A couple of years ago, Newt Gingrich accused Obama of being a socialist, causing some squawking and grousing about incivility from the more sensitive types in Washington.
I jumped to the President’s defense, pointing out that Obama is a different type of statist.
I’m gratified that Thomas Sowell of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution agrees with me.
It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a “socialist.” He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism. What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector. Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama’s point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies… Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the “greed” of the insurance companies.
So what is the right technical description of what Obama is proposing? Well, if you allow nominal private property, but impose government control, it’s called fascism. Sowell agrees, and also adds some history for the unenlightened.
One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left. Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg’s great book “Liberal Fascism” cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists’ consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left’s embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left. …What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people — like themselves — need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat. …Only our own awareness of the huge stakes involved can save us from the rampaging presumptions of our betters, whether they are called socialists or fascists. So long as we buy their heady rhetoric, we are selling our birthright of freedom.
All this being said, I want to reiterate something else that I wrote back in 2010. It is counterproductive to call Obama a fascist because that term is now linked to the specific form of evil produced by Hitler and the National Socialist Party.
So if you disapprove of Obama’s policies, call him a statist or a corporatist. Heck, you can say he believes in cronyism or maybe even collectivism. Those terms get across that he wants more government without causing needless controversy that distracts from the main message.
But make sure you apply the same term to Republicans who impose the same types of policies, such as Bush and Nixon.
Reblogged this on jamesbbkk and commented:
So worse than a socialist, indeed:
Dan-I wouldn’t disagree except socialism is not just an economic theory. There is also a socialist theory of the mind and how to use the institutions of the state to mold it away from the individual, cognitive, knowledge model. Instead, you get an emphasis on emotion and fostering instinctive reactions. Each person is pushed to see themselves first and foremost as part of a group with an obligation to an amorphous common good.
And in the education policies he is pushing with the immense power of the federal purse, Obama does qualify. Which is why Professor John Goodlad has said if people really understood what Obama was doing in education they would be far more outraged than they are over healthcare. And he meant that apparently as a compliment.
I live in Europe and I would have to say that it is wrong to equate socialism with fascism in a European context. Socialism, as a label, does not have the same negative context here as it does in the US, indeed, many mainstream political parties in Europe are happy to embrace the ‘Socialist’ label and it would be wrong to equate them with fascists. Fascism, in it’s classical sense, implies a totalitarian disposition that simply does not exist here.
Living in Spain, I can honestly describe it as a free country, in fact, when I read on many US libertarian blogs what is happening over there, it makes me shudder. No politician in Spain would dare try to prohibit 16oz sodas. Puppicide is unknown here. I can eat fois gras till the geese come home.
Now, for sure, our fiscal situation is a complete mess and may well explode in our faces very soon. But answer me honestly, how far behind Spanish banks are the US banks, do you think?
We, of course, need to be vigilent of the authoritarians in our midst, but lets not equate socialism with fascism. It demeans the term. And we need to save it intact for when and if we really do need it, and it may not be that long.
While I basically agree with our host Dan Mitchell, I am disappointed by Sowell’s cavalier use of the words “right” and “left”.
Mussolini did not see himself as a man of the “left”: he saw himself as a man of the “right” (a word written in The Doctrine of Fascism with quotation marks, as I did).
That’s because he, like most Europeans at the time, equated the Right with “authority, the collective, and the State” (to quote from The Doctrine of Fascism). In other words, Europeans used the word Right to mean what Americans mean by the word “left”.
Mussolini also saw classical liberalism as the polar opposite of fascism: for him, liberalism was of the Left — and, significantly, he saw the election of FDR as the end of American liberalism.
For Mussolini and his contemporaries, Obama would be Right-wing and the Tea Party Left-wing. OWS would be perhaps center-Left, but only by virtue of their opposition to the ruling class.
Also, W.E.B. Du Bois being American, I seriously doubt that he used the words “right” and “left” before ww2.
Technically Smechkly who cares if the pea is split 50/50 or 49.999/50.001. I throw up every time some political brain tries to explain the difference between liberalism, progressivism, statism, socialism and communism. Keep these conversations in the Harvard reading room. Obama is 99.945% a Socialist. I’ll put big government (how many Czars does he have now?), ObamaCare and attempted gun control and on the scale and the needle points to socialism. He walks like socialist, he talks like a socialist, he’s a socialist.
[...] who impose the same types of policies, such as Bush and Nixon." Read the whole thing… Obama’s Technically not a Socialist, but He Won’t Like How Thomas Sowell Describes His P… _______________ Cam "Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are [...]
I have read that the dichotomy of “socialism” and “facsism” into opposing economic camps was a propaganda ploy of Stalin, to differentiate Hitler, his political rival, from himself. This allowed him to change what was essentially a politcal rivalry between the two parties, into an economic struggle his fellow travellers could buy into. Whether the state “owns” or “controls” the means of production is a false choice. State ownership or control is socialism, fascism, communism, Marxist-Leninism, Maoism or whatever. A rose by any other name is still a rose.
The true economic choice facing mankind is between individualism (aka free enterprise capitalism) vs. collectivism (see the list of names above). The wishy-washy middle populated by most American and European politicians is pure, unadulterated opportunistic, populist, self-engrandizing narsicism (did I spell that right?).
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One major missing component of this administrations “socialism” is that in true socialism, the government will provide you with a job. This administration provides everything except a required work obligation.
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