It hit me this morning what a socialist enterprise the military is. The government decides — usually without the consent of the taxpayer — what munitions will be manufactured, where troops will be sent, and what operations will be carried out on his/her dollar. Not only that, but our troops receive all kinds of benefits we would deem “socialist” if they were provided to the population at large: medical care, housing, childcare, education assistance, pensions etc. Now, you may be quick to point out that maintaining a military is vital to securing the freedom and prosperity of our nation, and that we should be obliged to take care of our troops — I am inclined to agree — but that doesn’t negate the fact that the military is by definition a socialistic institution.
America actually tolerates a great deal of such institutions: the post office, public schools, unemployment benefits, social security, medicare, emergency services and so on. However, no one but the most hard-line libertarian would suggest we do away with these programs. In this regard, we are all what I’d like to call “convenience socialists.” We are to socialism what Ted Haggard is to gay.
That said, I’d like to point out that we socialists differ from the mainstream only in where we draw the line. Most people see no ideological conundrum in publically funded defense against threats to our freedom. We socialists count the downhill slide to plutocracy among those threats.
Six years ago today, Bush announced we were going to war with Iraq.
Listen to the language he uses:
“…to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.”
“…Saddam’s ability to wage war…”
“We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat, and restore control of that country to its own people.”
“[we] will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.”
“We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of firefighters, and police, and doctors on the streets of our cities.”
“…the dangers to our country, and the world, will be overcome.”
Today we look back, and we can say there was no threat. Yet the Bush Administration clearly whipped up support for the war by implying impending attacks on the American people. We were duped, and it can be very hard to admit that.
It’s especially hard for the families of the troops still over there. Faced with a lack of justification, many of them have understandably substituted a new rallying call: the liberation of the Iraqi people. Don’t get me wrong, spreading freedom is a noble cause, but this gripes me for two reasons.
First, the American people are not generally preoccupied with this kind of thing, and if we were, there would be far more worthy subjects for our attention. I don’t mean to downplay the atrocities committed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, but North Korea, East Timor, Rwanda, Darfur, and Cambodia are all instances where someone should have stepped in to end brutally oppressive regimes or mass murder, and the U.S. didn’t step up to the plate. We shouldn’t be allowed to wear the ‘liberator’ hat unless we are out there indiscriminately liberating.
Of maximal relevance is Saddam’s gassing the Kurds. There was no palpable threat to the American people at that time, so we let him have at it. When we went to war in 2003, it was because we were made to fear him. Make of that what you will — our obligation to peace and freedom as a superpower is another debate entirely — but we are not liberators, and that is not why we went to war in Iraq.
The second problem is that we were not spreading freedom. Freedom would entail allowing the Iraqis to choose their own goverment and economic systems. We essentially installed your standard western Executive/Parliamentary/Judicial representative republic, which we assume to be the most highly developed form of government (debatable). It was certainly better than the dictatorship they had before, however what concerns me is that with American style democracy, came American style economy. We didn’t separate the two concepts, we just set up a capitalist market and called it done.
Nowhere is it written that Democracy = Captalism, which is one thing that frustrates me so much about the American political environment today. One could imagine a capitalist dictatorship, a socialist democracy, or a communist republic, but in practice we don’t distinguish economic system from political system — we mistakenly think it’s a package deal.
The Iraqis very well may have wanted to be socialist country like France, but we didn’t give them the option. Instead, we opened their market to all of our ridiculously cheap American products and services, so they will never be able to develop industry of their own. We won’t let them institute tariffs on our goods, so they will be perpetually suckling at the teat of American hypercapitalism; without economic autonomy, they will remain a third world country forever.
We are quick to “bring ‘em what we got,” but we soon forget how we got here: a century of sky-high tariffs and economic isolation, which fostered growth of our own economy. Only then did we open up our market to foreign goods. We are denying this to the Iraqis.
Some ‘freedom.’
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One last thing Bush said:
“…coalition forces will make every effort to spare innocent civilians from harm.”
“I think there is a prudential reason for maintaining a progressive tax system (and we certainly can argue about “how” progressive it should be): namely, that if you believe, as I do, that the U.S. is best served by maintaining a capitalist system and a free market, we have to accept that one of the natural consequences of such a system is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
Regardless of whether these fewer and fewer deserve the money they accumulate or are unfairly being punished by progressive taxation, the political consequence of such an accumulation of wealth is radicalism - a majority that uses its political power to destroy the system rather than simply to modify it.
In other words, progressive taxation is required to maintain the political viability of a free market.”
Sarah Palin won’t stop ranting about how Obama is going to turn the country into a communist state:
“See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else.”
In classic Palin style, she singlehandedly accuses liberals of advocating abolition of private property, while at the same time blurting out a completely unintegrated noun phrase “more tax agenda” that sounds like some kind of Buzzword-Tourette’s tic.
This single sentence is a scintillating example of the Republican strategy: make people fear your opponent with utterly inarticulate, nonsensical, baseless accusations, delivered with a contrived appeal to down-home sensibility. And tragically, this seems to be working.
To me, the discourse plays out as follows:
Liberals: “The rich are getting richer at expense of the poor.”
Republicans: “You are a redistributionist.”
Liberals: “No, it’s just alarming that in 1980, the top 7% owned 20% of the wealth, and today the top 1% owns the same amount. We need to rebuild the middle class.”
Republicans: “You are a socialist.”
Republicans are just calling names, they aren’t offering any real solutions to the problem that our country is becoming a plutocracy.
Well let me make a radical claim: redistribution is exactly what we need right now. At times, that word has been (rightly) treated as a profanity, but today it shouldn’t be. The pendulum has swung too far in the direction of plutocracy, and it’s time that it swing back towards fairness. You may call that change in direction “socialism”, but we have to pull to get back to center.
