Socialism isn't Scary

Below is my column from today's edition of the Grand Haven Tribune. 

Some nights, watching the news, I feel like I’ve stepped into a time machine. Accusations of communism are flying again, aimed at our schools, our city halls, even our churches. I half expect someone to lean into a microphone and ask, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”

That question was asked again and again by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s, the era that came to bear Senator Joseph McCarthy’s name. Careers were destroyed on rumor and innuendo. Screenwriters were blacklisted, teachers were fired, and thousands of federal employees, including many gay and lesbian public servants, were purged in the name of national security. With the wisdom of history, I hope none of us look back on that period as our finest hour as a nation. Most of us now see it as a warning about what fear can do to a free people.

And yet, the accusation is back, often aimed at anyone who suggests we might solve a problem together. Press a little, though, and it becomes clear that what most critics mean is not communism but socialism.

The difference matters. Communism, as Karl Marx imagined it, sought the abolition of private property and a classless society. In practice, the twentieth-century regimes that claimed the name, from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Mao’s China, became one-party police states that crushed dissent, controlled the press, and seized land and livelihoods by force.

Democratic socialism, and its close cousin social democracy, are something else entirely. They work through elections, not revolution. They keep markets, private businesses, and private property, while insisting that some things, like health care, education, and a secure old age, are too important to leave entirely to the pursuit of profit.

Many ideas once dismissed as dangerously socialist are now simply part of American life. In 1912, the Socialist Party, with Eugene Debs as its presidential candidate, called for a shorter workday, an end to child labor, women’s suffrage, unemployment insurance, and old-age pensions. Each was fiercely opposed. In 1961, the American Medical Association even distributed a recording by a young actor named Ronald Reagan, warning that health insurance for seniors would cost us our freedoms. Medicare passed four years later. The word “socialist” has a long history of being used to frighten us away from things we later cannot imagine living without.

My favorite piece of this history, though, comes from Milwaukee, where the city’s socialist mayors earned the nickname “sewer socialists.” Their radical program was clean water, public sewers, and parks. That nickname has stuck with me, because I think this whole conversation makes more sense when we stop shouting about it nationally and start thinking small and local.

Here in Grand Haven, none of us digs our own well or hauls our own waste. We pay for water and sewer together. Our electricity comes from a city-owned utility, the Board of Light and Power. When the snow piles up each winter, the snowmelt system downtown keeps the sidewalks clear for everyone, whether they own a shop on Washington Avenue or are just out for a walk. We share a library, firefighters, public schools, and Harbor Transit buses that get neighbors to work and to the doctor. I’ve never heard anyone at a city council meeting call any of that communism. We just call it Grand Haven.

At the same time, nobody wants City Hall deciding what I grill for dinner, which church my family attends, or where I buy my morning coffee. Those choices belong to us. The shops, restaurants, and small businesses that make our downtown so lively exist because people took a risk on their own good ideas, and our town is richer for it.

Catholic social teaching has a word for this balance: subsidiarity. Things should be handled at the smallest, most local level that can handle them well. Individuals and families come first, then neighbors, congregations, and civic groups, and only then larger levels of government when a task is simply too big. Some things are best left to each of us. Some things only the whole community can do. Most of us live by that principle every day without ever giving it a name.

So maybe the better question is not “Is it socialist?” but “Is this something we do best on our own, or something we need to do together?” That is a question neighbors can actually talk about, and the answers rarely divide neatly along party lines.

Let me be clear about what should frighten us. Authoritarianism, the state seizing control of our bodies, our goods, and our services, absolutely strikes at the root of our democracy. Christians of every political stripe should resist any government, left or right, that silences dissent, punishes the vulnerable, or demands loyalty above conscience. 

But the belief that we can sometimes do things better together, especially to protect the most vulnerable, is not something to be afraid of. Neither is the conviction that not everything should be left to the free market, or, more accurately, to the power of a handful of billionaire oligarchs.

In fact, as I read the Bible, crafting a society of justice that cares for the least of these sounds an awful lot like what the prophets were talking about. Jesus began his public ministry by announcing good news to the poor and release to the captives. He told us that whatever we do for the hungry, the stranger, the sick, and the prisoner, we do for him. 

I don’t think Jesus was a socialist (or a capitalist, for that matter). Those are modern categories, and the kingdom he ushered in is bigger than any political platform. But it is a kingdom where the hungry are fed and the lowly are lifted up. That vision isn’t scary. It sounds a lot like the gospel, and on our best days, it sounds a lot like Grand Haven.

The Rev. Dr. Jared C. Cramer, Tribune community columnist, serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven. Information about his parish can be found at www.sjegh.com.