The socialist Democrat

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It was a shock. Canada’s democratic socialist party, The New Democrats (NDP), won a resounding victory this month in Alberta, the country’s most rightwing province where the Progressive Conservatives have ruled for over four decades. The NDP promised to increase corporate taxes, social spending as well as oil and gas royalties.

Alberta has fossil fuel reserves comparable to Saudi Arabia and is home to the notorious tar sands. Oil prices have fallen recently and NDP leader Rachel Notley said that the province should diversify their economy and get off “the boom-and-bust roller coaster.” She doesn’t support plans for Keystone XL and vowed to stop spending taxpayer dollars to promote the pipeline in Washington, D.C.

A Canadian pundit said this was like Senator Bernie Sanders being elected the governor of Texas. It seemed appropriate that about the same time, Sanders declared that he was running for president. Sanders has become America’s most well-known democratic socialist.

This might be the right time for Bernie’s economic populist message. A Pew poll found that 77 percent of Americans — including 53 percent of Republicans — agreed that “there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.” Sixty one percent of Americans believed that “the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy.” Fifty seven percent thought wealthy people don’t pay their fair share of taxes.

But Bernie is a socialist. For many Americans who lived through the Cold War, the word “socialism” has been identified with Communist totalitarianism and gulags. So it isn’t surprising that Pew found only 31 percent of Americans had a positive reaction to the word “socialism.” But it is interesting that scarcely 50 percent of Americans had a positive view of capitalism and 40 percent had a negative response.

Young people were somewhat more favorable to socialism. Pew found that 49 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 have a positive view of socialism and only 43 percent say they have a negative view. Forty-seven percent had a positive view of capitalism and 47 percent had a negative view.

With increasing income inequality and stagnant wages, rightwingers are concerned that capitalism is getting a bad reputation. During the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ demonstrations, an influential GOP pollster Frank Luntz told a Republican Governors Association meeting that “I’m so scared of this anti- Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death. They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

Luntz urged Republican politicians to avoid using the word “capitalism” because Americans think “capitalism is immoral.” He suggested that they replace it with “economic freedom” or “free market.”

Since he started running for president, journalists have asked Sanders about being a democratic socialist. On ABC’s This Week, he said that in the Scandinavian countries ruled by democratic socialist parties, “by and large, government works for ordinary people in the middle class rather than, as is the case right now in our country, for the billionaire class.”

Host George Stephanopoulos interrupted him. “I can hear the Republican attack ad right now,” he said. “‘He wants America to look more like Scandinavia.’” 

“That’s right,” Sanders replied. “What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong when they have more income and wealth equality? What’s wrong when they have a stronger middle class, in many ways, than we do; a higher minimum wage than we do; and they’re stronger on the environment than we are?” 

He told Stephanopoulos that we do a lot of good in this country but “we can learn from other countries.” There’s a problem with that approach. The corporate media does an absymal job of covering the world so ordinary Americans don’t get to compare our social policies with those of other countries. We are told that we are the greatest and the most wonderful country in the world. That is, we don’t need to learn from anybody else. Sanders did point out that the U.S. has “the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth at the same time as we’re seeing a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires.”

Sanders’ policy proposals should have wide appeal: free college tuition; a $1-trillion program to rebuild America’s roads and bridges; publicly funded elections and universal Medicare for All health care.

Bernie comes out of a long tradition of American democratic socialism. You can find out more about this tradition on Memorial Day, May 25. Historian Jack Ross will speak about his new book The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History at 3 p.m. at Congregation Har HaShem, 3950 Baseline Road in Boulder. The event is free and sponsored by Democratic Socialists of America.

This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.