This past weekend, I went up to my hometown in Central Minnesota to visit some friends. This being Central Minnesota (also known as Michele Bachmann’s district), all sorts of fun political signs were in abundance. There were the old standbys, like hand-painted anti-abortion signs on farms and “U.S. out of the U.N.” graffiti so old it’s possible that it had been there since the U.N. itself was formed. This time, though, I noticed a new sign on I-94, stating “Fed up with Socialism? Undo it in November”. This caused me to cringe and fear for the future of this country just a little bit more than usual.
I’d put this piece of deliberate mangling of semantics in the same category as Rep. Allen West’s recent claim that there are up to 81 Communists in the House of Representative. And it’s not just because I majored in Political Science and therefore know that terms like Socialism and Communism mean specific things. For example, Communism does not mean “expansion of the welfare state”, it means doing away with all private property. Similarly, Socialism does not mean “Anything Democrats propose”, it means the state ownership of the means of production. Neither of which, you will notice, are close to what is going on in the United States today. Which major “means of production” are nationalized in this country (aside from the bailout of the automakers, which was always meant to be temporary)? Maybe Amtrak. Medicare, which enjoys pretty high ratings, is also pretty close. But we do not have nationalized air travel, or heavy industry, or other hallmarks of socialist countries. I know plenty of liberals who are pretty mad that Obama has shied away from anything remotely close to government control, like the public option in the health care debate (me being one of them).
No, what makes me sad is that we are only fooling ourselves. I remember when we used to make fun of Soviet Union and North Korean and Chinese propaganda for being so over the top. Didn’t those dupes realize that Imperialist, Fascist America only existed in the minds of those people that created the propaganda in the first place? Those suckers in those authoritarian regimes, they didn’t know what reality was! Except now, it’s become more and more common, and acceptable, to use inflammatory rhetoric within the American political sphere.
Before I go any further: yes, I know sometimes liberals say bad things too. “What about all those people who said that Bush was a fascist?”, etc. I know. They certainly do exist. But did any members of Congress call Bush a fascist and refuse to back down? How many billboards were put up across the country calling Bush a fascist? I’m not sure I remember very many. “Both sides do it” is the easy way out: both sides do not do it equally, and that’s the problem.
To a certain extent, the media is to blame. When somebody like Allen West says “Congress is full of Communists”, that generates news. Shaming him, or pointing out that the word Communism has a specific definition and Rep. West is not in the same ZIP code as that definition, is not fun. The media has given up its duty to educate, and merely acts as stenographers. Without pushback from the media, any arguments from the left against Rep. West merely becomes the same old partisan bickering. He said, she said. Nobody is informed.
That’s what is so dispiriting about these billboards. We face serious issues in this country. Personally, I believe the best course of action is to collectively decide what we want our nation to look like, and then decide how we want to pay for it. For example, the health reform bill as a whole is unpopular, but many of the individual portions such as the elimination of the “pre-existing condition” clause (something that hits close to home for me) are popular. Sorry, but if you talk to any health care economist, there is no way you can have a system that provides insurance to people with pre-existing conditions without an individual mandate of some kind. It’s economically impossible. These are the discussions we should be having. Misusing loaded terms like socialist isn’t advancing the debate.
I don’t mind having debates about what our country should look like. It’s a big country, and there’s plenty of room for debate. But when we can’t even move past name-calling, what hope do we have for solving our very real problems?