Socialism (Catholicism?) 101, Part 2

[This one by my Emory colleague, historian Patrick Allitt.]

[From today's NYT online's "Room for Debate".]

Patrick Allitt is the Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University in Atlanta. He is author of “The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History.”

It’s odd that so many critics of the administration should use “socialism” as a devil word. In fact millions of Americans, including many of these critics, are ardent supporters of socialism, even if they don’t realize it and even if they don’t actually use the word. Think of two elements of society that enjoy overwhelming popular support despite being government owned and operated.

American public schools, highways and even the armed forces are organized along socialist lines.

The first is the public schools. Horace Mann, in early 19th-century Massachusetts, pioneered the project of creating publicly funded schools for every child in the state. The idea caught on widely and in less than a century had been emulated by every state in the Union. No Child Left Behind, endorsed by a conservative administration, is the most recent incarnation of this huge, centralized socialist project.

The second example is the highways. Early auto enthusiasts asked Henry Ford to contribute to building a private highway system but he declined to invest and warned them that they should not create the precedent of private road ownership — much better to let the government pay. For a century now, governments — state and federal — have built an astonishing network of utterly “socialist” highways throughout the land. So far as I know, no one has objected to driving along them for that reason.

You could even take the view that the armed forces are organized along socialist lines. Government owned and operated, bureaucratic, centralized, exempted from competition, they are widely beloved all the same. Private military contractors, on the other hand, such as Blackwater, arouse more suspicion than support; there is a taint of dishonor to being a mercenary. And as Machiavelli showed 500 years ago, mercenaries are far less dependable than citizen armies.

Socialism by that name never became a mass movement in the United States. (The last serious socialist presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, ran for office from a prison cell for his criticism of President Woodrow Wilson in World War I.) But socialism as an organizational principle is alive and well here just as it is throughout the industrialized world.