My parents were young adults when World War I occurred, and they lived on into the Cold War years following World War II. My father was college age by the time the War to End All Wars broke out, and my mother was a few years younger. They experienced the Great Depression years as a family with children, and they got to watch the U. S. inevitably slide into the second world war. But the Iron Curtain and the Cold War spawned by the U.S.S.R. was beyond their ability to explain.
Both of my parents were a little young to have noticed Benito Mussolini’s burgeoning success with Socialism in Italy. But the “noble experiment” in Russia following the Armistice of 1918 caught their attention, and it piqued their sense of fairness and justice for the poor and the lower classes. From what I read, many years later, it appears that they were not totally out of step with their young adult peers.
Socialism in the 1920s and 1930s did not have the bad reputation in the U. S. that it acquired in later years. The liberal or progressive agenda of the Roosevelt administration, in many respects copying policies of the maturing Socialist governments in Europe, was apparently well tolerated even as it elongated the Great Depression. In my family, Socialism started becoming a little tarnished as the excesses of the German Socialist Workers Party began to leak out. Stalin’s distancing his government from those of Germany and Italy (directing his propaganda ministry to refer to those countries only, and frequently, as “Fascist”) slowed the oxidation of “Socialism” somewhat. After Hitler ordered his armies to invade Russia, there was never again any mention of Germany as a “Socialist” country.
Socialism regained a little of its luster during the brief period while the U.S.S.R. and the West were united in the effort to defeat the Axis powers. Post-war, though, the Iron Curtain and an apparent “cold” war was another speed bump in the rehabilitation of Socialism. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations into U. S. Government officials who were, or thought to be, Communists was the next reputation killer for Socialism. Anti-colonial resistance movements the world over, some with rather long histories, began to come out and display the Communist banners everywhere. My mother commented, “This isn’t what we thought of as Socialism”.
Marxism has had, and continues to have, a number of different fashions and flavors. From the late 1800s there have been Pragmatism, Progressivism, Socialism, Fascism, Communism, and multiple nuances of “Liberalism”. But to the average person on the street, there hasn’t been fifty cents worth of difference between the varieties of Marxism. This Chameleonism has probably been Marxism’s best self-preservation trait, and it seems to have worked well in the U.S. The consistent attributes across all forms of Marxism, however, have been and continue today to be control and coercion—all important decisions are made by the government, with little left to the vagaries of the ballot box or the citizenry. The U.S. mid-term elections seem to indicate that there is, at least at present, a difference of opinion on this governmental philosophy between the Obama administration and a substantial percentage of U.S. voters.
It’s still too early to tell if the arrogance, elitism and overreaching of President Obama, Senator Reid, and Speaker of the House Pelosi have resulted in another decline in the reputation of Socialism. Also it is not yet known what effect the financial calamities and resultant rioting in the Socialist countries of Europe will have on long-term opinion of Socialism as a viable form of government.
In our last conversation that included political topics, my mother said she was coming to the conclusion that Socialism ran contrary to human nature, and she wasn’t sure it could ever be made to work. But my father never lost the faith, and he went out of this world comfortable in his belief that Unionism and Socialism would become the perfect government for the U.S. some day.
The Obama administration and its allies are now in full damage control mode, albeit with differing styles among the players. Nancy Pelosi paraphrases Nikita Khrushchev’s dictum, “We will bury you”. Harry Reid, however, prefers Star Trek’s Borg, “Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated”. President Obama unwaveringly continues promoting class envy, reminding us that equality of opportunity may sound nice, but that any government which fails to effect and rigidly enforce universal equality of identical results is a loser government.
All of us will likely have to wait for the next national election to see how much the national opinion of Socialism improves. In the meantime we can continue to observe how the reputation of Socialism fares in the European Socialist countries.
