On February 7th, the House Financial Services and Senate Judiciary committees voted on a resolution:
H.Con.Res.9 – Denouncing the horrors of socialism
The resolution was sponsored by Florida House Republican Maria Elvira Salazar, the daughter of Cuban exiles who likely knew Cuban military dictator Fulgencia Batista, who fled to Florida about the same time as they. For Cuban exiles like Salazar’s parents, who lost sweat shops and colonial plantations to agrarian reforms, socialism was all-too easily conflated with a Holocaust.
But just to keep things in perspective, and perhaps as one indicator of just how lopsided wealth in Cuba was before, after the revolution Castro nationalized his own family’s 25,000 acre estate. Plantations like Castro’s family’s were worked by landless farmers living and working in conditions similar to Southern plantations and pre-revolutionary Russian estates. For Cuba’s virulent anti-Communists, plantations and military dictators were the “good old days.”
Salazar’s resolution conflates socialism with totalitarian regimes, famine, mass murder, and places Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in the same company as Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin. Salazar’s resolution is filled with hysterical hyperbole and concludes with a ridiculous claim found neither in the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution: “Whereas the United States of America was founded on the belief in the sanctity of the individual, to which the collectivistic system of socialism in all of its forms is fundamentally and necessarily opposed: Now, therefore, be it resolved…”
None of this is surprising coming from the Republican Party, which has clearly lost its collective mind and is in fact, and in Florida most acutely pursuing, the systematic dismantling of the Bill of Rights.
But most Americans make a distinction between European democratic socialism and the distorted dictatorships found in North Korea, Russia, and China. No sane individual believes for a second that “National Socialism” (aka Nazism) had anything to do with socialism. A 2021 Gallup Poll found that 52% of Democrats and 72% of Republicans view American Capitalism positively and, rather counter-intuitively, that 65% of Democrats and 14% of Republicans think of socialism in a positive light.
For Republicans, who are now the “either-or” heirs of the John Birch Society, it is either Capitalism or socialism. Democrats, on the other hand, understand “socialist” in the context of European social-democratic governments whose support for national healthcare, heavily subsidized education, housing, and parental leave contribute to a social safety net Republicans dismiss as “Communism.” For most Democrats “socialism” means features of social governance that can conceivably exist alongside a less predatory version of Capitalism. For Republicans, only the most predatory form of Capitalism is worth saving.
So it was disappointing to find that 109 Democrats — including a majority of the Massachusetts House delegation — signed on to Salazar’s resolution. Only Jim McGovern, Richard Neal, and Ayanna Pressley refused to make a show of red-blooded patriotic anti-Communism. At the very least they made a distinction that 65% of registered Democrats share regarding the nature of “socialism.” I was not surprised by Bill Keating, Stephen Lynch, Seth Moulton, or Jake Auchincloss. I had expected more of Lori Trahan and Katherine Clark, previously (and significantly) the Assistant House Democratic Leader.
“Disappointing” doesn’t even begin to describe Massachusetts House Democrats. Their disgraceful vote was another sign that the Democratic Party is as ambivalent about the social safety net as it is about every other liberal issue or democratic right it has already conceded to Republicans through collusion or neglect. From police reform to the defense of abortion and voting rights, Democrats allow Republicans to set the agenda on every issue, and they seem only too happy to join their Republican colleagues in betraying working people and minorities as they undermine true liberals within their own party.
With the ascendancy of the Tea Party, Trump, De Santis, and others in the GOP’s far-right starlight — and with a slim Republicans majority in the House — it appears we have entered a new McCarthy era. In the Fifties, the first targets of Joe McCarthy were liberal Democrats he claimed were “communistically inclined”, along with Jews, gays, and “Hollywood elites.” McCarthy succeeded in having libraries throughout the US purged of books, including Philip Foner’s The Selected Works of Thomas Jefferson and The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman, a play about false accusations in a girl’s school that had obvious parallels with what McCarthy himself was doing. If you live in Florida today, no doubt you are experiencing either deja vu or PTSD.
I have long believed that the Democratic Party, sadly, is the only thing standing between Republicans and the final nail in the coffin of American democracy. But if Democrats are not up to the task, it may be time for a new party to take on that responsibility. The formation of a new party — a regular occurrence in any other democracy — is hampered only by our lack of imagination.
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