[ A look at the new documentary, “The Big Scary ‘S’ Word”
in which director Yael Bridge explores how socialist ideas that were
once considered radical are now taken for granted by most Americans.]
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WHY IS SOCIALISM BECOMING LESS SCARY?  
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Peter Dreier
October 23, 2020
Talking Points Memo
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_ A look at the new documentary, “The Big Scary ‘S’ Word” in
which director Yael Bridge explores how socialist ideas that were once
considered radical are now taken for granted by most Americans. _

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introduces Sen. Bernie
Sanders, I-Vt., U.S. 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate during a
rally at University of Michigan, March 8, 2020 in Ann Arbor, MI, Photo
by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images // Talking
Points Memo

 

In her extraordinary new documentary film, “The Big Scary ‘S’
Word,” director Yael Bridge examines the surprising rebirth of
American socialism. “Socialism is as American as apple pie,” notes
one of the film’s interviewees, Harvard University philosopher and
activist Cornel West. That statement becomes the film’s theme. 

Of course, many would dispute West’s statement. “America will
never be a socialist country,” President Donald Trump has often
proclaimed, identifying socialism with Venezuela, Cuba, and other
undemocratic societies. Trump is echoing the redbaiters who,
throughout the 20th century, and especially during the Cold War (from
the late 1940s through the 1970s), attacked socialism as a “hostile
and foreign ideology,” an import from Soviet Communism, as Columbia
University historian Eric Foner explains in the film. 

“Most socialists begin with a critique of inequality and the premise
that this is essential to the nature of capitalism and if you want to
create more justice and more equality, you’re going to have to
change the system,” Foner observes.

Although Bridge excavates the past contributions of socialism to
American politics and culture, she primarily focuses on the past
decade’s upsurge of socialist activism, including its role in
various issue movements (feminism, Occupy Wall Street, struggles for
health care and environmental sustainability, workers’ rights, and
Black Lives Matter) and the growing number of socialists winning
elected office.

Recent polls show that Americans — especially young people — are
warming up to socialism. A Gallup poll
[[link removed]] earlier this year discovered that
43 percent of Americans say socialism would be a good thing for the
country. Among 18-34 year olds, 58 percent embrace the idea, compared
with 40 percent of those between 35 to 54, and 36 percent among those
55 and older. Among Democrats, 70 percent say they think socialism
would be a good thing for America, in contrast to 45 percent of
independents, and 13 percent of Republicans. 

"Most socialists begin with a critique of inequality and the premise
that this is essential to the nature of capitalism and if you want to
create more justice and more equality, you’re going to have to
change the system."

The popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is both a cause and a consequence of these
changing beliefs. So, too, is the remarkable growth of the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA), which had only 6,000 members a few years
ago but now has over 70,000 dues-paying adherents and many more who
embrace its ideas and its activities. 

If today’s American socialists have any model at all, it is not
Russia, Cuba, or Venezuela, but the social democracies of Scandinavia,
like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway — countries with greater
equality, a higher standard of living for working families, better
schools, free universities, less poverty, a cleaner environment,
higher voter turnout, stronger unions, universal health insurance, and
a much wider social safety net. Sounds anti-business? Forbes
magazine ranked
[[link removed]] Sweden as
the number 2 country for business. The United States ranked number 17.

But the 83-minute film goes into considerable depth in explaining that
American-style socialism is homegrown, rooted in the nation’s soil
and culture.  Bridge shows how socialist ideas once considered
radical are now taken for granted by most Americans. Key leaders of
the abolition movement — and founders of the Republican Party —
were influenced by socialist views, historian John Nichols reminds us.
President Abraham Lincoln, who corresponded with Karl Marx, viewed
slavery as antithetical to democracy and believed that in the
burgeoning battles between labor and capital, workers and farmers had
the moral upper hand.  

In the early 1800s, American socialists — many of them influenced by
religious beliefs and secular philosophies, including writers
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson — founded communitarian
colonies like New Harmony in rural Indiana, Brook Farm in
Massachusetts, and the Oneida Community in upstate New York to try to
put their ideas into practice. Utopian socialism gained many new
adherents — including labor leader Eugene Debs and feminist writer
Charlotte Perkins Gilman — after Edward Bellamy published his novel,
“Looking Backward,” in 1888, which described a socialist America
in the year 2000. 

In the film, West reminds us that the “Pledge of Allegiance” was
written by Francis Bellamy, a socialist Baptist minister and
Edward’s cousin, in 1892 and that “America the Beautiful” was
penned by a socialist poet, Katherine Lee Bates, the following year.
He might have added that in 1883 another socialist poet, Emma Lazarus,
wrote the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

In the early 1900s, socialists led the movements for women’s
suffrage, child labor laws, consumer protection laws, the progressive
income tax, and workplace safety. Their constituents included
activists from old American families, among them some wealthy
“traitors to their class,” as well as many recent immigrants,
including Jewish and Italian garment workers, Scandinavian farmers,
Polish and Czech steelworkers, and Milwaukee’s German brewery
workers.

