The Democrats’ Socialist Surge : Jason Riley
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-socialist-surge-1439334004
Bernie Sanders drew a crowd of 27,500 in Los Angeles on Monday. In the age of Obama, a liberal with a statist agenda fits right in.
People who follow politics probably know that Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont who is challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, is a socialist. Whether they give a fig is a separate matter, which may tell you something about today’s Democrats.
Mr. Sanders is currently drawing the largest crowds of any candidate in either party. On Monday, he drew a crowd his campaign estimated at 27,500 to the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, including those in an overflow area outside, watching on giant video screens. Over the weekend, 28,000 people turned out to see him in Portland, Ore., and a campaign stop in Seattle pulled 15,000. The conventional wisdom is that Mr. Sanders’s bid is destined to fail. His progressive base is too white and too small for a party that places a premium on “diversity,” and the Democratic establishment has already settled on Mrs. Clinton.
All true, perhaps. The disruption of his Seattle appearance by “Black Lives Matter” protesters suggests that challenges lie ahead for him. But it is also true that no one is saying Bernie Sanders can’t win because America isn’t ready to elect an avowed socialist as president, which might have been the case not too long ago.
Mr. Sanders, a New York City native, moved to Vermont in 1968 after becoming involved with the radical left while attending the University of Chicago. He first ran for Senate in 1972 as the candidate of the socialist Liberty Union Party and garnered just 2% of the vote. He lost a few more statewide races, and then eked out a 10-vote victory in 1981 to become mayor of Burlington. In 1990, running as an independent, he became only the third socialist ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. The one preceding him—Victor Berger of Wisconsin—left office in 1929.
Berger was a founding member of the Socialist Party of America, which nominated labor leader Eugene Debs for president five times between 1900 and 1920. The first part of the 20th century was socialism’s heyday. Debs never won a state but he did win almost 6% of the popular vote in 1912, and the party elected about 1,200 candidates to local offices during that period. The socialists, however, with their calls for income redistribution and the nationalization of resources, were never able to compete with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s coalition of Big Labor, blacks and rural whites in the South.
In 1932, the Socialist Party won just 2% of the vote, and in 1936 it managed less than half of 1%. Depression-era Democrats wanted economic growth, not a cradle-to-grave welfare state. When a 1935 Gallup poll asked voters to assess the amount of government spending on relief and recovery, only one in 10 said spending was too low, and the respondents who said spending was too high outnumbered those who said it was adequate by 2 to 1.
“Socialist parties blossomed in every important country in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, mobilizing mass support for expanding the power of the state, both to provide welfare services (such as pensions) and to restrain the power of the market,” write John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in their 2004 history of U.S. politics, “The Right Nation.” “But in America socialists cast their seed on barren ground.”
Notwithstanding FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, the authors note, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 “on a wave of resentment against ‘big government,’ the United States had a lower tax rate, a smaller deficit as a proportion of GNP, a less developed welfare state and fewer government-owned industries than any other western industrialized nation.”
If the Democratic Party once felt the need to distinguish itself from socialism, that no longer seems to be the case. When Mr. Sanders entered Congress in 1991, “Democrats initially balked at accepting a Socialist in their caucus,” according to the “Almanac of American Politics.” Eventually, however, he was granted seniority status as a Democrat, and he used it to push a progressive agenda that included tax increases, single-payer health care, a 50% reduction in military spending and a national energy policy.
It was working-class voters who backed Debs a century ago, but Mr. Sanders’s socialism appeals mainly to upper-middle-class professionals and fits neatly within the parameters of mainstream, income-inequality-obsessed Democratic politics in the 21st century. He may have an affinity for a political ideology that has given the world everything from the Soviet Gulag to modern-day Greece, but in this age of Obama, the senator is just another liberal with a statist agenda.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the head of the Democratic National Committee, was visibly rattled when MSNBC host Chris Matthews asked her recently to explain “the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist.”
Her nonresponse: “The more important question is, ‘What is the difference between being a Democrat and being a Republican?’ ”
Mr. Matthews pressed her: “I used to think there was a big difference. What do you think it is? A Democrat like Hillary and a Socialist like Bernie Sanders.” Ms. Wasserman Schultz refused to answer. And why should she? These days, it’s largely a distinction without a difference.
Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor, is the author of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).
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