The meaning of “democratic socialism”―a mixture of political and economic democracy―should be no mystery to Americans. After all, socialist programs have been adopted in most other democratic nations. And, in fact, Americans appear happy enough with a wide range of democratic socialist institutions in the United States, including public schools, public parks, minimum wage laws, Social Security, public radio, unemployment insurance, public universities, Medicare, public libraries,
The Two Internationalisms
In recent years, internationalism―cooperation among nations for promotion of the common good―has acquired a bad reputation.
Of course, internationalism has long been anathema to the political Right, where a primitive tribalism and its successor, nationalism, have flourished for many years. Focusing on their nation’s supposed superiority to others, a long line of rightwing demagogues, including Adolf Hitler (“Deutschland
Trump Has Blocked Wage Gains for American Workers
On June 19, 2019, President Donald Trump bragged at his re-election kickoff rally in Orlando that, thanks to his leadership, the wages of American workers “are rising at the fastest rate in many decades.”
The reality, however, is that they are not. Indeed, wages rose at a faster rate only a few years before, under his predecessor. And a key reason for the very limited
Dear Moderators of the Presidential Debates: How About Raising the Issue of How to Avert Nuclear War?
You mass media folks lead busy lives, I’m sure. But you must have heard something about nuclear weapons―those supremely destructive devices that, along with climate change, threaten the continued existence of the human race.
Yes, thanks to popular protest and carefully-crafted arms control and disarmament agreements, there has been some progress in limiting the number of these weapons and averting a nuclear holocaust. Even so, that progress has been rapidly unraveling in recent months,
Billionaires and American Politics
Is the United States becoming a plutocracy?
With the manifestly unqualified but immensely rich Donald Trump serving as the nation’s first billionaire president, it’s not hard to draw that conclusion. And there are numerous other signs, as well, that great wealth has become a central factor in American politics.
Although big money has always played an important role in U.S. political campaigns, its influence has been growing over the past decade. According to the Center
Whatever Happened to an Affordable College Education?
As U.S. college students―and their families―know all too well, the cost of a higher education in the United States has skyrocketed in recent decades. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, between 2008 and 2017 the average cost of attending a four-year public college, adjusted for inflation, increased in every state in the nation.
How About a Peace Race Instead of an Arms Race?
In late April, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that, in 2018, world military expenditures rose to a record $1.82 trillion. The biggest military spender by far was the United States, which increased its military budget by nearly 5 percent to $649 billion (36 percent of the global total). But most other nations also joined the race for bigger and better ways to destroy one another through war.
This situation represents a double tragedy.
Breaking the Grip of Militarism: The Story of Vieques
Vieques is a small Puerto Rican island with some 9,000 inhabitants. Fringed by palm trees and lovely beaches, with the world’s brightest bioluminescent bay and wild horses roaming everywhere, it attracts substantial numbers of tourists. But, for about six decades, Vieques served as a bombing range, military training site, and storage depot for the U.S. Navy, until its outraged residents, driven to distraction, rescued their homeland from the grip of militarism.
Like the main island of Puerto Rico, Vieques—located eight miles to the east―was ruled for centuries as a colony by Spain, until the Spanish-American War of 1898 turned Puerto Rico into an informal colony (a “nonsovereign territory”) of the United States. In 1917, Puerto Ricans (including the Viequenses) became U.S. citizens, although they lacked the right to vote for their governor until 1947 and today continue to lack the right to representation in the U.S. Congress or to vote for the U.S. president.
During World War II, the U.S. government, anxious about the security of the Caribbean region and the Panama Canal, expropriated large portions of land in eastern Puerto Rico and on Vieques to build a mammoth Roosevelt Roads Naval Station. This included about two-thirds of the land on Vieques. As a result, thousands of Viequenses were evicted from their homes and deposited in razed sugar cane fields that the navy declared “resettlement tracts.”
The U.S. Navy takeover of Vieques accelerated in 1947, when it designated Roosevelt Roads as a naval training installation and storage depot and began utilizing the island for firing practice and amphibious landings by tens of thousands of sailors and marines. Expanding its expropriation to three-quarters of Vieques, the navy used the western section for its ammunition storage and the eastern section for its bombing and war games, while sandwiching the native population into the small strip of land separating them.
Over the ensuing decades, the navy bombed Vieques from the air, land, and sea. During the 1980s and 1990s, it unleashed an average of 1,464 tons of bombs every year on the island and conducted military training exercises averaging 180 days per year. In 1998 alone, the navy dropped 23,000 bombs on Vieques. It also used the island for tests of biological weapons.