In 1916, Victor Berger, a Jewish immigrant from Austria and a
socialist congressman from Milwaukee, sponsored the first bill to
create “old age pensions.” The bill didn’t get very far, but two
decades later, in the midst of the Depression, President Franklin
Roosevelt persuaded Congress to enact Social Security. Critics
denounced it as un-American. But today, most Americans, even
conservatives, believe that Social Security is a good idea. 

Nichols (whose book, “The ‘S’ Word,” helped inspire the
documentary) reminds us that Milwaukee was run by Socialists from 1910
through 1960. Milwaukee introduced reforms, later adopted by many
other cities, that led to clean water and air, lovely municipal parks,
and well-designed public housing. Under Socialist Mayor Dan Hoan, who
led the city from 1916 to 1940, Milwaukee was consistently ranked as
the nation’s healthiest and best-run city. Anita Zeidler —
daughter of the socialist Frank Zeidler, who served as mayor from 1948
to 1960 — noted that Milwaukee’s socialists were “very
practical.” Proud of their modern infrastructure, they called
themselves “sewer socialists.” 

Debs, who founded the Socialist Party in 1901 and ran for president
five times under its banner, “spoke the language of American
society,” explains historian Foner. He never received more than six
percent of the national vote, but he was a popular public figure. At
its peak in 1912, over a thousand Socialist Party members won public
office. Candidates running as Republicans, Democrats, and Progressives
stole many of the Socialist Party’s ideas, watered them down, and
got elected.

A similar dynamic occurred during the Great Depression. With
one-quarter of Americans out of work, many became radicalized. Elected
president in 1932, FDR tapped into that anger by promoting ideas that
a few years earlier would have been unthinkable. He met with Socialist
Party leader Norman Thomas and other leftists and invited a number of
pragmatic radicals like Frances Perkins, Harry Hopkins, and Sidney
Hillman, into his inner circle. They crafted the New Deal program —
public jobs, Social Security, the minimum wage, unemployment
compensation, the right of workers to unionize, tough regulations on
banks — ideas that were first espoused by socialists. 

"Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the
people have made in the last 20 years."

It may surprise some viewers of “The Big Scary S Word” to hear
President Harry Truman – an ardent anti-communist Cold Warrior  –
excoriating his Republican opponents for branding as socialist his
efforts to expand the New Deal by providing government-funded health
insurance, more low-rent public housing, and other programs. In a
speech in October 1952, Truman said: “Socialism is a scare word they
have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20
years.”  

Black and white socialists were in the forefront of the civil rights
movement from the founding of the NAACP in 1909 through the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. Socialist organizers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard
Rustin influenced Martin Luther King’s thinking and activism. 

In a letter to his girlfriend (and later wife) Coretta Scott in 1952,
when he was a graduate student at Boston University, King wrote: “I
imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my
economic theory than capitalistic… [Capitalism] started out with a
noble and high motive… but like most human systems it fell victim to
the very thing it was revolting against. So today, capitalism has
out-lived its usefulness.” 

The film includes a little-seen interview with King in which he
discusses his leftist views.

“We have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise
capitalism for the poor,” King says. “Why are there 40 million
poor people in America? When you ask that question you’re raising
the question of a broader distribution of wealth. You begin to
question the capitalistic economy.”

But King rarely spoke publicly about his socialist views because he
believed that, in the midst of the Cold War, it would hurt his
credibility as a civil rights leader.

One of King’s closest advisors was Michael Harrington, whose
best-selling 1962 book, “The Other America,” awakened the country
to the reality of poverty in the midst of affluence. Although he was a
committed socialist, he did not argue that America’s persistent
poverty and inequality were caused by capitalism because, like King,
he feared that doing so would undermine the book’s influence. 

"The taxpayers are essentially the owners of the bank. It is
controlled by the people. … Sure it’s socialistic. But it’s not
un-American."

Socialism is no longer so scary.  The most compelling parts of the
film are the stories of Lee Carter, Kshama Sawant, Stephanie Price,
and Dicarlo Johnson, contemporary activists who reflect the upsurge of
socialism.

In 2017, Lee Carter, a 30-year old white Marine veteran and DSA
member, ran for the Virginia state legislature after he was injured at
work and discovered the inequities of the state’s workman’s
compensation system. A Democrat, he beat a six-term Republican
incumbent, but quickly learned that he would have little influence in
the Republican-controlled legislature. While many of his legislative
colleagues had cushy jobs with corporations that influenced their
votes, Carter worked as a low-wage Lyft driver in order to give him
the flexibility to attend legislative sessions and meet with
constituents. 

