All that’s left is working out the details
In the early phase of the Obama administration, conservative commentators have made much of America’s supposed march toward socialism. Earlier this year, the Republican National Committee toyed with the idea of re-branding its political opponents the Democrat Socialist party. Instead, the GOP settled for simply opposing the Democrats’ “socialist” agenda.
That socialist agenda so far seems to be bailing out Wall Street, beefing up the military, helping General Motors get back on its feet (or wheels), and pursuing alternatives to single-payer national health insurance, so it hardly seems as though Karl Marx is in the White House. The Heritage Foundation analyzed Obama’s budget numbers and determined that he was increasing government spending from 20 percent of the gross domestic product to 22 percent. As Alan Wolfe asked in The New Republic, “Is it really possible that a society is capitalist when government spending represents 20 percent of GDP—but socialist at 22 percent?”
When you get into the details of government policy, the idea that Obama is somehow governing radically becomes even more absurd because, in essence, our entire government is set to serve private, capitalist business interests at every level. We are in fact heavily dependent on the government dole, and were even long before the Great Recession.
This came home to me while I was moderating a Historic Preservation and Cultural Tourism Symposium in Snohomish on the occasion of that town’s 150th birthday. Conference panelists included representatives of various federal agencies that provide assistance to historic-preservation efforts. We learned the details of tax breaks, tax credits, grants and other help the government can provide to local communities.
The agencies included Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Park Service, all of which have programs aimed at “revitalizing” towns, cities and rural areas. It’s not because historic preservation in itself is good. The rationale is that it’s good for business. Historic preservation is often pursued under the policy umbrella of economic development, and all you have to do to get help is adhere to government standards. The rules and regs reflect bipartisan Congressional mandates and mission statements that say the government’s job is to intervene in the marketplace to create outcomes that are carefully socially engineered. What the Republicans call socialism.
This goes beyond historic preservation. The Small Business Administration, the Interior Department, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, the Defense Department, the Department of Energy—nearly every public entity you can mention—have as part of their DNA aiding the economic prosperity of Americans, whether it’s training the next generation of workers, building affordable “workforce” housing, expanding roads and rail to generate economic growth, supporting crop prices or providing exploitable resources such as oil, grazing land and mineral rights.
The federal government is designed to help the private sector in an infinite number of ways, accessible especially to those who know how to navigate the system and have powerful friends. This is true for red states and blue cities. An urban area can get DOT funds for a light rail line, a rural town can get the USDA to buy it a police squad car, if they know the ropes. Thus is demonstrated the value of power-pork deliverers such as Sen. Patty Murray or the earmark-savvy Congressman Norm Dicks, whose name often comes up when you ask people where a federal grant came from or how a project in Washington state got Congressional approval.
And the DNA of private dependence on public largesse is truly embedded in Puget Sound through military and defense spending, which is a major source of employment in the region. In King, Snohomish, Kitsap and Pierce counties, more than 100,000 jobs are dependent on military bases. And DOD procurements in Washington state totaled nearly $5 billion in 2006, with 77 percent of that in Central Puget Sound, according to the Prosperity Partnership, an economic development coalition connected with the Puget Sound Regional Council. We joke about having “senators from Boeing,” but our pols have been delivering for other parts of the war machine, too, like shipyards and Navy bases.
Even Snohomish, where the historic-preservation conference was held, has roots in the defense business, as its founders included speculators hoping to capitalize on a military road that was going to be built through the area in the 1850s to allow the shipment of troops and material north for a potential war with Britain in the San Juans Island Boundary dispute. We know it today as the Pig War, whose only casualty was a Hudson’s Bay Company porker, which serves as a fitting symbol for a government project that spurred a local building boom.
Our government’s definition of social good is, in essence, welfare for business. People opposed to that tend to be libertarians, who are the only real critics of the current administration on the political right with any credibility on the topic of opposing socialism. Libertarians oppose Obama’s brand of governance but have excoriated George W. Bush’s. Other critics include a few self-proclaimed socialists on the left, but there’s only one actual socialist in Congress: independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. He opposed, for example, Obama’s appointment of the Wall Street-friendly Tim Geithner as secretary of the Treasury.
The GOP outcry is transparently hypocritical because the Republicans support big government, strong government and interventionist government when it suits them, and their brand of socialism is very much reflected in policy details designed to take care of their friends. As Wolfe writes, “Socialism, in the Republican imagination, is only something Democrats do, never something they themselves do.” In short, it’s a largely imagined and even cherished villainy they project onto their opponents and use to stir their angry base. When all else fails, try red-baiting.
The fact is, the merger between government and the private sector was a battle fought and won long ago by economic arguments championed by most Republicans and your local Chamber of Commerce. By GOP rhetorical standards, we’re all socialists now, and have been for a long while. All we’re doing now is quibbling over the details. L&P
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