In a Washington restaurant 70-some years ago, Sen Joseph McCarthy dined with aides, discussing what his re-election strategy would be. What issues would help the junior senator from Michigan? Someone suggested anti-communism. At first McCarthy disliked the idea, saying it did not have enough emotional appeal. But with nothing better to his liking, he decided to go with it. Thus was born one of the sadder chapters in U.S. political history. Claiming loudly to have in his pocket a list of communists infesting the State Department, he often commanded media notice, threatening the careers of innocent officials. But his charges never succeeded in convicting even one enemy of the state.
Being called a commie then was poison, and the contagion spread afield to entertainers and many others. It took the Army-McCarthy hearings of Congress for a fellow senator to ask him whether he had any sense of decency in his libelous scatter-shot charges.
Today the epithet is socialist. It has much of the same take-down clout. So to discuss this term, we start with defining it. Webster says socialism is “a political and economic theory of social organization based on collective or governmental ownership and democratic management of the essential means for the production and distribution of goods; a policy or practice based on this theory.”
Put simply, if I build and operate a factory, I don’t really own it. And if I propose to sell my product through my web of distributors, I may not. The reason is that the government stepped in and seized it, deciding how to manage it and the workers whom I employ. This seems unfair to most people, and to the church’s social doctrine for over a hundred years.
Why would someone try to justify this theft of my private property? Usually because workers felt they were not being rewarded enough. Unable on their own to conduct then-illegal strikes, work-stoppages or collective bargaining, they wanted the government to intervene as the policeman. Their salary and benefits were to be set by a non-interested bureaucracy affecting me the same way it dictated to other factory owners.
Things must have been bad for a government to resort to theft. But indeed they were, when Americans were seriously considering the collectivism of the Soviet Union in the thirties. It’s hard to believe socialism being so attractive here, but there were epidemic abuses to working people with little policing from government. Then too there was the Great Depression.
I visited the Soviet Union in 1968 and saw for myself the colossal failure of the planned economy. But I remembered how just 23 years before, they were digging out from World War II. The siege of Leningrad had cost a million and a half lives. People on the street approached me, wanting to change far more stable western money into rubles, offering three and four times the official exchange rate. Illegal, of course, but starvation has been known to motivate law-breaking.
When someone is called a socialist, ask the speaker whether his/her target wants the government to own the factories and the means of distribution. It’s likely they would look at you strangely. Most probably they dislike “big government,” a regime that taxes working people — and factory owners — money to provide for social programs for less advantaged people, like the 700,000 blind Americans.
The fact is we all become “socialists” when the town does not clear the snow fast enough, or when ventilators are not gotten to local hospitals for COVID-19 patients. But we reject that name since we are Americans who do not stand for such nonsense. So it comes down to how much we are willing to share God-given resources with those truly and demonstrably deprived. We might refuse to bankroll social programs for ghetto dwellers of a different race than us, but when it comes to our local needs in our racially uniform neighborhood, like the snow, we dig in and refuse, protesting about nanny government.
Catholic social doctrine says the purpose of government anywhere is to arrange for the common good of all citizens, something that surprises even some modern U.S. Catholics. Many think it is for the good of people who look like them, the same color, in other words. Others become “parasites,” getting free stuff from our pockets. Unfortunately it depends on whose ox is gored, a shoddy standard for any social doctrine. Odd how Jesus was so preoccupied with the least of his brothers and sisters.
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