In 2019, however, the Democrats won a majority of seats in the
legislature and Carter was re-elected, buoyed by support from DSA, the
Democratic Party, the Sierra Club, Indivisible, NARAL and Planned
Parenthood. Earlier this year, the legislature finally passed one of
his bills — to extend the state’s minimum wage to workers at
Dulles and Reagan airports.  

Sawant, an immigrant from India and a one-time software engineer and
economics instructor, was active in Seattle’s left-wing movements,
including Occupy Wall Street. In 2013, she won a seat on the Seattle
City Council, running as a socialist. The following year, she helped
lead a grassroots campaign that persuaded her colleagues to pass a $15
citywide minimum wage, against the opposition of Amazon, Starbucks,
and other large Seattle corporations. Other cities have since
followed Sawant’s example and now Democrats have embraced a $15
minimum wage at the federal level.  

Carter and Sawant are among the roughly 50 socialists who now serve in
public office at the local and state levels (not only in deep blue
states but also in Montana, Indiana, Texas and Tennessee) as well as
four members of Congress. 

Price is a single mom with a master’s degree who teaches elementary
school in Oklahoma. She has to work two jobs to make ends meet and dip
into her own pocket to buy school supplies for her students because
the state government won’t provide adequate funding for public
schools. Classrooms are overcrowded and textbooks are outdated. Price
was never involved in politics until 2018, when her union, the
Oklahoma Education Association, waged a lobbying campaign to persuade
the Republican-controlled legislature to increase funding. We see
Price joining 36,000 other teachers marching on the state capital and
taking part in a remarkable 10-day strike that generated national
media attention. 

“We are fed up,” says Price, who is Black. “We shouldn’t have
to fight this hard.”

The strike ends with only a modest increase in school funding. Price
says: “I don’t feel it’s time to quit. We have to keep pushing.
We need to stand up together. I’m ready to shake some shit up. I’m
ready to make some changes.”

Those experiences radicalized her. She gained self-confidence and is
elected vice president of her local union. At the end of the film, she
attends her first socialist conference and even gives a speech.
“I’m surrounded by people who are not happy with the status quo.
I’m not the only person who has these feelings,” she says. 

Johnson, a Black man, turns around his life after he gets involved
with the Evergreen Cooperative movement in Cleveland, which, starting
in 2008, set up several successful worker-owned businesses that employ
over 200 people, many of them inner city residents who had previously
barely survived on minimum wage jobs. 

Johnson works in the co-operative’s laundry, which serves some of
Cleveland’s largest hospitals and universities. Thanks to his job at
Evergreen, Johnson was able to buy a house. He exudes pride at being
part of the co-op, where he sits on a committee that reviews the
firm’s financial information, something that blue-collar employees
in traditional businesses never get to do. The film uses the Evergreen
experience to illustrate the tradition of consumer, worker and tenant
co-operatives in American history.

In a segment of the film that perhaps best illustrates Bridges’
theme, we see North Dakota’s Republican Gov. Doug Burgum extolling
the virtues of the Bank of North Dakota (BND) at a celebration of its
100th anniversary in 2019. The bank was founded after the
Non-Partisan League, a political movement led by socialist farmers,
gained control of the governor’s office and the state legislature in
1918. The next year, the legislature established BND with $2 million
of capital to serve the farmers who were being ripped off with high
interest rates by private banks based in Minneapolis and Wall
Street. 

During the Depression, when other banks were foreclosing on family
farmers, BND helped them buy their farms back. BND made the first
federally-insured student loan in the country and continues to provide
loans to local farmers, businesses, and homeowners. 

“The Bank of North Dakota is successful when the citizens are
successful,” explained Roxanne Junker, a North Dakota native who
wrote a book about the bank. “It could make more money lending to
luxury condos instead of single-family owners, but it doesn’t have
to. Its goal is to serve the communities.” 

Since the Wall Street-induced financial collapse that began in 2008
and the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, activists
around the country have looked to the BND as a model. Several cities
and states have been debating the pros and cons of creating public
banks. Proponents hope that the Biden administration and a Democratic
Congress will pass legislation to create a federal bank to make loans
to worker, consumer, tenant co-operatives, and other enterprises that
Wall Street banks shun.

“The taxpayers are essentially the owners of the bank. It is
controlled by the people,” explains Mike Jacobs, publisher of the
Grand Forks Herald, referring to BND. “Sure it’s socialistic. But
it’s not un-American.” 

_“The Big Scary ‘S’ Word” will be screened at NYDOC, the New
York Documentary Film Festival, from November 11 to 18._

_[PETER DREIER is professor of Politics and the founding chair of the
Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His
books include Place Matters: Metropolitics for the
21st Century, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A
Social Justice Hall of Fame, and the forthcoming Baseball Rebels: The
Reformers and Radicals Who Shook Up the Game and Changed America.]_

_Thanks to the author for sending this to xxxxxx._

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