If you’re looking to become much dumber very quickly, I highly recommend this The Problem with Jon Stewart segment on socialism. And if you’re thinking “I would like to be dumber, but I have plans to have a railroad tie fired through my brain like Phineas Gage”, let me tell you: This Jon Stewart segment will be faster and more effective.
The segment begins with the statement: “Hard-working Americans aren’t doing that great.” Obviously, on some level, that’s true; there are people struggling to make ends meet (and to skip to the end: I think we should do more to help them). Of course, Stewart happened to be speaking at virtually the same moment that another not-too-shabby jobs report came out; I would argue that a 4.6 percent unemployment rate 18 months after a once-in-a-century pandemic with trendlines headed in the right direction indicates that we’re doing something right. Still, the “these are hard times” narrative will always be alive somewhere in the media landscape. The three media narratives that never change no matter what are: “these are hard times”, “our teens are out of control”, and “those clowns in Congress should stop bickering”.
Having established the true (if obvious) fact that some people’s finances aren’t doing too well, Stewart asks: “Anybody know what might help them?” He then plays a montage of Fox News talking heads mentioning the following things (I’m using their words):
Single-payer health care
Government-paid child care
Universal child care
Free college
Early education
Child education
A guaranteed job
Family and medical leave, paid vacations
Retirement security
Government healthy food
After the montage, Stewart incredulously asks: “Why aren’t we doing those things?”
Well, to start with: We are doing some of them. Some people call “child education” “school”, and we have that. We also have a retirement program that deep-weeds policy wonks know as “social security”. We don’t have universally-free college or a jobs guarantee because those are thoroughly-bad ideas (see you in the comments section, Splainer!). Single-payer health care could be good or bad depending on the design, but it’s enormously complex, and though I’m positively-disposed to the idea, I also wouldn’t say “gee, I can’t think of a single reason why we don’t do that!” “Government-paid child care” and “universal child care” are the same thing, and I wish that thing had made it into the Build Back Better bill (ditto family/medical leave), but on the bright side, it looks like “early education” (universal pre-K) will make it in. I have no idea what Government Healthy Food is. I googled it to see if it’s some program I’ve never heard of, and Google is convinced that I’m looking for Michelle Obama’s “Eat Healthy” initiative. That’s not a food program — it’s just nutritional information. Eat Healthy has never mailed a single celery stalk or yam to a single American, so I don’t know what Lou Dobbs is talking about or why Jon Stewart considers Lou Dobbs’ made-up thing essential.
Stewart’s next move (obviously, if you’re familiar with the genre) is to play a montage of the same talking heads shrieking “that’s socialism!” You might recognize this as a classic Obama-era Daily Show move: Make fun of Fox News morons for yelling about how any taxes or spending are SOCIALISM!!! It’s an ignorant, ridiculous claim, and in the Obama years, I really enjoyed watching Jon Stewart rip it to pieces.
But this time, Stewart skips the “that’s not socialism” rejoinder. In fact, when the Fox montage ends with “paradise for all”, Stewart says: “Right.” The segment completely accepts the “spending = socialism” paradigm, and then proceeds to discuss corporate subsidies on those terms.
This is a small thing, but I think it’s indicative of a larger trend. Just a few years ago, everyone on the left understood the need to (correctly) point out that taxes and spending are not socialism. Much of the intra-left discussion at the moment involves people like me arguing that we’re seeing rapid, bizarre changes that are going to lead us into electoral wilderness if we don’t get our shit together. The rejoinder to this argument is usually: “Nah.” Since Jon Stewart recently was and maybe still is an avatar for liberal/progressive right-think, I’d like to hold his segment up as an indication of how much things have changed in left-wing discourse.
After intimating that socialism might be paradise for all, Stewart says: “If you've ever listened to AM radio in your uncle’s van, you know: Socialism…not good!” Well, yes, you’d know that if you’ve listened to AM radio. Of course, you’d also know that if you paid any attention to the world whatsoever in the past century. Socialism has a track record that makes trans-Atlantic zeppelin travel seem like an astounding success by comparison. Across the globe, socialism has produced autocratic regimes, famines so severe that history gives them a name, and — to be fair — some honestly-very-good agitprop art.
