What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?

What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?
Jonah Goldberg
What Kind of Socialist is Barack Obama?


"Fourteen months into his presidency, in March 2010, Obama succeeded in muscling through Congress a partial government takeover of the national health-care system. That legislative accomplishment followed Obama’s decision a year earlier, without congressional approval, to nationalize two of the country’s Big Three automobile companies. In the intervening months, he had also imposed specific wage ceilings on employees at banks that had taken federal bailout money—the first such federal wage controls since an ill-fated experiment by Richard Nixon in 1971. Obama also made the federal government the direct provider of student loans, and did so by putting that significant change in American policy inside the larger health-care bill. In a September 2009 press conference, Obama suggested that a publicly funded health-care system might help “avoid some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits and excessive administrative costs”—thus mistaking the act of making money, the foundational cornerstone of capitalism itself, with the generation of unnecessary expenses.

in a May 2009 interview, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham mocked the president’s critics for considering Obama to be a “crypto-socialist.” …Only four months before Meacham’s mockery of conservatives, he co-authored a cover story for his magazine titled “We’re All Socialists Now,” in which he and Newsweek’s Evan Thomas (grandson of the six-time Socialist-party presidential candidate Norman Thomas) argued that the growth of government was making us like a “European,” i.e. socialist, country.

At the same time, a host of Left-liberal writers, most prominently E.J. Dionne and Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post, were floating the idea that the new president was ushering in a new age of “social democracy.” The left-wing activist-blogger Matthew Yglesias, echoing the Obama White House view that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, said the Wall Street meltdown offered a “real opportunity” for “massive socialism.”

Surely if fans of President Obama’s program feel free to call it socialist, critics may be permitted to do likewise.

In an April 2009 essay published in Foreign Policy, John Judis modestly called “prescient” a prediction he himself had made in the mid-1990s: “Once the sordid memory of Soviet communism is laid to rest and the fervor of anti-government hysteria abates,” he had written in a symposium in the American Enterprise, “politicians and intellectuals of the next century will once again draw openly upon the legacy of socialism.” In his Foreign Policy piece, Judis claimed vindication in the age of Obama: “Socialism, once banished from polite conversation, has made a startling comeback.”

But is it correct, as an objective matter, to call Obama’s agenda “socialist”? [T]he only meaning sure to garner consensus is an assertive statism applied in the larger cause of “equality,” usually through redistributive economic policies that involve a bias toward taking an intrusive and domineering role in the workings of the private sector. One might also apply another yardstick: an ambivalence, even antipathy, for democracy when democracy proves inconvenient.1 With this understanding as a vague guideline, the answer is certainly, Yes, Obama’s agenda is socialist in a broad sense."


Please consider reading the full article if you have an interest in political history.

 

What kind of kook is Jonah Goldberg? A really, really far rightwing nut.

 

Socialist/Corporatist,very similar to what the Nazis were.

 

I think it's interesting that a year ago many Obama supporters would have become all defensive at such a label and denied it with vigor. Now that they have come to understand what it is, they aren't so vocal and some are quietly embracing it.

 

That's true. The guy favors socialism and many of his followers do too. If socialism is as great as they think, then why try to run away from the label?

 

Who was taken over?

Oh? What companies were nationalized?

And? If we're bailing them out, they shouldn't be taking home 7-figure salaries.

and?

Obama wrote the bill?

Capitalism is mutually exclusive with health insurance. To make money, you have to not provide insurance and pay for peoples' treatment.

Social Democracy is not new and Social Democrats are distinct from Liberals. They oft don't agree on much of anything.

Wow... you found a blogger to say something

 

I swear we heard the same shit for 8 years about the other guy

 

He is nothing
He is a "Hey Boy" for the corporatocracy's banking cartel.
Nothing more.
You fucking idiots try to blame shit on pResidents.
pResidents are the puppets. The 535 and cronies need to go down.
Bush,B00B, never started a war. Bechtel, KBR, Boeing and Carlyle group did.

You ignorant motherfuckers never listen.
Now ? Britney got a clit ring !!!
Back then ? Lassie killed a wolf.
You are idiots.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY]YouTube - Eisenhower warns us of the military industrial complex.[/ame]

 

Nobody is pure Socialist....nobody is pure Capitalist

A successful country manages to work out a compromise between the two. You can mock the Europeans, but in some areas (education, healthcare) they are more efficient than we are. The US has historically worked from the center and swung from left to right and back.

To call Obama, or Democrats in general "Socialists" is intentionally misleading

 

Because nobody would have anything to do with them....That's why they stole the term "liberal" back in the 1920s.