Last week on Morning Joe, Sen. Claire McCaskill tried to dismiss Bernie Sanders and the response he is getting. Among her words we read that Bernie “is too liberal to gather enough votes in this country to become president.” Further, she explained the response to his candidacy like this: “It’s not unusual for someone who has an extreme message to have a following.”
Were you to go to BillMoyers.Com you would be able to read this remarkable piece by Harvey Kaye that will explain how wrong McCaskill is. The thrust of the piece is this: the kind of Social Democracy that Sanders advocates has a very strong tradition in America, and can clearly be seen both in the New Deal and elsewhere.
Let me give you a sample of what Kaye has to offer:
Social democracy is 100 percent American. We may be latecomers to recognizing a universal right to health care (indeed, we are not quite there yet). But we were first in creating a universal right to public education, in endowing ourselves with ownership of national parks, and, for that matter, in conferring voting rights on males without property and abolishing religious tests for holding national office.
I actually left out the first two words of that paragraph which appear like this:
Think again
Kaye uses that formulation in response to the notion that somehow the ideas of Social Democracy are "un-American."
Immediately after the paragraph that I quoted he reminds us of the work of Thomas Paine, hugely influential in the founding of this nation.
But there is more, so I ask you to keep reading.
Kaye's second iteration of Think again comes by reminding us of the traditions of German immigrants helping build the Midwest, of Eugene Debs and Victor Berger helping us get municipal ownership of public utilities (something we are now unfortunately seeing being reversed), of the building of important unions in the garment industries. And in that same paragraph we read
By the farmers and laborers who rallied to the grand encampments on the prairies organized by populists and socialists across the southwest to hear how, working together in alliances, they could break the grip of Wall Street and create a Cooperative Commonwealth. By African-Americans who came north in the Great Migration to build new lives for themselves and, led by figures such as the socialist, labor leader and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, energized the civil rights movement in the 1930s.
And then there was the New Deal of FDR. I will let you read that part of this terrific piece on your own.
I do want to quote another paragraph, because when you read it you may not be surprised by what polling data tells us about American attitudes, too often ignored by the Washington Consensus and the mainstream media as well as the leadership of both parties, which in fact are in favor of much of social democracy. Read this:
Polls conducted in 1943 showed that 94 percent of Americans endorsed old-age pensions; 84 percent, job insurance; 83 percent, universal national health insurance; and 79 percent, aid for students — leading FDR in his 1944 State of the Union message to propose a Second Bill of Rights that would guarantee those very things to all Americans. All of which would be blocked by a conservative coalition of pro-corporate Republicans and white supremacist southern Democrats. And yet, with the aid of the otherwise conservative American Legion, FDR did secure one of the greatest social-democratic programs in American history: the G.I. Bill that enabled 12,000,000 returning veterans to progressively transform themselves and the nation for the better.
Kaye reminds us that as the generation from WWII aged they gave us the programs of the Great Society.
Let me pivot for a moment.
In the latter half of the 19th Century we saw the abuse and inequality imposed by the wealthy, to which we got the response of the Grange Movement, the regulation of railroads, and the beginnings of the rise of organized labor.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Century we saw some of the damage that could be done by too much concentration on profit and uncontrolled capitalism, and we got things like the FDA and the Clayton Antitrust Act and the Federal Reserve.
We saw a Great Depression, and a response - opposed by oligarchs and their political allies - to right the wrongs that had created, to modify our government and our society to serve ALL of our people (although admittedly the Roosevelt administration was slow to include African-Americans because of the need for Southern racist Democratic votes - and I remind people that the last of those Southern Democrats would be Republicans after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, following the path trod by Strom Thurmond).
That American society sees an increasing number of people in support of what McCaskill is willing to dismiss as extreme should not be surprising - each time we see the real extremism - of racists and Anti-Semites, of wealth against democracy - when given a chance the American people follow a path as old as this nation, expressed to be sure by Thomas Paine, but by many major figures since.
It is ironic that our teaching of history too often omits these parts of our history. One example that immediately comes to mind that for all the hagiography about Helen Keller it is rare that students learn that she was an ardent Socialist.
I hope Harvey - and Bill Moyers - won't mind, but I am going to push fair use by concluding with ALL of his final three paragraphs.
He sets those up by reminding us about King, among others. Here as an attendee on 8/27/63 I remember that as an event for JOBS and Justice, and that King was assassinated when in Memphis on behalf of striking sanitation workers. Kaye also reminds us that Clinton began her campaign at Four Freedoms Park, as an acknowledgement of what should be the Democratic Party's debt to the magnificent Social Democracy of that hereditary Patrician from New Hyde Park, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Here are those three paragraphs:
Bernie Sanders may never appear at Four Freedoms Park. But he sounds like FDR, not simply because you can practically hear him saying of the one percent what FDR did — “I welcome their hatred” — but all the more because of what he wants to do: tax the rich, create a single-payer national health care system, make public higher education free to all qualified students, create jobs by refurbishing the nation’s public infrastructure, and address the environment and climate change.
But even more critically, like FDR he doesn’t say he wants to fight for us. He seeks to encourage the fight in us: “It is up to us to launch the most heroic of all struggles: a political revolution.” If that is “extreme,” then Democrats like McCaskill are not just forgetting their history, but trying to suppress it.
That Sanders, given his background, is garnering huge crowds who shout his name with an enthusiasm reminiscent of the heyday of the People’s Party in the 1890s, radiates a special glow. Americans may once again be remembering who they are and what they need to do to recapture a government now in thrall to the Money Power. And that ain’t extreme. It’s fundamentally American.
Might I suggest that you not only read the piece by Harvey J. Kaye, but also promote it on your social networks and make others aware of it?
The better we know our history the more we will realize that what Bernie advocates is truly the best of our American heritage, which is why Claire McCaskill is WRONG!
Peace.