Sanders campaign messaging and socialism
Norman Goldman (http://www.normangoldman.com/) posed an exercise in campaign messaging last month, asking listeners to craft a message for any Democrat or Republican that would enable the chosen subject to mobilize base voters in the primary and still win the general election. I’ll probably try a Republican later for the hell of it, but naturally I’d like to start with Sanders.
An obvious messaging issue is “socialism.” Most Democrats are strongly in favor of reining in the financial sector and expanding public goods like infrastructure funding, Social Security and Medicare, etc. But many worry about broadening the appeal of those policies, noting that conservatives have been demonizing the terms “liberal” and “socialist” for 40 years. Any Democratic nominee will inevitably be called socialist, just as any Obama initiative aimed at helping the 99% is already called that—see the Affordable Care Act.
Quite a few people fear that Sanders is asking for a lot more trouble by using socialism as part of his self-definition. He clearly does not accept the traditional definition—ownership of all means of production by either the state or by worker cooperatives (though he would definitely like to see more of the latter). So far he has dealt with the issue by referencing social democracies like Norway and Sweden. I think that this is a mistake, because Americans blow off small countries as irrelevant just because of their size. After all, we have states that are much larger than those countries. What I would like to see him do is equate the term to public goods—investments in the underlying infrastructure that is necessary for any private enterprise to exist at all. Socialism therefore means public goods for everybody—not just white people and not just rich people.
After all, conservatives just love public goods for themselves.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/27/palin-shares-wealth/
In an interview with Philip Gourevitch of the New Yorker, Sarah Palin explained the windfall profits tax that she imposed on the oil industry in Alaska as a mechanism for ensuring that Alaskans “share in the wealth” generated by oil companies:
“And Alaska—we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs. … It’s to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans.
Isn’t that special? Karl the Marxist might have said exactly that, supposing that he had written in schizophrenic word salad instead of academic German. She just doesn’t want the brown hordes of the lower 48 to have any of that good stuff.
Sanders can refer to just about any plank in his platform as promoting public goods. I think he should use the term and say that this is what he really means by socialism. Democrats have been losing ever since 1980 by being too gutless to defend public goods, shrinking from being called “tax and spend liberals” and “socialists.”
Public goods are by their very nature “socialist,” even Marxist. Urban fire departments are supported by property taxes. The more your property is worth, the more you pay. That would be “from each according to his abilities.” But they don’t send a truck out unless you have a fire. That would be “to each according to his needs.” That’s how public goods work—we all pay, and when we need them, they are there. (Rural fire departments are anarchist, as in Kropotkin and mutual aid. In the 19th century, anarchism was called “left communism.”)
Snappy comebacks to common attacks
“This is a capitalist country, where everyone is against socialism.”
“Capitalism could not possibly exist without massive investment in public infrastructure. Conservatives have weakened this country by letting our public infrastructure go to hell. I propose infrastructure projects that benefit everyone.”
“We don’t need any more of the ‘tax and spend’ liberalism that has made our national debt so large.”
“Taxing and spending happens to be the government’s job. I propose to spend your hard-earned tax dollars on infrastructure projects that benefit everyone, not on endless war.”
I could go on, but you get the idea. Since conservatives have spent 40 years redefining public goods as socialist, why not just use their definition. More examples?
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