Embracing the baloney

For a reality appetizer video, go here.

After which, read on.

'This primary is going to be a choice between socialism and a more just form of capitalism'

Chris Cillizza surrenders to the rhetorical strategy that emerged during the campaign of 2016, draining "socialism" of its actual meaning and using it as a label not only for the more progressive candidates for the Democratic nomination - actual and self-professed democratic socialists - but also for their more progressive agenda.

Some talking heads on MSNBC back then decided that owning the word and insisting it refer to any public ownership of any organization providing any good or service, at all, rather than public ownership of all the means of production, was the best way to deal not only with resurgent and false right wing denunciations of Democrats, their current agenda, and all the achievements of more than a century of progressive politics, as socialists and socialism but with Bernie's open profession of socialism.

They repeatedly cited public ownership of schools, hospitals, fire departments, police forces, bridges, and roads, calling each of these instances of socialism.

In this way they explained politics could be thought of as in part a matter of quarreling over what means of production ought to be in public hands rather than private, "all" and "none" being at the communist and libertarian opposite ends of a spectrum representing differing ratios or mixtures of the two - differing dosages of socialism and capitalism.

This move was dishonest then and is so now in that both Bernie and AOC have a well-known history with the DSA and routinely claim to be democratic socialists, meaning by that the real thing, and definitely not meaning the watered down Marxism and even post-Marxism of European Social Democracy, nowadays just a more advanced progressivism than our own, that both have urged America needs a greater dosage of.

And most actual socialists historically have referred to any economy featuring anything much less than public ownership of all the means of production as capitalist and sometimes to those in which some of the means were publicly owned as "mixed economies".

Democrats in general, whether or not they embrace all or part of the Bernie/AOC agenda and however appalled they might be at Republican projects of privatization of schools, roads, and prisons, overwhelming are not socialists and reject both socialism and "socialism".

The increasing acceptance of "socialism" among the young, including young Democrats, is doubtless due in some part, perhaps entirely, to the increasingly widespread use of "socialism" as those MSNBC talking heads used it.

And while those talking heads consistently endorsed the spreading tendency they had themselves helped to create to understand "socialism" in that way, they also agreed with Bernie's and AOC's assertions that America needs a significant dose of European Social Democracy.

Though apparently accepting their usage of "socialism", Chris Cillizza does not seem quite on board for Social Democracy or the Bernie/AOC agenda.

Actually, the environmentalist parts aside, the Bernie/AOC agenda itself is not much different from what TR ran on in 1912.

TR was not the Socialist Party candidate, nor was his the socialist agenda, of that year.

That distinction belonged to Bernie's professed political mentor and personal idol, Gene Debs, who advocated actual socialism, public ownership of all the means of production, or at the very least what was then called "the commanding heights" of the economy, including but not at all limited to the entire financial, transportation and steel industries.

But neither Bernie nor AOC is running on that agenda, nor have they said a word about it, though last time out Bernie did often give angry vent to his evident and sincere loathing of capitalism, in that way at least revealing his continued adherence to the real socialism of his mentor, usually at the same time denouncing the Democratic Party and the American political "system" with equal fervor.

TR flat out rejected socialism, and did so by its name, and was probably the most progressive of the other three candidates that year, and Taft the least.

In any case, since nobody is actually running on an agenda of flat out socialism, the primaries will not be a choice for Democrats between socialism and "a more just form of capitalism".

It will be, so far as the agendas go, a choice among different visions of the latter, with differing doses of concession to feasibility in a divided country and a divided congress.

But so far as candidates go, yes, it will be a choice between supporters, at least in their hearts, of out and out socialism on the one side and supporters of capitalism - "a more just form of capitalism" - on the other.

No, it's not President Donald Trump. 

(You probably figured that out from the "more just form of capitalism" part of it.)

It's actually from former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, who has been running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination since, approximately, 1991. 

And while Delaney is a long shot to be a long shot in this race, he's not the only one who is thinking about the two lanes of the Democratic primary fight that way.

"I will tell you I am not a democratic socialist," California Sen. Kamala Harris said during a campaign stop in New Hampshire on Monday. 

And in a CNN town hall on Monday night, another Democrat, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, was careful to make her skepticism of things like "Medicare for All" and the "Green New Deal" very clear.

What you see in all of that is a clear line being drawn between Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who announced his presidential bid formally on Tuesday, and the looming figure of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on one side, and the likes of Klobuchar and, assuming he runs, former Vice President Joe Biden on the other.

All the other candidates in the race fall somewhere along that spectrum -- roughly like this:

Sanders   Warren   Gabbard   Castro   Gillibrand   Booker   Harris   Klobuchar   Biden

Actually, with her wealth tax and her idea of putting workers on corporate boards, Warren's agenda is as aggressive as theirs and maybe in some ways more so.

And given she has shown as much as or more rhetorical heat denouncing "the system", it's possible she deserves the label "socialist" as much as Bernie does.

I don't know enough about the others from Booker leftward on the list to say.

What about Sherrod Brown?

From Booker leftward, the candidates are, broadly speaking, in favor of the "Green New Deal" and "Medicare for All." 

 . . . .

From Harris rightward, there is a healthy skepticism of the practicality (and political savvy) of backing those massive government programs.

Still, the Republicans and the conservative movement did invite this, what with their endless denunciations of all things progressive as socialism, Marxism, cultural Marxism, and even communism since the days of the New Deal.

The young and the ignorant for whom the actually existing Communism is ancient history were perfectly set up by the revival of that sort of rhetoric during the campaign of 2016.

Chris Hayes, Lawrence O'Donnell, and the others had an easy time of it selling their redefinition.

MSNBC just now talked about how thousands of Bernie supporters in key states Hillary lost went for Trump instead of her.

Not really a surprise, considering how both of them yelled about the rigged economic system, the evils of free trade, the rigged political system, and the stagnation of the working class.

And how much both of them claimed the two major parties were corrupt and in cahoots with a free trade loving plutocracy that cared only for itself.

Too, it was during his visits to Pennsylvania that Trump promised to strengthen both Medicare and Social Security, and denounced the Democrats for wanting to subvert them.

PS.

Of course, even the two most popular items on the original Bernie agenda, tuition free education at public colleges and universities and Medicare for All, are impossible without undoing pretty much all of the Republican tax cut, removing the cap on the Social Security tax (or is it the Medicare tax?), and boosting way up the marginal income tax rate for the higher and highest brackets.

And all of it is impossible without getting rid of the filibuster.

Politicians and the voters at large have to learn that elections have consequences, for real.

As for the wealth tax, all of the good it might do and less of the harm can be accomplished by putting the government back into breaking up too large corporate entities into smaller entities less willing or able to extravagantly reward their executives or their owners.

And just say no to worker-control.