MEYERSON ON TAP (Prospect.org)
| The solution is hiding in plain view.It was one of those steam-bath D.C. days where your shoes start to sweat. I was behind my desk reading Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and wondering why he had to rewrite the thing 17 times, when she slinked into the office. She’d clearly gone to the Lauren Bacall School of Slink, but her eyes were wild with alarm. “Sit down,” I began, “and tell me all about it.” “It’s the pundits,” she husked, huskily. “They’re all over the map when they try to explain why there are so many”—she paused here to collect her thought—“socialists.” “They say some foreign power is paying them,” she continued, pulling out a Wall Street Journal op-ed from her lip gloss bag. “They say they were seduced by Marxist professors. They say this is what happens when we let billionaires get taxed or Lee Greenwood doesn’t get a lifetime Grammy.” “Pfoo,” I replied. I walked to my bookcase, picked out Werner Sombart’s 1906 tome Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? and gently threw it at her. “Check out Sombart,” I said. “In America, he said, socialism runs aground on the reefs of roast beef and apple pie.” “He was a vegetarian?” she asked. “No,” I replied. “He said American mass prosperity—relative to Europe’s, anyway—negated the need for socialism. But he didn’t address what would happen if broadly shared prosperity up and left.” “Where did it go?” she asked. “It got a super-luxe first-class ticket,” I answered. “Wealth and income and political power climbed their way up to the very top of the totem pole. What your precious pundits don’t seem to remember is that the number of American socialists and communists ballooned during the Depression. We’ve been here before, babe.” “As much as now?” she asked. “No, again. So long as they ran on third-party tickets, they couldn’t win squat. And the commies only started picking up members when Stalin told them to make nice with Roosevelt. In 1934, they’d called him a fascist. In 1936, when Uncle Joe changed his mind, FDR became the commies’ superhero. Real good commies had this thing for amnesia. Helped to forget what you’d said a couple months earlier.” “Then this guy Harrington—this was in the ’70s—said that the commies had been smart to go to work with unions and the Democrats, but they should have been open about who they were. That’s what socialists should do, he said. Third-party candidacies had their place, but that place usually wasn’t America. And when Bernie Sanders and AOC and this Zohran character validated that, it gave socialists some running room. They could grow.” |
| “So socialism surged when Mike Harrington was saying this?” she asked. “Well, no,” I responded. “I was a member of DSOC and DSA when they formed in the ’70s and early ’80s. But we hadn’t gone plutocratic yet. The banks hadn’t taken over the economy then, the big boys weren’t offshoring our smelters and our shoes yet, rich people still were paying taxes, there were barely any billionaires …” “No billionaires,” she gasped. “How can there be an America without billionaires?” “Believe it, babe. And we were happier then. So DSOC and DSA chugged along with just a handful of members. There were still lefty kids and some oldsters who could sing Spanish Civil War songs, but they didn’t register that capitalism was beginning to be let out of its cage and money would begin trickling upward. Then zooming upward.” “Socialism is catching on now,” I continued, “because Americans can see that capitalism just isn’t working for them. There’s a poll in today’s Wall Street Journal that shows that a majority of Americans say capitalism isn’t working well. That’s up from about a third a decade ago. When an -ism isn’t cutting it, people may conclude it’s time for a different -ism.” “But why socialism?” she squeaked. “Why not Rosicrucianism,” I came back with. “Because socialists aren’t afraid to tax billionaires to provide affordable child care. Because Rosicrucianism and Theosophism are still formulating their position on that.” “So it’s not foreign powers?” she queried. “It’s not Marxist critical studies professors?” “Moscow gold is gone,” I said. “Marxist critical studies professors we shall always have with us, but they’ve been around since the ’70s with no real-world effect until Lehman went blooey and only the rich really got bailed out.” “I think I get it,” she said, getting up and making for the door. “Gotta run.” “Hey,” I posited. “You free tonight?” She made the kind of face I make when eating my Aunt Freida’s goulash. “Well, how about I stay on the case for you?” I countered. “My retainer is just 50 bucks …” “Retainer?” she asked with studied incredulity. “Are you kidding? Like I can do 50 smackers?” “But …” I began. “Forget it, Mr. Historically Accurate Economic Determinist,” she spat out, slamming the door. “It’s the economy, stupid.” |
 Harold MeyersonEditor at Large |