Of course, 99.9 percent of the time, Americans who support “socialism” don’t actually support socialism. Socialism is “a way of organizing a society in which major industries are owned and controlled by the government.” I have never met anyone in my entire life who thinks that everything should be state-run. I’ve known scores of socialists, but never heard anyone say: “When you buy soap, it should come from the Glorious Patriotic Soap Company, and your laptop should be made by The People’s Centralized State Computerworks.” The idea that everything could be made by state enterprises maybe wasn’t completely insane in 1848, when there were only 20 products in the world, so if the government made shoes, bread, buggy-whips, and a couple other things, everyone’s needs would be met. But the idea that that anyone in the future might pop into the State Food Shop to buy a Glorious Snack Treat Of Chocolate And Nougat With Little Cookie Things For VICTORY is absolutely bonkers.
When Americans say “socialism”, they almost always mean “Sweden”. Many people think that “socialism” means Swedish-style capitalism-with-a-large-social-safety-net, and that “communism” is the system used in the USSR, Cuba, and North Korea. That’s not correct — communism is meant to be the post-government condition that evolves from socialism — but whatever. I understand that the meaning of a word can change. So, even though socialism technically means “state-run monopolies”, in America today, it functionally means “the government helps you pay for day care.”
What I don’t understand is why anyone who supports the second thing (as I do!) would risk having it confused with the first thing. If my name was Geoffrey Epsteen, I wouldn’t walk around explaining “it’s Geoffrey with a ‘g’, and there are two ‘e’s in ‘steen’ like Bruce Springsteen” — I would just change my fucking name. There have been many polls in recent years showing that socialism is more popular than ever, but still not popular. This Gallup poll shows the trend:
The best argument against running from the “socialism” label like it’s a swarm of bees is that those numbers are bad, but not that bad. I agree that they could be worse. But, I’d make three points: 1) Positive views of socialism are surely highly-concentrated among people who are likely to vote Democratic anyway, 2) Republicans hate socialism so much that the word helps energize their base, and 3) What the socialist label signals to people matters. The GOP has spent decades trying to make the “socialism” label stick to Democrats because it’s a mark of radicalism. In fact, I’d argue that the fact that it’s a mark of radicalism is exactly what young people like about it. Unfortunately, I think that’s also what’s turning many people off.
Let’s return to this sentence: “If you've ever listened to AM radio in your uncle’s van, you know: Socialism…not good!” But people form opinions of socialism in ways other than AM radio. Some Americans have views of socialism formed by having lived in a socialist country. Though I can’t find polling on how socialism polls among, say, Cuban-Americans or Vietnamese-Americans, anecdotal evidence along with recent election results make it fairly clear that the socialist label is deeply unpopular in those communities. I don’t want to make too much of a single line in a comedy show, but it seems slightly telling that Stewart and his staff seem to think that the main way people develop negative views towards socialism is through exposure to right-wing propaganda. In fact, people can form negative views of socialism other ways, such as having Nicholas Maduro destroy your country’s economy so thoroughly that a once-middle-class country devolves into a prison-style toilet paper-based economy.
Let me put this example in context. This article is part of a three-part series. In part one, I argued that in present-day American politics, few things are more important than a party’s brand, and that the Democratic brand is increasingly associated with a type of highly-educated activist that most people hate. In part two, I argued that educated activists are hated because they practice a weird, fundamentalist religion that requires ostentatious displays of self-righteousness and is deeply-foreign to most Americans. In this article, I’m using Jon Stewart’s acceptance (or at least non-rebuttal) of the “spending is socialism” paradigm as a small, illustrative example of the drift towards radicalism in left-wing discourse. Socialism might be fashionable among young, college-educated types, but it remains unpopular elsewhere. A decade ago, Jon Stewart would have responded to “Obamacare is socialist” with “that’s ridiculous, no it’s not.” Today, he accepts the term, even though the policies being discussed are similar. Based on this segment, it seems likely that within the TPWJS writers room — which we see every episode and has already logged more screen time than every writers room in the history of late night combined — the notion that socialism isn’t broadly-popular and obviously the right way to go doesn’t even register. Which is the definition of being in a bubble.
