Our emails are made to shine in your inbox, with something fresh every morning, afternoon, and weekend. There may be nothing more American than the pride of being American.
Patriotic people who love their motherland—or adopted land—are everywhere in the world, but there is arguably no one as enthusiastically keen to demonstrate it as Americans. American pride typically means standing for its way of life—and its way of life is capitalism. And if capitalism is American, what can be more un-American than socialism? Politicians still use the specter of socialism to push back against reforms like universal health coverage or affordable housing.
And even as prominent political figures like senator Bernie Sanders and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declare themselves socialist, the belief that socialism is fundamentally incompatible with the US is still widespread.
It was the result of a deliberate promotion of patriotism alongside an aggressive rejection of socialism at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. And then there were the workers, frustrated by a lack of protection. Farmers revolted against banks and big corporations, particularly the railroads. Factory workers began to form unions, calling for better compensation and working conditions.
Both farmers and factory workers found strong representation in two political parties at the turn of the century—the Populist Party and the Socialist Party, both of which posed a real threat to capitalist forces. Leftists managed to get major shares of the votes in midwestern states like Oklahoma, Nevada, Colorado, and North Dakota where eventually, in the late s, leftists formed a government that created a state bank to provide low-interest rate loans to farmers.
New immigrants who had come in pursuit of a better life, too, often found themselves exploited by the titans of industry with little help or intervention from the government.
Many of them had been exposed to Marxist and anarchist political theories in their home countries, and began to begrudge the American system. Several Democratic presidential candidates have echoed the idea of a universal basic income program, providing a regular, taxpayer-funded paycheck to cover basic living expenses, eliminating the value and necessity of work. America is not a country that thrives because of big government. It thrives because its citizens know that hard work is rewarded, freedom is protected, and individuals can enjoy the fruits of their labor as they see fit.
It is that dream of personal freedom and individual property that has defined America as the land of opportunity. It is that opportunity that has and will continue to draw people to our land while making America the envy of the world. Skip to main content. The cost and burden of taking out those loans was making a lot of Americans ambivalent. Over the last 40 years wages have stagnated in real terms while the price of college has risen eight times as fast and the price of health insurance has also outpaced earnings.
At a local level it is also a response to a sclerotic democracy riddled with entitlement, nepotism and corruption. In south-west Pennsylvania, Innamorata beat Dom Costa. His extended family had dominated local politics for several years. One of his cousins, Paul, was defeated in his race for state representative by another socialist candidate, Summer Lee, an African American woman. In Chicago, where six socialist-backed candidates won seats to the seat city council earlier this year, the same pattern of taking down a corrupt establishment was clear.
Her father Dick Mell , the father-in-law of the former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich currently in jail for corruption and extortion , had held the seat since When Dick retired in , Mayor Rahm Emmanuel appointed his daughter as his successor. She lost the seat to a socialist candidate, Rosana Rodriguez-Sanchez. Yet Norway, unlike the United States, enjoys universal health care, child care, and elder care, as well as tuition-free universities, around 12 months of paid parental leave, and a robust social safety net.
Or they can question whether Scandinavia really is socialist after all, as Anthony B. Kim and Julia Howe of the Heritage Foundation did last year. In an essay that was published last year, Jeffrey Dorfman, an economist at the University of Georgia, argued that leftists who promote the Scandinavia model tend to conflate socialism with a generous welfare state. A fully socialized economy would be just as unfeasible as a fully privatized one. Socialism, as the term has evolved in mainstream usage, does not mean a total absence of markets, just as capitalism does not imply a total absence of public ownership and regulations.
Democratic socialism simply means a democracy leaning toward the leftward bound of the private-public ownership spectrum. Democratic socialism simply means a democracy leaning toward the leftward bound of the private-public ownership spectrum—an economy in which the government controls major corporations, while the people in turn control the government, securing de facto popular control of the economy.
The government functions as an intermediary, managing state corporations on behalf of the people. The greater the control the government exerts over the economy, and the greater the control the people exert over the government, the better the democratic socialist label fits.
The Norwegian government in particular controls the levers of the economy through ownership of major industries and financial institutions. It did not achieve this control through forced nationalization but through stock acquisitions on the open market. These investments, predominantly in hydropower and energy-intensive industries, were heavily financed by German war reparations, and to a lesser degree by the U. Marshall Plan. A second round of acquisitions began with the discovery of petroleum on the Norwegian continental shelf.
A final round of acquisitions arose from the Norwegian banking crisis of to As trust in the banking system recovered, public ownership was steadily scaled down until the current arrangement of roughly one-third public, two-thirds private ownership was established. While the U. It currently holds about 40 percent of the stocks traded on the Oslo Stock Exchange.
The public benefits of partially socialized industrial and financial sectors extend beyond dividends and veto power. The same can be said of financial institutions, whose gambling resulted in the Great Recession. When boards of directors hire CEOs, they instruct them to maximize shareholder value.
For private shareholders, value mostly boils down to short-term return on their investments.
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