By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
What is the explanation for the ongoing enthusiasm among younger Democratic voters for the self-described socialist Bernie Sanders?
The press reports indicate that he was interrupted repeatedly with loud cheers at a speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in early July, as he pressed his case for tuition-free public universities, paid vacations for all Americans, a substantially higher minimum wage, lengthy maternity leave, a breakup of the big banks, and a dramatic reduction in unemployment among young adults to be spurred on by massive government infrastructure spending.
A recent CNN poll shows 35 percent of Democrats in New Hampshire favor him in his run for the Democratic Party nomination against Hillary Clinton.
We can’t attribute this enthusiasm to the Democratic base. Most of them are lined up behind Hillary. Neither can we ascribe it to the usual suspects on the radical left, the Occupy Wall Street crowd and the academic new leftists with minds filled with the theories of William Appleman Williams and Staughton Lynd about the inherently exploitative nature of free market capitalism: The crowds cheering on Sanders are too numerous for that to be the explanation.
Then where is the new enthusiasm for socialism coming from? Looking at the faces of the earnest young people in the crowds backing Sanders, I would say most of them are individuals who are convinced that “the system” no longer works for them, and that the only hope they have for gainful employment and a reasonably secure place in society — a home, a car, money for their children’s education, a decent retirement plan — is for the government to take control of the economy and provide it for them.
Notice I said “take control of the economy,” not assume “ownership and operation of the means of production,” in the manner socialists historically have proposed. That is the genius of Sanders’ approach to socialism, as well as that of many of his supporters in show business and the academy. He does not propose that Washington, D.C., take over and run the mills, mines, farms, oil companies, and factories of the United States.
He knows such a proposal could be made a laughingstock in an instant by an opponent who would ask him if he wanted our food and gasoline to be provided by the people who run the IRS and the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Socialists like Sanders want the people who know how to find and distribute oil and make cars and build computers, to continue to do so. What they want is for the government to control them: to tell them whom to hire, what to pay them after they are hired. And then to tax the daylights out of them to promote “social justice” in society as a whole.
The fact that this approach to the economy resembles Mussolini’s fascist Italy — with its stress on privately owned businesses tightly regulated by the government for the benefit of the country as a whole — more than what Josef Stalin was doing in the Soviet Union, is important but largely irrelevant. Sanders and his backers will dismiss the observation as name-calling and fear-mongering. And the press will back them when they do so.
Beyond that, the young people cheering Sanders are likely to have never heard of fascist economic theory. When they hear the word “fascism” they think of the police during crowd control and Fox News.
We should not take lightly the appeal of socialism as defined by Sanders to those who are convinced that the economy will not work for them and that it is under the control of corrupt corporate leaders whose only concern is maximizing profit and their personal wealth.
Until now, socialism has had a limited appeal in the United States. But that was because young people believed in what, for brevity’s sake, we can call the American Dream. They believed that if they got a decent education, applied themselves, and worked hard they could live reasonably well in this country.
They understood, of course, that there was no guarantee that they would live like the Rockefellers and the Kennedys. But they believed that a house, a car, maybe two, some vacation time at the lake, and money to put their children through school was a reasonable expectation. Which it was, until recent decades. Friends of mine who became supervisors and foremen in the factories in the area of Queens where I grew up lived like that. The young people cheering on Sanders don’t see anything comparable in their future.
Socialism offers them an answer. Its proponents have a program to address society’s ills, all of society’s ills. Sanders offers free college education, government jobs rebuilding “the infrastructure” if the private economy fails to provide opportunities, free health care, more public housing in areas that need it, increased Social Security benefits to guarantee a comfortable retirement, pollution controls on manufacturers to protect the environment.
Wherever young people see a problem, Sanders has a government program to address it.
Free-market theory seems empty in comparison. It tells the young people that a growing economy will provide opportunities for them. It tells them they will be better off economically if they are “self-reliant” and in charge of their own health care and retirement costs. It doesn’t matter that all this is true. It still sounds as if the conservatives want to “do nothing,” which is, after all, what “laissez-faire” means. Sanders, in contrast, promises to make their lives better.
But don’t the young people drawn to Sanders realize that we can’t afford to do all the things he promises? That the taxes required to finance his utopian schemes would be crushingly high and destroy the businesses that Sanders’ supporters hope will one day employ them? They don’t. They have been sold on the idea that there is “plenty of money” in this country, but that it is in the hands of too few people. Or being spent unnecessarily and wastefully by the military.
They are convinced that the society that Sanders envisions can be achieved by making the rich “pay their fair share” and by cutting back on a few fighter jets and aircraft carriers — and staying out of wars in places like Iraq.
(Republicans, by the way, share much of the blame for this perception that there is no need to be concerned about how we pay for the government’s actions. Both George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush fought two wars in the Middle East without raising the taxes to pay for them.)
In good economic times, with abundant job opportunities, working-class voters proved willing to listen to Republican candidates for office who assured them that life would be better for them if the government stayed out of their lives and let the free market work its magic. It is a message that is hard to sell to the young people of today who see no light at the end of the tunnel for the economic dislocations of our time.
There could be interesting days ahead.
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