”? John Judis’s formulation—“liberal
socialism”—is perfectly serviceable, and so is “social democracy” or, for that matter, simply
“progressivism.” My own, perhaps too playful, suggestion would be neosocialism.
The term neoconservative was assigned—and with hostile intent—to a group of diverse thinkers who had
grown convinced that the open-ended ambitions of the Great Society were utopian and, ultimately,
counterproductive, even harmful. At first, few neoconservatives embraced the label (as late as 1979,
claimed he was the only one to accept the term, “perhaps because, having been named
Irving, I am relatively indifferent to baptismal caprice”). But as neoconservatism matured, it did become a
distinct approach to domestic politics, one that sought to reign in government excess while pursuing
conservative ends within the confines of the welfare state.
In many respects, Barack Obama’s neo-socialism is neoconservatism’s mirror image. Openly committed
to ending the Reagan era, Obama is a firm believer in the power of government to extend its scope and
grasp far deeper into society. In much the same way that neoconservatives accepted a realistic and
limited role for the government, Obama tolerates a limited and realistic role for the market: its wealth is
necessary for the continuation and expansion of the welfare state and social justice. While
neoconservatism erred on the side of trusting the nongovernmental sphere—mediating institutions like
markets, civil society, and the family—neosocialism gives the benefit of the doubt to government.
Whereas neoconservatism was inherently skeptical of the ability of social planners to repeal the law of
unintended consequences, Obama’s ideal is to leave social policy in their hands and to bemoan the
interference of the merely political.
“I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically
approved approach to health care, and didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go
ahead and have that passed,” he told CBS’s . “But that’s not how it works in our democracy.
Lionel
Trilling
Irving Kristol
Katie Couric
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Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.”
Whereas Ronald Reagan saw the answers to our problems in the private sphere (“in this present crisis,
government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”), Obama seeks to expand
confidence in, and reliance on, government wherever and whenever he can, albeit within the confines of
a generally Center-Right nation and the “unfortunate” demands of democracy.
As with Webb’s Fabian socialism, one will never be able to say of Obama’s developing doctrine, “now
socialism has arrived.” On the night the House of Representatives passed the health-care bill, Obama
said, “This legislation will not fix everything that ails our health care system. But it moves us decisively in
the right direction.” Then, speaking specifically of another vote to be taken in the Senate but also
cleverly to those not yet satisfied with what had been achieved, he added, “Now, as momentous as this
day is, it’s not the end of this journey.”
Under Obama’s neosocialism, that journey will be endless, and no matter how far down the road toward
socialism we go, he will always be there to tell the increasingly beleaguered marchers that we have only
taken a “critical first step.”
Footnotes
1 On this score, contemporary liberalism does not come out too well either. When it appeared that
health-care-reform legislation would not pass, a chorus of liberal voices, in and out of government,
rallied around the notion that the American political system “sucks.” And on the issue of global warming,
there is a loud and growing antagonism to democracy per se. New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman speaks for many when he says, often, that China’s “one party autocracy” is preferable to
America’s “one party democracy.”
About the Author
is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute.
Do you want to respond to this article? Click here, to write a letter to the Editor.
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