How to Deal with Accusations of “Socialism”

Don't be Trapped into Discussing Socialism

The radical right loves to accuse American leftists of being socialists and their policy ideas of being “socialism,” and the radical rightists add, as the OTWH did in his latest State of the Union speech, that America will never be a socialist. This accusation reveals the emptiness of radical rightist thinking. They can find no substantive reason for opposing the things that the left is proposing. So, they resort to name-calling.

The accusation has the additional advantage, from the rightists’ point of view, that it draws unwary leftists into an argument over socialism. They end up defending socialism instead of defending their policy proposals. This is a huge mistake. It is a trap, and leftists should not fall into it.

Promote Policies on the Basis of Widely Shared Values

What then should a leftist do when confronted with the accusation of socialism. He/She should ignore the accusation and should defend his/her policy recommendations on their merits. That is easy to do, and the rightists have no real defense against it except more name-calling. The defense should invoke basic American values and moral principles. Here is an example in the area of healthcare:

In a rich society like ours, people should not die because they cannot afford to pay for care. We all know that the free market does not always provide for everyone’s needs and that, in some cases, we should go beyond what the free market provides. For example, most of us feel that if a school child cannot afford to buy a winter coat in Wisconsin’s cold climate, that is unjust, and we go outside of the free market to find a remedy. We donate the coats that our children have outgrown to Goodwill, or we raise funds to pay for coats for children who cannot afford them. 

Healthcare is like winter coats for school children. Just as every school child ought to have a winter coat, so everyone in our country ought to have adequate healthcare, and we know that many people are not wealthy enough to provide it for themselves in our current healthcare system. The kind of private health insurance that we have in the United States is not an adequate answer because its cost keeps rising, and its coverage gets worse and worse. 

We know, too, that we cannot provide healthcare for everyone through individual charity.  In health care, there is no equivalent to donating our children’s outgrown coats to Goodwill. We can provide care for everyone only if we use our power as citizens and work through our government to establish a program that recognizes that no one should be denied health care because of an inability to pay. Medicare for All is one way of solving that problem.

Nowhere in this example is socialism mentioned, and the point is that we can promote the policies that we favor without invoking socialism and without discussing its merits. Polls have shown over and over again that while most Americans are wary of socialism, they favor some kind of a national health care system. We can appeal to them on the basis of the values that we all share, and that is how we win.