The last President to follow the prescriptions for the economy of Democratic Socialism was so successful that the GOP had to institute term limits to assure he would not become a permanent fixture. FDR understood economics well beyond any of his peers at the time and used that understanding to covertly manipulate America into the best decades in its history and the people responded by giving its confidence to his party.
America’s dedication to Democratic Socialism was so deeply entrenched that by the ’50s a Republican President ran on a platform of strong unions and economic expansionism fueled by infrastructure investment. Ideologically, the GOP was on the ropes. Had the Democratic party stayed true to its roots in FDR’s policies and not gotten subverted by the interests of the financial sector we would likely now look a lot more like Denmark than the new Soviet Union oligarchy that we are now so well aligned with economically. It’s difficult to argue that such would be bad when so many countries such as Denmark kick our collective ass in almost any meaningful metric that benefits their populations while also supporting robust capitalistic economies.
The thing that is most often missed amid all of the labeling and name calling of our political struggle is that neither FDR’s or Bernie’s policies are “socialism”. No one is calling for the federal government to take possession of the means of production or distribute profits equally among workers and management. Both simply limit the excesses of capitalism that always make it its own worst enemy. Without such limiting factors as progressive taxation and regulation of markets, capitalism implodes on itself on a regular cycle and must look to the state for its salvation, as we saw as recently as ’08.
When capitalism implodes there is a natural collective desire for a strong government to arise and relieve the people’s suffering. That desire can shift between more labor-friendly governance that provides a bottom for workers and the supply chains they support, or it can, in absence of such policies, shift to searching for scapegoats to lay blame on for the suffering. The first tactic of fascism is always the second choice, dividing the people along lines of race or nationality to direct attention from the real cause of their pain which is the socially blind and solely profit-driven nature of unregulated capitalism.
Any historian with any knowledge of macroeconomics could have easily predicted the outcome of the 2016 election after the Democratic party, in collusion with our corporate media, prevented Bernie from offering the first option to America. The only natural choice that didn’t present staying the course on a fatal trajectory of neoliberal engineered decline was Trump. If America doesn’t recognize its error in not allowing Bernie to save capitalism, which is what he is offering, a greatly empowered Trump and the oligarchs pulling his strings will give the world another round of fascism that will only be defeated militarily once it is given total control of the world’s largest military.
Socialism isn’t a choice that is on the table, but fascism and WWIII are, regardless of which party is in power without Bernie.
