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How could America get a socialist president?
- Thread starter Commissar From Kiev
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Every time someone trolls on AH.com a baby sealion cries.
Please don't make baby sealions cry.
usertron2020
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Please do not get yourself an Official Warning, Kicking, or Banning.
I'll stand out like a sore thumb of bad manners if you should leave us.frlmerrin said:
FDR was a Centrist Democrat with considerable amounts of Social Democracy in his New Deal for saving the US economy. If he looks "Socialist", it probably has to do with the incredible amounts of venom produced by his chief enemies, the Chicago Tribune and the US Supreme Court of Charles Evans Hughes (one of our worst SCOTUSes ever). Not unlike today, with Obama's presidency marred by a totally-off-the-wall opposition calling him (among countless other names) a Socialist, despite his Republican predecessor having some considerable "socialist" programs of his own (Medicare Part D frex). The Tea Party of today would find much to admire in the Roosevelt Haters.
Liberal Democrat =/= Social Democrat =/= Socialist
I know it can be confusing when you are someone living in and putting familiar political association labels meant for your own multi-party parliamentary systems ruling over much smaller nation-states rather than using unfamiliar labels meant for duopoly republican systems ruling a continental spanning nation.
IOW, in the USA to be a Liberal Democrat (by European standards) would make you at most a mild Conservative without any of the impulses for scorched earth. To be a "social(ized)"/Progressive Democrat by European standards would make you a standard Socialist but without nationalization of any private sector bodies. To be a Socialist in America you'd have to be, well, an actual Socialist. (1)
1) Like the Socialist Party in America. Bernie Sanders may have "Socialist" on his lapel, but if he actually started calling for massive nationalization of US industry as was tried in Western Europe, he'd be immediately ejected from the 2016 POTUS race and wouldn't get re-elected in the Senate, even when representing Vermont. Socialism, and socialization, is represented by what you have/had in Scandinavia, not here. Not even in most of Western Europe.
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I think you can only have a mass Socialist Party in the US if you kill Jim Crow.
usertron2020
Donor
But if you kill Jim Crow, somebody is going to get the credit for it, and it won't be a lily white SCOTUS pre-Earl Warren that does it. After all, it was the SCOTUS that originally OKed Jim Crow AND signed off on putting the Nisei in camps.
A Socialist Party can quite happily ignore Jim Crow for the same reason the Northern Democrats did.
Well, the Socialists would certainly view Southern poll tax as an instrument of capitalist oppression, so it's not a far stretch to have some socialists fighting against Jim Crow.
Perhaps if the socialist leadership managed to cool down immigrant vs. American-born and black vs. white tensions, they could accomplish quite a lot.
Some would, but I think some would view it as a capitalist evil and want to get rid of Jim Crow.
My thesis is that socialism requires the sort of class cohesion that Jim Crow dissolves by two-tiering labor. I mean kill it in the crib: start from the 1870s/1880s.
I think they would ignore it and consider economic needs to be greater that getting rid of Jim Crow.
Considering that killing Jim Crow OTL was used by Reagan et al. to persuade the white working class to kill the unions that got them the wages that made anything Reagan said attractive, I don't think you need to kill Jim Crow to have a a more social state in the early 20th.
Nonetheless, I could see socialism appealing more to black southerners than white southerners.
These are completely unrelated issues. In the USA (especially in the south) it would have been completely possible to have a powerful agrarian socialist party that was also white supremacist. I would suggest that Huey Long of Louisiana was about as close to a populist socialist as the US ever had. Long and his many supporters were also no enlightened liberals about race.
Yes, but in the 1930's and 1940's black southerners were powerless and politically irrelevant, precisely because of Jim Crow. Absent an outright violent Marxist revolution among blacks, a successful and powerful democratic socialist movement in the South would have to be a white-dominated movement that appealed mainly to economic justice issues affecting poor whites.
That is true, but that is not to say that the socialist movement would have to be outright racist.
That's also not good enough. Lots of liberals accept government intervention without advocating the abandonment of capitalism.
Socialism advocates public (meaning democratic whether of the anarchist or ststist steiain) ownership of the means of production in capital. Simply "intervening" in the market isn't enough, heck welfare etc are liberal capitalism reforms that address the effects of capitalism rather than its core.