Politicon discussion of left-right disputes in the Democratic Party and socialism

This is an interesting discussion from last weekend's Politicon convention.

Is Socialism Good for America? Politicon 2018 Panel ft. Ana Kasparian, Kyle Kulinski and Sam Seder 10/21/2018:

The title of this panel was "Is Socialism Good for America?", but its actual focus is on how left should the Democratic Party be.

Sam Seder opens by asking how each participant stands on the idea of socialism. And he asked them to identify themselves on a spectrum from not-socialist to public ownership of the means of production, the classical Social Democratic goal in the 19th century and which the Soviet Union and China implemented in their respective ways. It made me think about how I would respond if I were on that panel.

I think I would have made a distinction between between a longer term vision and immediate goals that the Democratic Party can use in campaigns right now. I would put the longer view in liberation-theology terms that God is on the side of the working class and that I envision Heaven being pretty much like the Wobblies' vision of the One Big Union.

But that is also a "pie in the sky" way of looking at it. On the issue of owning the means of production, I would mention that we do have a large number of state enterprises in the world over the last century that we can evaluate as practical experiences. Most of largest oil producing nations have or recently have had state ownership of their oil supplies which, among other things, can enhance the level of actual national independence a country has. Even in the neoliberal age, European countries still have some nationalized industries like trains. Included various formas of national health care or health insurance.

I would talk about current issues where making private industries public immediately is a sensible and practical position that even Democrats could take. Obviously, Medicare for All is now a mainstream position that is very popular, even among Republicans, even though the Very Serious People still consider it dangerously radical. Making prisons an exclusively public function is another, one that Ana Kasparian mentions in her response. Private for-profit prisons are a genuine obscenity. And I would stress the need to keep public education public and why scam for-profit colleges like the infamous Trump University should be banned.

I would also float an idea as a potential immediate issue the Democratic Party could take up but is not currently being discussed would be nationalizing the arms industry. That also opens up a discussion of the need for genuinely democratic control. Because a nationalized armaments company could be just as irresponsibly greedy and asocial as private ones. This is something that's very relevant to the current system in China, which will soon be the largest economy in the world, if it isn't already.

Bakari Sellers makes an excellent point on the panel that the Republicans ironically helped improve the image of "socialism" by calling the moderate Democratic President Barack Obama a socialist and derided ACA/Obamacare as socialism. Because if the image of socialism in the public eye is the federal government mandating access to affordable and good quality health insurance instead of a Cold War cartoon view of sinister commissars, it makes it no longer taboo for Democrats to talk about it in a realistic and serious way. And that is what has happened in the last several years.