Why So Scared?

Some of the great pleasures of teaching for nearly twenty years derive from former students and their willingness to stay in touch and ask questions related to past classroom experiences.  They remember some things we did, and they continue to find them relevant today.  It helps me know that what we do in the classroom really does matter far beyond a unit test or a final exam.  

Over the past month I have had coffee and lunch with several students who returned from college over the break.  It is a lot of fun listening to their college stories, and more importantly how they’re applying things we worked on together and how those experiences are helping shape the decisions they are making in college.

I received an email last night from a former student.  This is a really bright young man with a promising future and aspirations to make those promises come to fruition.  He raised a question that seems to have been bugging him a long time.  “I was talking with my grandpa about socialism v capitalism, he hates socialism…He loves social security, Medicare, public schools, library, fire, police etc. which at their core are socialist policies. So why are people so scared of it even when they love it really?”

He has hit on one of the great hypocrisies in American culture.  Just watch campaign commercials from the right and the constant condemnations about the evils of socialism.  Listen to interviews from right-leaning middle class folks and the poor and they REALLY hate socialism.  Except of course they don’t.  Like my student’s grandfather, they could not live very well (or at all) without the socialist policies of our government.

There are a lot of approaches I could take to illustrate this phenomena, but that won’t really answer the question about why people are scared of socialism.  Let me use just one example of the depth and breath of the hypocrisy among the right regarding the socialist devil.

Leading up to the 2020 election, 85% of American farmers said they planned on voting for trump.  85%!  

We could make a pretty good argument that farmers are the biggest freeloaders in our country.  (I can’t say I really like to use the word “freeloader”, but since the right uses it to disparage the poor who are on public assistance, it should equally apply to farmers.)  The USDA reported in 2020 that the government handed out $53 billion to farmers to help them stay afloat.  In the last twenty years, over a half a TRILLION dollars has been handed to farmers for not working or not producing farm products.  Sounds a little socialist, doesn’t it?

So while trump’s trade policies have had mixed results for farmers, the impending tariffs will certainly level huge penalties on this important sector of our economy.  If he ran again in 2028, and had just ruined the lives of many farmers, trump would probably get 90% support from farmers.  There are countless examples like this across the spectrum of trump voters, and I am totally done trying to make sense of it.

The point of this grumbling is not to explain the baffling contradictions in trump’s base.  I am supposed to be trying to explain why people are afraid of socialism.  Like most great questions from students and former students, there is no simple answer.  The genesis of this fear certainly comes from the hysteria that emerged in the early 20th century with the rise of Communism in Europe.  

Leading into the Great Depression, and the obvious failures of capitalism in this country, what the Russians were doing looked pretty damn good to the millions of people in soup lines.  Granted, we knew very little about the evils of Soviet totalitarianism, for another 15-20 years, but the idea of a society taking care of the most disadvantaged among us appealed to many in distress.

As a response, the US government began implementing many of the most important safety net programs that endure through today (at least for now).  Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment, farm subsidies, etc.  saved the lives of millions and gave hope to millions more.  

The country has NEVER been an “every man for himself” country, but that was the running narrative of the industrial capitalists who falsely believed they were self-made men.  It is surely the greatest myth of American history.  Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, JP Morgan, etc accomplished absolutely nothing without the tireless work in horrible conditions of millions of people who could not live on the wages these “self-made” men granted them.  

The rich people never stopped disparaging socialism and they won’t be stopping any time soon.

What the rich and the right fear the most is that the millions of people in the middle class and poor will wake up and realize they have been duped.  They don’t want my student’s grandfather waking up one morning realizing that without the socialist foundations of our society he might be homeless, sick, or worse.  So the messaging, despite all of the falsehoods it pushes about socialism, will continue to scare people into condemning the very system that keeps them surviving.

Fear rules.

I have told this story before, but it’s the best way to wrap up this argument.  In 2008, Barack Obama was elected President, and ran again in 2012.  A reporter went to a town in Oklahoma, which was the only town in America that voted at a lower rate for Obama in 2012 than in 2008. She went to a diner to interview people to ask them why this happened.

One man said “Because he’s a socialist.”  The reporter said, “But sir, you live in a trailer with no plumbing or heat.  You are benefiting greatly from the many social programs that have been around for 100 years.”  He replied “But someday I WILL be rich, and I don’t want Obama taking my money.”

This delusionary “thinking” drives the fear that drives our stated hate of socialism.  It’s how the rich want it, and that’s how it’s going to be.

Fear rules.