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What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?

Jonah Goldberg
Commentary Magazine — May 2010

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The assertion that Barack Obama is a socialist became a hallmark of the 2008 presidential
campaign. His opponent, John McCain, 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 in favor 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 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 Jon Meacham 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 Evan Thomas (grandson of the six-time Socialist-party presidential
candidate Norman Thomas) 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 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
Gene Debs 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 Franklin
Roosevelt. 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
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.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. 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 Sidney Webb, 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 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, Tony Blair, 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 Ten Commandments. Even though he
hailed from the Right of the Labour party, Roy Hattersley, 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 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 Eric Voegelin’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 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, Robert Nisbet 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 Saul Alinsky, 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 New York Times, 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 Karl Marx 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 Internal
Revenue Service).

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). 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 Lionel Trilling, 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, Irving Kristol 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 Katie Couric.
“But that’s not how it works in our democracy. 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

Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute.

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