Religion & Law

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

Katrina vanden Heuvel

When any American reform leader takes on the status quo, he or she confronts a ferocious, well-organized and reactionary opposition. Is it any surprise that right-wing groups now compare President Obama to Hitler and liken his pragmatic health care reform to socialism?

It?s offensive and troubling. But it?s worth invoking history and remembering that Franklin Roosevelt confronted the American Liberty League, which called him a socialist and a Communist. And he faced down Father Coughlin, the demagogic priest who was a cross between Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh in a Roman collar.

History again: the rabid protesters calling President Obama a socialist are representatives of a long national tradition which features an irrational and well-stoked fear of a strong central government. (Mr. Obama has found it more difficult to turn away from the fanatical right than his reform predecessors partly because conservative ideology has been in the saddle for three decades and the recession began too late in the Bush administration to sufficiently discredit its free-market fundamentalism and those who still speak on its behalf.)

Mr. Obama himself acknowledged parallels with previous battles for reform. He said last month, ?These struggles always boil down to a contest between hope and fear. That was true in the debate over social security, when F.D.R. was accused of being a socialist. That was true when L.B.J. tried to pass Medicare. And it?s true in this debate today.?

I head to Moscow this Sunday to interview the former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Moscow, I know that those who follow our politics are shocked that an educated nation (that?s us) can attack a moderately liberal president for being socialist. My friends e-mail me and ask: What is this complaint socialist-hating Americans have about the Obama administration having too many czars? Old-style Soviet Communism has been discarded, in these last years, in favor of flat taxes, capitalist corruption and oligarchs. Meanwhile, most enlightened Russians, like Gorbachev or his colleague Dmitri Muratov, the editor of Moscow?s last oppositionist newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, seek a European-style social democracy.

America?s Glenn Beck-inspired mobs would consider social democracy one and the same as socialism or communism. But there is a difference; and it is one which our history textbooks and our media have for the most part failed to fill us in on. So, now we are in a vacuum, and misinformation and mendacity fills it. At our peril. Isn?t social democracy ? or call it socialism with a human face ? all about a healthy and thriving public sphere in education, health care, transportation, libraries, parks, child care? Isn?t it about government programs that improve the conditions of people?s lives? If that is socialism, then Medicare is our America variant of socialism.

We are poorer today for the divisions unleashed by those who would lash the label ?socialism? around the neck of a moderately liberal president in order to cripple efforts by government to play a smart and humane role.