Bernie Sanders has never made a secret of his affinity for socialism. He’s always been a fan of alternatives to free market capitalism, in fact, and his Vermont constituents who have sent him to Congress for the last twenty years have never seemed to mind. While Sanders appends the word “democratic” to his preferred brand of collectivism in order perhaps to convey that his is a less murderous style of Marxism than that which plagued the 20th Century, he’s never been particularly anti-communist. He has heaped praise upon the Castros and spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, where he was happily photographed half-naked with party apparatchiks in a Yaroslavl banya. Like any good comrade, Sanders spent his career making a distinction between the European-style socialism he espoused and the more moderate state capitalism endorsed by Democrats. Only in September of last year did Sanders officially become a member of the party whose presidential nomination he was seeking. Now, Hillary Clinton and her allies are now doing their best to turn Sanders’ socialism into a liability. Perhaps Team Clinton might be able to remind loyal Democrats that Sanders declined for decades to self-identify as a member of the club. After seven years in which Barack Obama has done his best to rehabilitate the concept, however, the former first lady and her supporters have a hard time reminding liberal voters that socialism is a four-letter word.
New York Times reporter Jason Horowitz picked up on the nascent effort among Democrats to re-stigmatize the concept of socialism in a statement released by Clinton ally and Brooklyn-based Congressman Hakeem Jeffries. In attacking Sanders as a “gun-loving socialist with zero foreign policy experience,” it was clear that the label was applied in a pejorative sense. Horowitz noted that this messaging came on the heels of an effort by Clinton to brand Sanders a “relatively new Democrat.” While it’s a transparent attempt to gin up support for Clinton through naked appeals to tribal loyalty, it may nevertheless be an effective approach. Sanders would likely not take issue with either fact – his support for socialism, or his previously arms-length relationship with the Democratic Party. The most likely obstacle on the path to this tactic’s success, though, is the sitting Democratic president.
For the better part of his presidency, a cottage industry has flowered among the nation’s political commentary writers, all of whom committed themselves to resolving the eternal question: Is or isn’t Barack Obama a socialist. Everyone on either side of that debate believes they have the definitive answer. Writing in COMMENTARY as early as 2010, Jonah Goldberg may have penned the most compelling piece on the president’s earliest, tentative steps toward a kind of unselfconscious “neosocialism.” Even before he was elected to the White House, Obama spoke openly and favorably about “spreading around opportunity” – a redistributionist euphemism he later clarified meant, explicitly, the redistribution of income through the tax code – in order to equalize outcomes.
For conservatives, this and similar admissions of fealty to a foundational redistributionist framework was evidence of socialistic sympathies. The president’s approach to governance – a reliance on top-down solutions and Keynesian economic stimulus – merely confirmed the right’s suspicions. Nothing, however, so irritated the committed socialist as the idea that Barack Obama was one of them. There is no shortage of breathless correctives penned by self-described socialists insisting with various degrees of irritation that the president was no true Scotsman. Theirs was a neat rhetorical trick. For the left, the claim that the president’s policies so often failed to achieve their stated objectives because they were too liberal could not be countered with the notion that they failed because they were not liberal enough. Thus, the kind of European-style socialism that was once anathema in the United States – single-payer health care programs, increased subsidized housing inventory, and even the word itself – were destigmatized. To paraphrase the late Al Smith, for Democrats, the answer to the ills of liberalism was more liberalism.
By the time the president entered his final year in office and could really indulge his inner “Bullworth” — as he once admitted he had always wished he could do, but was frustratingly constrained by the bounds of American political norms and traditions – even Obama had let the veil drop. Fresh off of a historic trip to the open-air prison that is communist Cuba, the president journeyed to Argentina in late March. There, in a town hall with local Argentinians, Obama expressed his indifference toward socialism as an alternative socio-economic theory of organization.
“So often in the past, there has been a division between left and right, between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate,” Obama said. “Those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical, and just choose from what works.”
“You don’t have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory,” the President of the United States and the leader of the free world averred. “You should just decide what works.” The president declined to deliver his declaration of apathy toward free market capitalism in Cuba, where that kind of political expression would be a direct threat to the authoritarian, socialist cabal in Havana. Eh. Whatever works, right?
Nothing the president said made anyone squirm in their seats back home, either. For Republicans, this merely exposed the president they knew and had come to terms with. For Democrats, it was a justified equivalence between two roughly morally corresponding – even compatible – economic systems. That such a statement failed to elicit even an ounce of indignation in the United States speaks to the rehabilitation of socialism as a viable, even virtuous, economic theory among Democrats.
Clinton, Jeffries, and other Clintonites may try to attack Sanders for failing to self-identify as a fellow big “D” Democrat in favor of a more European identity. For the millions of Sanders voters to whom “socialism” is an entirely theoretical and, as such, preferable alternative to capitalism, such appeals will fall on deaf ears. The Democrats buried or expelled its “Scoop” Jacksons in the effort to rebrand itself a liberal-left party. That day has arrived. It seems that Clinton and company are experiencing a bit of buyer’s remorse.