Naturally, for the Viequenses, this military domination created a nightmarish existence. Driven from their homes and with their traditional economy in tatters, they experienced the horrors of nearby bombardment. “When the wind came from the east, it brought smoke and piles of dust from their bombing ranges,” one resident recalled. “They’d bomb every day, from 5 am until 6 pm. It felt like a war zone. You’d hear . . . eight or nine bombs, and your house would shudder. Everything on your walls, your picture frames, your decorations, mirrors, would fall on the floor and break,” and “your cement house would start cracking.” In addition, with the release of toxic chemicals into the soil, water, and air, the population began to suffer from dramatically higher rates of cancer and other illnesses.
Eventually, the U.S. Navy determined the fate of the entire island, including the nautical routes, flight paths, aquifers, and zoning laws in the remaining civilian territory, where the residents lived under constant threat of eviction. In 1961, the navy actually drafted a secret plan to remove the entire civilian population from Vieques, with even the dead slated to be dug up from their graves. But Puerto Rican Governor Luis Munoz Marin intervened, and U.S. President John F. Kennedy blocked the Navy from implementing the plan.
Long-simmering tensions between the Viequenses and the navy boiled over from 1978 to 1983. In the midst of heightened U.S. naval bombing and stepped up military maneuvers, a vigorous local resistance movement emerged, led by the island’s fishermen. Activists engaged in picketing, demonstrations, and civil disobedience―most dramatically, by placing themselves directly in the line of missile fire, thereby disrupting military exercises. As the treatment of the islanders became an international scandal, the U.S. Congress held hearings on the matter in 1980 and recommended that the navy leave Vieques.
But this first wave of popular protest, involving thousands of Viequenses and their supporters throughout Puerto Rico and the United States, failed to dislodge the navy from the island. In the midst of the Cold War, the U.S. military clung tenaciously to its operations on Vieques. Also, the prominence in the resistance campaign of Puerto Rican nationalists, with accompanying sectarianism, limited the movement’s appeal.
In the 1990s, however, a more broadly-based resistance movement took shape. Begun in 1993 by the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques, it accelerated in opposition to navy plans for the installation of an intrusive radar system and took off after April 19, 1999, when a U.S. navy pilot accidentally dropped two 500-pound bombs on an allegedly safe area, killing a Viequenses civilian. “That shook the consciousness of the people of Vieques and Puerto Ricans at large like no other event,” recalled Robert Rabin, a key leader of the uprising. “Almost immediately we had unity across ideological, political, religious, and geographic boundaries.”
Rallying behind the demand of Peace for Vieques, this massive social upheaval drew heavily upon the Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as upon the labor movement, celebrities, women, university students, the elderly, and veteran activists. Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans throughout Puerto Rico and the diaspora participated, with some 1,500 arrested for occupying the bombing range or for other acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. When religious leaders called for a March for Peace in Vieques, some 150,000 protesters flooded the streets of San Juan in what was reportedly the largest demonstration in Puerto Rico’s history.
Facing this firestorm of protest, the U.S. government finally capitulated. In 2003, the U.S. Navy not only halted the bombing, but shut down its Roosevelt Roads naval base and withdrew entirely from Vieques.
Despite this enormous victory for a people’s movement, Vieques continues to face severe challenges today. These include unexploded ordnance and massive pollution from heavy metals and toxic chemicals that were released through the dropping of an estimated trillion tons of munitions, including depleted uranium, on the tiny island. As a result, Vieques is now a major Superfund Site, with cancer and other disease rates substantially higher than in the rest of Puerto Rico. Also, with its traditional economy destroyed, the island suffers from widespread poverty.
Nevertheless, the islanders, no longer hindered by military overlords, are grappling with these issues through imaginative reconstruction and development projects, including ecotourism. Rabin, who served three jail terms (including one lasting six months) for his protest activities, now directs the Count Mirasol Fort―a facility that once served as a prison for unruly slaves and striking sugar cane workers, but now provides rooms for the Vieques Museum, community meetings and celebrations, historical archives, and Radio Vieques.
Of course, the successful struggle by the Viequenses to liberate their island from the burdens of militarism also provides a source of hope for people around the world. This includes the people in the rest of the United States, who continue to pay a heavy economic and human price for their government’s extensive war preparations and endless wars.
Lawrence Wittner (https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/ ) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
Most Americans Reject Trump’s `America First’ Policy
As president, Donald Trump has leaned heavily upon what he has called an “America First” policy. This nationalist approach involves walking away from cooperative agreements with other nations and relying, instead, upon a dominant role for the United States, undergirded by military might, in world affairs.
Nevertheless, as numerous recent opinion polls reveal, most Americans don’t support this policy.
