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...and socialism
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Candidate
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Apr 22, 2009 09:18pm |
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| Category | Op-Ed by Candidate |
| Media | Newspaper - Boston Globe |
| News Date | Thursday, April 23, 2009 03:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | By Bernie Sanders
REPRESENTATIVE Spencer Bachus is one of the few people I know from Alabama. I bet I'm the only socialist he knows, although he darkly claims there are 17 socialists lurking in the House of Representatives.
I doubt there are any other socialists, let alone 17 more, in all of Congress. I also doubt that Bachus understands much about democratic socialism.
Of course, Washington brings people like us together to fight for our principles and work things out for the good of the country. Spencer and I used to serve together on the House Financial Services Committee. But Washington is often a place where name-calling partisan politics too often trumps policy. A standard refrain in John McCain's presidential stump speeches was a claim that Barack Obama's Senate voting record was more liberal than the Senate's only socialist, yours truly. Even as political hyperbole, the attack didn't work out that well for my colleague from Arizona.
Still, branding someone as a socialist has become the slur du jour by members of the American right, from Newt Gingrich to Rush Limbaugh. Some, like Mike Huckabee, intentionally blur the differences between socialism and communism, between democracy and totalitarianism.
If we could get beyond such nonsense, I think this country could use a good debate about what goes on here compared with places with a long social-democratic tradition like Sweden, Norway, and Finland, where, by and large, the middle class has a far higher standard of living. |
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