Sanders May Be Slipping but America is Awakening to Socialism

By Finian Cunningham

March 18, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - "American Herald Tribune"- The declared socialist presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders took a beating this week in the Super Tuesday primaries, with his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton winning all four states on offer.

Sanders is still in the running. The overall race to win presidential nomination is not over yet, with some big states like California and Washington yet to vote. But it’s looking like a long shot for the Vermont senator now.

Some might pessimistically conclude that socialism is a non-runner as a political choice in America. As one pundit recently asserted on CNN in negative reference to Sanders, the United States is a “center-right”country, not a left one. Suggesting that there was an inherent aversion to socialism among most Americans.

On the contrary, one could very well make the counter argument that socialism has a great future in the US. (And not just in the US, but globally –provided that the policies are confidently presented.) In this view, socialism actually represents an exciting new beginning in the US. With time, public support for such policies can only grow. Who knows in the future, a socialist president may take the White House; and a socialist Congress may be elected. Why not?

Even if Sanders doesn’t win the presidential ticket this time around, what his brave campaign has achieved is no small thing. He has opened up public awareness and discourse to the mere concept of “socialism”. It has been something of a marvel to see mainstream news media outlets having to give air to the very word. Probably for the first time in US history.

The hitherto absence of the socialism-word in American public discourse is testimony to the repressive condition of US official politics, certainly since the end of the Second World War. For decades, American public thought has been imprisoned in a zeitgeist of anti-Soviet Cold War paranoia. Fear of open discussion was rife and it contaminated any genuine free expression or exploration of democratic alternatives. Within living memory, anyone in public life who had the temerity to declare socialism was literally run out of their jobs by McCarthyite “commie hunters”.

The US prides itself in being “a leader of the free world”. But how laughable is that claim whenever people, up until recently, could not advocate democratic ownership out of fear of being ostracized, imprisoned and, yes, assassinated for being a Red.

Sanders has slain that dragon by bringing the notion of socialism into mainstream debate. History has helped too. The long-ago dissolution of the Soviet Union has removed that bogeyman from many of the rightwing parties. Although you may have noticed Republican contender Donald Trump attempting a bit of anachronistic muckraking this week by referring sarcastically to “our communist friend Bernie”. How pathetic!

Amazingly, and rather uplifting too, is that many Americans, especially young Americans, are not at all alienated or repelled by the idea of socialism. Far from it, millions of American voters have enthusiastically embraced Sanders and a form of politics that aims to exert democratic control over governance, economic production and Wall Street finances.

This public enthusiasm is because the time is ripe for a socialist alternative. No-one can deny the paramount reality in American society, as with many other countries around the world, of the record levels of inequality. The relentless chasm between rich and poor is destroying communities. It is killing this and many other countries.

Even Republican front-runner and arch-business magnate Trump acknowledges this reality. And it is a major reason why so many people are rallying to him in the vain hope that Trump will “make America great again”. But he won’t. Because the capitalist paradigm has become exhausted, irreparably warped and out of democratic control. The system has inevitably and irretrievably become a milking machine for the corporate and financial oligarchs, operated by their politician-puppets.

That is why socialism is going to grow. Because bringing the economy and government under democratic control is the only way that society can be redeemed to generate decent jobs and public services, affordable housing, free education and universal healthcare. As German socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg said one hundred years ago: the historical choice we face is either “socialism or barbarism”.

And people have had enough barbarism already.

The thing is that, contrary to myth, ordinary Americans have a long and honorable history of advancing socialism. One thinks of the Haymarket martyrs of 1886 and countless other workers’ movements for justice, the gutsy politician Eugene Debs, who ran for the presidency five times as socialist candidate into the 1920s; one also thinks of giant socialist literary writers like Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Ernest Hemingway.

Indeed, it is more natural to contend that democratic governance on the side of workers and communities is a far more suitable American ideal than what capitalism has long-degenerated into.

This is not to write off Bernie Sanders just yet. But already we can say that he has achieved a formidable breakthrough, whereby the vast majority of Americans are –once again –waking up to new political possibilities. They might even find that the current policies of Sanders –while a good departure from the existing bankrupt orthodoxy –are not socialist enough and indeed might be applied with even more bold democratic aspiration in the future. Maybe a new Socialist party is required, and the compromised Democrats abandoned altogether for the Wall Street marionettes that they are.

The Cold War-era of Red-baiting is long gone. It is like a bad spell cast by the ruling elites in a bygone era that no longer works. In fact, seems downright absurd in hindsight. Today, people want the justice they deserve and know it is their right.

As singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen once said: democracy is coming to the USA. 

Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. For over 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent.