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NY Times Op-Ed, March 10, 2020
We’ve Been Looking in the Wrong Places to Understand Sanders’s Socialism
By Richard White
Mr. White is a professor of American history.
Detractors like to equate Senator Bernie Sanders’s socialism with Soviet
and Chinese Communism. This is very 20th century of them. But if critics
are looking for a knockout blow, they’re swinging at the wrong century,
the wrong country and the wrong socialism.
Mr. Sanders does not disguise his socialism. But the question is: What
do Americans mean when they talk about socialism? Pete Buttigieg equated
socialism with a “rigid ideology,” but Mr. Sanders fits into a strain of
American socialism that has largely eschewed ideology, made few
references to Karl Marx, and been more likely to talk about fairness and
values than about economic theory.
American socialism has a long history, and Mr. Sanders falls into a
particular slice of it. He does not sound like the doctrinaire immigrant
socialists of the 19th century, for example. He is somewhat closer to
Norman Thomas and the socialists of the 1930s or Eugene Debs and the
socialism of the early 20th century. But both men headed a socialist
party, which Mr. Sanders does not.
The socialists Mr. Sanders most resembles were Gilded Age intellectuals,
reformers, union members and ordinary citizens who self-labeled as
socialist. There were immigrants among them, but the leading voices
were, like Mr. Sanders, native-born and middle-class advocates of reform
within the Democratic and Republican parties, whose bosses they often
criticized.
Mr. Sanders sounds like these Gilded Age socialists in part because the
issues of their time were similar to ours — immigration, environmental
deterioration, declining well-being and growing inequality in a period
of rapid technological and economic change. Mr. Sanders — whose
socialism, built on fairness, is remarkably nonideological — shares the
conviction of these old socialists that values, not economic laws,
determine the contours of American society. The Gilded Age socialists
admitted what their opponents often did not: Americans did not all share
common values.
Like most modern pundits, 19th-century liberals — the equivalent of
modern libertarians — believed that Americans always have been and
always will be individualists. They imagined society to be a collection
of autonomous subjects whose competition achieved the best possible
outcomes. To deny this truth, they felt, was to deny reality.
Those who called themselves socialists echoed Dr. Leete in Edward
Bellamy’s best-selling 1888 novel “Looking Backward,” a book that
imagined a socialist utopia. Dr. Leete defined the core problem in
American society as “excessive individualism.” The socialists stressed
collectivities — the home, the community, the church and the nation.
They spoke to another equally American tradition that had flowered in
the Gilded Age: The Knights of Labor, who envisioned worker-owned
cooperatives replacing wage labor and sought to amend “the work of the
Founders” to “engraft republican principles on property and industry.”
Their influence pervades “Looking Backward,” which is less a novel than
a compendium of desired reforms. Not surprisingly, some of Mr. Sanders’s
supporters have rediscovered the novel.
The more his opponents caricature Mr. Sanders as a Sandinista or a
Bolshevik, the more Mr. Sanders’s actual similarity to 19th-century
socialists makes him seem unthreatening, even avuncular. He is
infinitely closer to William Dean Howells, the 19th-to 20th-century
novelist who for a while proclaimed himself a socialist, than to Joseph
Stalin.
Howells’s political evolution makes socialism’s American roots clear.
Howells wrote campaign biographies for Abraham Lincoln and Rutherford B.
Hayes, and remained close friends with John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt’s
secretary of state. Even when Howells called himself a socialist in the
late 1880s, he continued to vote Republican, although he thought the
party was corrupted.
Howells’s socialism originated in an ethical crisis. He attended court
to watch trials; he visited factories. He defended those accused of the
Haymarket bombing. Liberalism failed him. He could no longer believe, as
he once did, that in the United States the ills that afflicted humanity
could “be averted by honest work and unselfish behavior.” By the late
1880s what he had called the “smiling aspects” of American life seemed
to be disappearing.
Howells regarded socialism as “not a positive but a comparative thing …
Every citizen of a civilized State is a socialist.” If anyone believed
“that the postal department, the public schools, the mental hospitals,
the almshouse are good things; and that when a railroad management has
muddled away in hopeless ruin the money of all who trusted it, a
Railroad Receiver is a good thing,” then that person embraced socialism.
Howells believed that “the postal savings-banks, as they have them in
England; and national life-insurance as they have them in Germany are
good things.”
Like Howells, Bernie Sanders embraces a series of modest changes. Mr.
Sanders often rightly seems bewildered that free public college
education — once the norm in California — and the universal health care
of Canada and Europe can seem to be radical solutions to American problems.
Opponents of socialism cast such proposals as dangerous and un-American,
but Henry James was closer to the truth when he described the limits of
Howells’s imagination. He thought Howells’s deficiencies as a novelist
arose from his being too much at home with “the moderate, the
optimistic, the domestic, and the democratic” to take great risks. James
could have been describing Howells’s socialism and that of his
contemporaries. Frances Willard, for example, was an evangelical
Christian and a self-described Christian socialist who drew little
distinction between her Christianity and her socialism. “In Every
Christian there exists a socialist; and in every socialist a Christian.”
She was a president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which
influenced the vision in “Looking Backward” of American socialism.
Francis Bellamy, Edward’s cousin and another Christian socialist, wrote
the Pledge of Allegiance. “Liberty and justice for all” pretty much
epitomized the values behind his beliefs.
The modesty of socialist goals could ironically emerge as Mr. Sanders’s
shield. Radicals — anarchists, Communists and other Marxists — have at
critical moments influenced America’s development, often for the better,
and most of them have despised American socialists as insufficiently
revolutionary, ideologically incoherent, hopelessly sentimental and
utterly enmeshed in existing society.
They were right — which was why American socialists have been far more
influential than their radical critics. Socialists appealed to
sensibility, values and justice, not ideologies. They put their hope in
the benevolence and fairness of the mass of Americans — what Howells
called the sufficiency of the common — rather than in elites. They often
did not know exactly where they were going or how to get there, but they
knew the direction they must go and who must accompany them. They did
not despair. They seem quite familiar and quite American.
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