For-show socialism is another behavior of the activist left that most people find deeply annoying. It costs a wealthy graduate student nothing to put a red star pin on his backpack and identify as a socialist. But to the extent that that grad student comes to symbolize the left, Democrats are likely to pay in votes. That, in turn, affects policy — Build Back Better would be a completely different bill if Democrats had two more Senate seats and a slightly-larger margin in the House. The consequences of radical messaging seemed clear to Democrats after their underperformance in 2020 — here’s how events were seen by the Democratic members of Congress who are currently providing the votes to enact social spending to help the working poor:
Democrats sagged with voters of color, particularly in Hispanic and Asian-American communities where Republicans’ attacks on Democrats as a left-wing party appear to have resonated, denying Mr. Biden a victory in Florida and costing the Democrats congressional seats in that state as well as Texas and California. Indeed, the only House seats Republicans picked up that were not in districts Mr. Trump also carried were in heavily Hispanic or Asian regions.
On a Democratic conference call this past week, Representative Linda Sanchez, a former member of the House leadership, criticized Democrats’ Latino outreach strategy as a dismal failure, according to two people who participated on the call. And Representative Donna Shalala of Florida, who lost her seat in a heavily Hispanic district, complained on the call that her party did not effectively rebut Republicans’ portrayal of Democrats as socialists.
“Defund police, open borders, socialism — it’s killing us,” said Representative Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat from South Texas who won just over 50 percent of the vote, two years after he nearly captured 60 percent. “I had to fight to explain all that.”
The “average white person,” Mr. Gonzalez added, may associate socialism with Nordic countries, but to Asian and Hispanic migrants it recalls despotic “left-wing regimes.”
It's common in politics to call unpopular things by another name. In my many years as a speechwriter, I always referred to “fees”, never “taxes”. The embrace of “socialism” to refer to taxes on the ultra-wealthy combined with social spending is the only case I can think of in which activists embrace an unpopular term to describe popular policies. The right has lobbed the “socialism” charge at the left for decades, and people like Jon Stewart used to rightly bat it away. Now, he doesn't bother. I have to think that’s bad news for the policies he supports.
It's weird how often this newsletter ends up addressing my specific intellectual bugbears. Like eventually I'm going to wake up to a three-part series on how people misuse the word "sublime."
Two immediate thoughts:
1. It's funny how the economic models most American socialists call socialism were actually conceived in post-WW2 Europe as a right-ish, neoclassical econ-based alternative to...yep, socialism: https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/german-social-market-economy-rules-based-policymaking-by-lars-p-feld-et-al-2021-03
2. JS's interview with Janet Yellen was so bad that it actually made me angry. If he wants to explain to his audience how policy exacerbates inequality, he might start by explaining the difference between monetary and fiscal policy to himself.
Marx changed the meaning of "socialism" to mean "state ownership" from what it meant before 1848 (which varied a lot from socialist to socialist, but was roughly "any government policy that helps poor people") and there were always non-Marxist socialists who rejected state ownership as the basic paradigm of socialism.
So the thing you are claiming as the "technical meaning" is just "the thing this one really famous guy tried to convince everyone else it meant in 1848", and the "functional meaning" is "what it meant before that, continued to mean for the tiny minority of non-Marxist socialists in the 1880s-1940s peak period of socialism and got revived as the meaning of socialism after that period".
There are lots of socialist parties - parties called things like "Parti Socialiste" or "Partido Socialista Obrero Español" or "Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" - that were supporters of state ownership of everything in 1950 and have not been for many years. Historically, the switch is usually characterised as being the "Bad Godesburg program" of 1959.
But, as you point out later on, that really doesn't matter. What matters is what most Americans believe it to mean.
Of course, the other point is that "Swedish-style capitalism-with-a-large-social-safety-net" is not what socialists mean by capitalism either. Capitalism is a political-economic system that is dominated by capitalists, ie large owners of capital. Capitalism is opposed to the free market and open competition because large owners of capital should not be able to lose out to small owners of capital.
And when people are complaining about capitalism, what they mostly mean by capitalism is "domination by rich people", not "a free market" or "private ownership of businesses".
I actually don't disagree with you at all in substance - American left-wing politicians should not talk about "socialism" because it's a loser in America, because so many Americans think that socialism means what Marx meant by socialism and not what non-Marxist socialists mean by socialism.