Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

According to both the dictionary definition as well as that taught at colleges and universities throughout the world, socialism embodies government control and distribution.  Under socialism in its so-called purer form, meaning its most extensive application, private ownership is jettisoned in favor of a communal pattern.

In more typical practical terms what defines a government as socialistic is the degree to which public as opposed to private ownership applies.  A more extensive form of socialism was advocated in the United States for years by the Socialist Labor Party.  

Norman Thomas was one of America's notable twentieth century socialist intellectuals and a frequent candidate for president and an earlier Nader-like alternative to the two party system for those who favored more active federal government economic participation and control, as had been Eugene V. Debs before him.

Thomas later conceded once that the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt began implementing sweeping programs, instituting Social Security and rural electrification through the Tennessee Valley Authority and other similar programs, as well as government regulation through creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the basic goals he sought had been implemented.

The Republican right did not even need Thomas' favorable comment to pounce on Roosevelt as well as later Democratic presidential successors Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy as purveyors of "socialism."  As Kennedy asserted when he ran against Richard Nixon for president in 1960, 90 percent of Republicans in Congress opposed Social Security when it was proposed and passed under Roosevelt's leadership in 1935.  

At the time Kennedy was running and advocating Medicare, a program that would not come to fruition until his successor Lyndon Johnson spirited such legislation through Congress in 1965, 30 years after the landmark Social Security Act, the same 90 percent Republican congressional opposition level occurred.

What did Republicans loudly lament in each instance?  They decried each program as "socialism."  

The same charge was leveled against stalwart conservative Republican President William Howard Taft when he supported and had implemented protective anti-childhood labor legislation. Taft signed the landmark act establishing the Child Labor Bureau way back in 1912.

Successful democratic governments internationally have operated under what is known in economic circles as a mixed economy model.  Under such a model a mixture of government regulation and ownership exists alongside a pattern of capitalist ownership.  Such ownership is subject to government regulation.

Until a point is established where public ownership and control exists such a system is not classifiable as socialist.  

Politicians such as John McCain have demagogued the socialist charge to absurd depths.  McCain has proudly proclaimed fellow Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican 1964 presidential nominee, and President Ronald Reagan as political heroes.  

Senator Goldwater during his landmark and ideologically defined campaign against President Lyndon Johnson, along with Reagan as faithful surrogate, denounced Medicare legislation that President Johnson strongly supported as "socialistic."

It is noteworthy that McCain while in the United States Navy as well as during his better than a generation on the federal government payroll as a congressman and senator has freely accepted health care plans that his two political role models Goldwater and Reagan denounced as "socialistic" when applied to the general citizenry.