The reaction of the American public to Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from key international agreements has been hostile. According to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll conducted in early May 2018, shortly before Trump announced a pullout from the Iran nuclear agreement, 54 percent of respondents backed the agreement. Only 29 percent favored a pullout. In July 2018, when the Chicago Council on Global Affairs surveyed Americans about their reaction to Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate agreement, it found that 66 favored remaining within the Iran accord, while 68 percent favored remaining within the Paris accord―an increase of 6 percent in support for each of these agreements over the preceding year.
Most Americans also rejected Trump’s 2019 withdrawal of the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia. A survey that February by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs reported that 54 percent of Americans opposed withdrawal from this nuclear arms control treaty and only 41 percent favored it. Furthermore, when pollsters presented arguments for and against withdrawal from the treaty to Americans before asking for their opinion, 66 percent opposed withdrawal.
In addition, despite Trump’s sharp criticism of U.S. allies, most Americans expressed their support for a cooperative relationship with them. The Chicago Council’s July 2018 survey found that 66 percent of Americans agreed that the United States should make decisions with its allies, even if it meant that the U.S. government would have to go along with a policy other than its own. Only 32 percent disagreed. Similarly, a March 2019 Pew Research poll found that 54 percent of American respondents wanted the U.S. government to take into account the interests of its allies, even if that meant compromising with them, while only 40 percent said the U.S. government should follow its national interests when its allies strongly disagreed.
Moreover, despite the Trump administration’s attacks upon the United Nations and other international human rights entities―including pulling out of the UN Human Rights Council, withdrawing from UNESCO, defunding UN relief efforts for Palestinians, and threatening to prosecute the judges of the International Criminal Court―public support for international institutions remained strong. In July 2018, 64 percent of Americans surveyed told the Chicago Council’s pollsters that the United States should be more willing to make decisions within the framework of the UN, even if that meant going along with a policy other than its own. This was the highest level of agreement on this question since 2004, when it was first asked. In February 2019, 66 percent of U.S. respondents to a Gallup survey declared that the UN played “a necessary role in the world today.”
But what about expanding U.S. military power? Given the Trump administration’s success at fostering a massive military buildup, isn’t there widespread enthusiasm about that?
On this point, too, the administration’s priorities are strikingly out of line with the views of most Americans. A National Opinion Research Center (NORC) survey of U.S. public opinion, conducted from April through November 2018, found that only 27 percent of respondents thought that the U.S. government spent “too little” on the military, while 66 percent thought that it spent either “too much” or “about the right amount.” By contrast, 77 percent said the government spent “too little” on education, 71 percent said it spent “too little” on assistance to the poor, and 70 percent said it spent “too little” on improving and protecting the nation’s health.
In February 2019, shortly after Trump indicated he would seek another hefty spending increase in the U.S. military budget, bringing it to an unprecedented $750 billion, only 25 percent of American respondents to a Gallup poll stated that the U.S. government was spending too little on the military. Another 73 percent said that the government was spending too much on it or about the right amount.
Moreover, when it comes to using U.S. military might, Americans seem considerably less hawkish than the Trump administration. According to a July 2018 survey by the Eurasia Group Foundation, U.S. respondents―asked what should be done if “Iran gets back on track with its nuclear weapons program”―favored diplomatic responses over military responses by 80 percent to 12.5 percent. That same month, as the Chicago Council noted, almost three times as many Americans believed that admiration for the United States (73 percent) was more important than fear of their country (26 percent) for achieving U.S. foreign policy goals.
Unlike the president, who has boasted of U.S. weapons sales to other countries, particularly to Saudi Arabia, Americans are also rather uncomfortable about the U.S. role as the world’s pre-eminent arms dealer. In November 2018, 58 percent of Americans surveyed told YouGov that they wanted the U.S. government to curtail or halt its arms sales to the Saudi Arabian government, while only 13 percent wanted to maintain or increase such sales.
Finally, an overwhelming majority of Americans continues to express its support for nuclear arms control and disarmament. In the aftermath of Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the INF treaty and announcement of plans to
What Democratic Socialism Is and Is Not
In recent weeks, Donald Trump and other Republicans have begun to tar their Democratic opponents with the “socialist” brush, contending that the adoption of socialist policies will transform the United States into a land of dictatorship and poverty. “Democrat lawmakers are now embracing socialism,” Trump warned the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in early March. “They want to replace individual rights with total government domination.” In fact, though, like many of Trump’s other claims, there’s no reason to believe it.
