How Socialists Built America

Harrington's proposals for renewal of New Deal public works projects were never fully embraced. But his and others' advocacy that government should intervene to address the suffering of those who couldn't care for themselves or their families underpinned what the author described as "completing Social Security" by providing health care for the aged. It urged on the Johnson administration's Great Society, including the Social Security Act of 1965 -- or Medicare. Johnson took his hits, but Americans agreed with their president when he argued that "the Social Security health insurance plan, which President Kennedy worked so hard to enact, is the American way; it is practical; it is sensible; it is fair; it is just."

Could a plan decried as "socialized medicine" by the American Medical Association because it was, in fact, socialized medicine really be "the American way"? Of course. During the Medicare debate in the early '60s, Texas Senate candidate George H.W. Bush condemned the proposal as "creeping socialism." Ronald Reagan, then making the transition from TV pitchman for products to TV pitchman for Barry Goldwater, warned that if it passed citizens would find themselves "telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." But Bush and Reagan managed the program during their presidencies, and Tea Party activists now show up at town hall meetings to threaten any legislator who would dare to tinker with their beloved Medicare.

Americans would not have gotten Medicare if Harrington and the socialists who came before him -- from presidential candidates like Debs and Thomas to organizers like Mary Marcy and Margaret Sanger and the Communist Party's Elizabeth Gurley Flynn -- had not for decades been pushing the limits of the health-care debate. No less a player than Senator Edward Kennedy would declare, "I see Michael Harrington as delivering the Sermon on the Mount to America." The same was true in abolitionist days, when socialists -- including friends of Marx who had immigrated to the United States after the 1848 revolutions in Europe were crushed -- energized the movement against slavery and helped give it political expression in the form of the Republican Party. The same was true early in the twentieth century, when Socialist Party editors like Victor Berger battled attempts to destroy civil liberties and defined our modern understanding of freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right to petition for redress of grievances. The same was true when lifelong socialist A. Philip Randolph called the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and asked a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr., who had many socialist counselors besides the venerable Randolph, to deliver what would come to be known as the "I Have a Dream" speech.

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Again and again at critical junctures in our national journey, socialist thinkers and organizers, as well as candidates and officials, have prodded government in a progressive direction. It may be true, as historian Patrick Allitt suggests, that "millions of Americans, including many of these critics [of the Obama administration], are ardent supporters of socialism, even if they don't realize it and even if they don't actually use the word" to describe public services that are "organized along socialist lines," like schools and highways. In fact, contemporary socialists and Tea Partiers might actually find common (if uncomfortable) ground with Allitt's assertion that "socialism as an organizational principle is alive and well here just as it is throughout the industrialized world" -- even as they would disagree on whether that's a good thing. Programs "organized along socialist lines" do not make a country socialist. But America has always been and should continue to be informed by socialist ideals and a socialist critique of public policy.

We live in complex times, when profound economic, social and environmental challenges demand a range of responses. Socialists certainly don't have all the answers, even if polling suggests that more Americans find appeal in the word "socialist" today than they have in decades. But without socialist ideas and advocacy, we will not have sufficient counterbalance to an anti-government impulse that has less to do with libertarianism than with manipulation of the debate by all-powerful corporations.

Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy were not socialists. But the nation benefited from their borrowing of socialist and social democratic ideas. Barack Obama is certainly not a socialist. But he, and the nation he leads, would be well served by a similar borrowing from the people who once imagined Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the War on Poverty.