Stan: Looking forward to your book — and welcome back! On Obama, socialism, and Harold Meyerson, this from my Commentary essay might be of interest:
Harold Meyerson, who actually calls himself a socialist, wanted it both ways. In a March 4, 2009, Washington Post column, he argued that anyone calling Obama a socialist didn’t know what he was talking about: “Take it from a democratic socialist: Laissez-faire American capitalism is about to be supplanted not by socialism but by a more regulated, viable capitalism. And the reason isn’t that the woods are full of secret socialists who are only now outing themselves.”
But after the Rasmussen data came out the following month, Meyerson changed his tune. In a column titled “Rush Builds a Revolution,” he argued that conservative attempts to demonize Obama as a socialist had backfired and were leading Americans, particularly young Americans, to embrace the label. “Rush [Limbaugh] and his boys are doing what Gene Debs and his comrades never really could,” Meyerson wrote. “In tandem with Wall Street, they are building socialism in America.” Moreover, whereas a more “viable, regulated capitalism” at first distinguished Obamaism from socialism, it now defined Obama’s brand of socialism. “Today,” Meyerson observed, “the world’s socialist and social democratic parties basically champion a more social form of capitalism, with tighter regulations on capital, more power for labor and an expanded public sector to do what the private sector cannot (such as providing universal access to health care).”
Surely if fans of President Obama’s program feel free to call it socialist, critics may be permitted to do likewise.