Socialism (Catholicism?) 101, Part 3

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

Andrew Hartman.

Recent denunciations of Obama’s proposed health-care plan as “socialist” have taken some observers by surprise, especially since the foreign threat of socialism receded two decades ago when the Soviet Union imploded. But, as historians should know, the degree to which conservatives invoke the specter of socialism has always been more calibrated to domestic anxieties than to foreign threats.

“Socialism” as a stand-in for modern threats, from feminism to federal health care.

Elizabeth Dilling’s 1934 catalogue, “The Red Network: A ‘Who’s Who’ and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots,” serves as an instructive prototype. Many of those listed were never members of the Communist or socialist parties, yet made their way onto a list of people who composed “the Communist-Socialist world conspiracy.” The list included Eleanor Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, John Dewey and Jane Addams.

What did they do to merit being labeled socialist? In various ways, they represented the changes of the 20th century: feminism, civil rights, decolonization, relativism and progressive education. For people like Dilling, “socialism” became a stand-in for these modern threats to tradition. Obama and universal health care represent something similar in 2009.

This is not to say that all or even most of the recent howls about socialism are rooted in unconscious anxieties about modernity. For many, the label serves as an effective, if cynical sledgehammer. In a nation with a long history of anti-socialist sentiments, if health care reform can be associated with “socialism,” that’s good strategy.

For others, there are very real philosophical principles at stake. In his 1944 “The Road to Serfdom,” the Austrian émigré Friedrich Hayek elaborated his laissez-faire economic principles by setting forth a political philosophy. In the shadow of Nazi totalitarianism, Hayek argued that any government intervention into the economy was a slippery slope to authoritarianism. This philosophy has carried the day for American conservatives, even after last year’s financial meltdown seemingly proved laissez-faire capitalism more slippery than any government.

In short, lumping socialism together with all things liberal has a long history. It’s no surprise that such rhetoric has not gone the way of the cold war. As Whittaker Chambers wrote in his 1952 best-selling autobiography “Witness”: “When I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialism revolution, which, in the name of liberalism … has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.”

Many conservatives would argue Obama and universal health care are the latest such ice storm