President Obama: As American as apple pie

By Money Matters Editors

There’s been a great deal of banter, and, frankly, static and hysteria, concerning President Obama’s economic policies. The most-vocal critics, really a fringe of the American voting public, assert that Obama is ‘a socialist.’ Nothing could be further from the truth: Obama believes in corporate capitalism, and fits into the tradition of a long-line of American reformers who are capitalists.

Europe looks at America with amusement: how can a President who ardently believes in the private sector’s virtues (entrepreneurship, ingenuity/innovation, dynamism, a more-efficient use of resources, reward for work, wealth building, and job creation, among others), and whose systemic reforms largely rely on the private sector, be viewed as a socialist?

Philistines, obstructionists, or both?

The reason is based in the United States’ political culture, which is 1) very private sector-oriented, and contains 2) the fear of a strong central government. There is a long history in the U.S. of autonomically - and in some cases mindlessly - opposing any economic/social reform. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), a liberal, was called a socialist during the debate over Social Security, the now bedrock pension system for most Americans. (Try opposing Social Security now, and see what happens to you, politically.) President Harry S Truman, an ideological moderate, was called ‘a traitor’ for taking, in the interpretation of the extreme ideological right, too weak a stance versus the Soviet Union and communism in the 1940s after World War II. President Lyndon B. Johnson was called a socialist during the successful effort to pass Medicare, the popular health insurance program for senior citizens. In short, any time an American president attempts economic / social reform, the fringe right wing goes into overdrive: it’s opposed to nearly all government programs, except defense.



But the extreme right’s fears of ‘big government’ are not just rooted in the American culture. They also stem from ignorance: they equate socialism with Soviet gulags, human rights abuses, and totalitarian governments. Many in the extreme right don’t know what a social democracy is – they can’t imagine how someone can be a social reformer, or even a socialist, and still favor democracy. They either have little knowledge of, or choose not to learn about the social democracies of Sweden, Finland, Norway, France, and Germany etc. Nor do they have substantial knowledge of the broad, enlightened – and more humane – public policies these nations have. The extreme right is against any social reform involving government, even those that lead to humane, smart, and more-just social conditions.

The extreme right favors limited government with small local governments, and almost as small state governments, and not much more. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with advocating for limit government – who wants excessive government? - but what they fail to understand is that the limited government system they seek is grossly inadequate to meet the problems of a modern, complex, industrial society. That reality has never deterred the extreme right: they’ve largely ignored the economic reality around them since FDR’s presidency, and probably for much longer than that. Further, their extreme views – and in some cases truly ludicrous ideas – today are perhaps triggered by the fact that, as a political bloc, their power is getting smaller and smaller. As evidenced by the 2006 and 2008 elections, more and more Americans know that the state can play a positive role in society, along side a dynamic private sector. Most Americans now realize that market absolutism - the belief that markets can do no wrong and are self-policing and self-correcting - has been discredited every bit as much as orthodox communism. The extreme right argues that the American people will swing back over to them, given more time, but the long-term trend does not look good: the financial crisis demonstrated the folly of market absolutism, and this is an age that has incontrovertibly required and will continue to require collective action. That's something that just doesn’t register with the extreme right: it probably never will.

The above infuriates the extreme right. Add the racist views by some elements in the extreme right – but by no means all members – and conservative, national, political commentators on t.v. and radio who use demagoguery and half-truths, and who play to the fears of these often ill-informed Americans, all with the goal of stalling any social reform that involves government, and you can see why they are quick to brandish any former as ‘a socialist.’

But know that President Obama, like FDR, Truman, LBJ, and Bill Clinton before him, are as corporate capitalist American as any CEO of a Fortune 500 company. And you don’t have to live in Europe for two years to understand that.