We're hearing so much talk about Bernie Sanders and that boogeyman "socialism," and there is so little time to stop the nonsense before the elections of 2020.
By nonsense, we mean the mistaken understanding of socialism vs. democratic socialism vs. democracy vs. all the other "isms" out there.
Whenever the GOP wants to scare American lemmings off a cliff, they start shrieking "socialism."
A tweet here, a bot there and suddenly we have trending and further misleading memes on Facebook that lots of boomer-aged Tennesseans and Georgians have been sharing of late: One goes like this:
"I am too old to live under socialism. I am addicted to luxuries like a toilet paper, electricity, food, clean water and shoes."
Well, if you like electricity and live in Tennessee or any one of the Volunteer State's six closest neighbors, you have that magical light and heat - and probably a job or certainly a retirement - thanks to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's early experiment with democratic socialism. He created the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933 as a federal utility - owned and funded (at least then-funded) by the government - to bring flood control and electricity to the South where big power companies found it unprofitable to serve sparsely populated rural communities. And in 1935, he signed into law the Social Security Act, which among other things created a social insurance program designed to pay retired workers age 65 or older a continuing income after retirement.
As a big part of Roosevelt's New Deal, the electrification of the Southeastern quarter of our nation sparked jobs here at the height of the Great Depression and attracted manufacturing that finally brought the region into the 20th century and allowed most of us to buy shoes, toilet paper and food - a good deal it manufactured here, thanks to TVA.
It was not until 1959, after the McCarthey-era scare sent everyone looking for Communists under every bed, that then-president Dwight Eisenhower (who himself had called TVA "creeping socialism) signed into law amendments to Roosevelt's TVA Act. Those amendments set the agency on the road to being self-funded, though still federally owned.
In the meantime, TVA had become the nation's leading electricity supplier, and per capita income in the Tennessee Valley had risen from 44 percent of the national average to 61 percent in 1953.
Now back to the meme. You like clean water? Surprise, folks, the water is also owned collectively. Water is, to quote the Clean Water Act of 1972, "the waters of the United States," and it's illegal to pollute those rivers and streams and oceans that belong to us - the people.
Did we mention that President Donald Trump wants to begin the privatization of TVA by selling the power lines that carry TVA electricity?
And did we mention that Trump last year began the process of rolling back our water protections?
And lest we forget, in January Trump acknowledged in a videotaped interview about his 2021 budget that "entitlements" (the GOP term for Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare) would "at some point" be on the table. And in his 2020 budget proposal, he unsuccessfully proposed cutting $26 billion from Social Security over a 10-year period.
When Republicans and the president don't like a government program, they flippantly condemn it as a sign of creeping socialism. And they try to paint the entire Democratic Party as drifting toward socialism. They flat out and erroneously call Bernie Sanders (not our favorite political candidate, but one we'll throw support behind if he becomes the Democratic nominee) a socialist. He's not. He's a Democratic socialist. And yes, there is a difference.
Webster's dictionary defines socialism as a form of society in which government owns or controls major industries. Marxist theory says socialism is the transitional stage between capitalism and communism. Capitalism is based on predominantly private investment in, ownership of, profit from and wealth from making or handling products and services. And Democratic socialism (the professed leanings of Sanders and some other progressive politicians) advocates political democracy alongside social ownership of the means of production - with an emphasis on self-management and democratic management.
That's a lot of three- and four-syllable words to describe more than a few of our very American systems - like TVA, Medicare and our national park system and - under our laws - even our air and water.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water, and don't let the GOP and Facebook mislead you.
Democracy gives us a Congress, which while not owned by us is at least supposed to work for us - as is the president, despite his efforts to wreck our country.