The ideal of socialism goes back deep into human history and, at its core, is based on the notion that wealth should be shared more equitably between the rich and the poor. Numerous major religions have emphasized this point, criticizing greed and, like the revolutionary peasants of 16th century Germany and the rebellious Diggers of 17th century England, preaching the necessity for “all God’s children” to share in the world’s abundance. The goal of increased economic equality has also mobilized numerous social movements and rebellions, including America’s Populist movement and the French Revolution.
But how was this sharing of wealth to be achieved? Religious leaders often emphasized charity. Social movements developed communitarian living experiments. Revolutions seized the property of the rich and redistributed it. And governments began to set aside portions of the economy to enhance the welfare of the public, rather than the profits of the wealthy few.
In the United States, governments at the local, state, and federal level created a public sector alongside private enterprise. The American Constitution, drafted by the Founding Fathers, provided for the establishment of a U.S. postal service, which quickly took root in American life. Other public enterprises followed, including publicly-owned and operated lands, roads, bridges, canals, ports, schools, police forces, water departments, fire departments, mass transit systems, sewers, sanitation services, dams, libraries, parks, hospitals, food and nutrition services, and colleges and universities. Although many of these operated on a local level, others were nationwide in scope and became very substantial operations, including Social Security, Medicare, National Public Radio, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. armed forces. In short, over the centuries the United States has developed what is often termed “a mixed economy,” as have many other countries.
Nations also found additional ways to socialize (or share) the wealth. These included facilitating the organization of unions and cooperatives, as well as establishing a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and a progressive tax policy―one with the highest levies on the wealthy and their corporations.
Over the course of U.S. history, these policies, sometimes termed “social democracy,” have enriched the lives of most Americans and have certainly not led to dictatorship and economic collapse. They are also the kind championed by Bernie Sanders and other democratic socialists.
Why, then, does a significant portion of the American population view socialism as a dirty word? One reason is that many (though not all) of the wealthy fiercely object to sharing their wealth and possess the vast financial resources that enable them to manipulate public opinion and pull American politics rightward. After all, they own the corporate television and radio networks, control most of the major newspapers, dominate the governing boards of major institutions, and can easily afford to launch vast public relations campaigns to support their economic interests. In addition, as the largest source of campaign funding in the United States, the wealthy have disproportionate power in politics. So it’s only natural that their values are over-represented in public opinion and in election results.
But there’s another major reason that socialism has acquired a bad name: the policies of Communist governments. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, socialist parties were making major gains in economically advanced nations. This included the United States, where the Socialist Party of America, between 1904 and 1920, elected socialists to office in 353 towns and cities, and governed major urban centers such as Milwaukee and Minneapolis. But, in Czarist Russia, an economically backward country with a harsh dictatorship, one wing of the small, underground socialist movement, the Bolsheviks, used the chaos and demoralization caused by Russia’s disastrous participation in World War I to seize power. Given their utter lack of democratic experience, the Bolsheviks (who soon called themselves Communists) repressed their rivals (including democratic socialists) and established a one-party dictatorship. They also created a worldwide body, the Communist International, to compete with the established socialist movement, which they denounced fiercely for its insistence on democratic norms and civil liberties.
In the following decades, the Communists, championing their model of authoritarian socialism, made a terrible mess of it in the new Soviet Union, as well as in most other lands where they seized power or, in Eastern Europe, took command thanks to post-World War II occupation by the Red Army. Establishing brutal dictatorships with stagnating economies, these Communist regimes alienated their populations and drew worldwide opprobrium. In China, to be sure, the economy has boomed in recent decades, but at the cost of supplementing political dictatorship with the heightened economic inequality accompanying corporate-style capitalism.
By contrast, the democratic socialists―those denounced and spurned by the Communists―did a remarkably good job of governing their countries. In the advanced industrial democracies, where they were elected to office on numerous occasions and defeated on others, they fostered greater economic and social equality, substantial economic growth, and political freedom.
Their impact was particularly impressive in the Scandinavian nations. For example, about a quarter of Sweden’s vibrant economy is publicly-owned. In addition, Sweden has free undergraduate college/university tuition, monthly stipends to undergraduate students, free postgraduate education (e.g. medical and law school), free medical care until age 20 and nearly free medical care thereafter, paid sick leave, 480 days of paid leave when a child is born or adopted, and nearly free day-care and preschool programs. Furthermore, Sweden has 70 percent union membership, high wages, four to seven weeks of vacation a year, and an 82-year life expectancy. It can also boast the ninth most competitive economy in the world. Democratic socialism has produced similar results in Norway and Denmark.
Of course, democratic socialism might not be what you want. But let’s not pretend that it’s something that it’s not.
Dr. Lawrence Wittner (https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/ ) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).