Language matters: The word ‘socialism’ has lost its meaning in America

Politics in America makes language its primary battlefield. While this may seem to be a good thing — because we generally settle our political differences bloodlessly — it comes at a price: We have weaponized language. We use language against one another for political purposes, often distorting that language in the process. As we continue to stretch the boundaries of language for political expediency, we risk losing the integrity of our language and everything this integrity upholds (our Constitution, our laws, our nation).

A case in point is how some political operatives have extended the word “socialist” as synonymous with “public” or “governmental,” and have tried to redefine and restructure our political landscape by villainizing as anti-American anything associated with these newly-stretched words.

Republicans have recently been calling Democrats “socialists” for backing government programs concerned with the public welfare. They want to identify Democrats as enemies of individual freedom and enemies of our market-driven nation, and to align them with evil, totalitarian regimes, such as China and the former Soviet Union. Republicans seem to trust that their name-calling scare tactics will get us to forget all the ways we have, over many years, embraced what appear to be elements of Republican socialism. Consider some of the essential government-owned or -run parts of our lives, all of which were forged for us when we still knew the difference between public and socialist: public roads, public parks, public restrooms, public education, public universities, public lands, public utilities, public transportation, public radio, public television, public libraries, public works, public defenders, public records, public meetings, public health initiatives, public monuments and museums, public tender (yes, the dollar — the backbone of our capitalist marketplace — is, strangely enough, a socialist unit of exchange), among a host of others. As we can see (and despite vigorous Republican revilements of socialism), Republican socialism is quite alive in America and is vital to our well-being.

Supporting a few additional, and arguably critical, public initiatives (the Affordable Care Act, for example) is no more an act of socialism than is using public tender to pay for groceries. However, Republicans have painted public health options as dangerously socialist, even though neither public health care nor a public option for health care is any more socialistic than are public parks, roads or restrooms. What makes a political party socialist is not its advocacy of isolated initiatives meant to promote the public welfare, but the insistent policy that the government owns the economic system. Neither of our major political parties does this, contrary to Republican claims.

We should keep in mind, moreover, that our nation and our government stand in stark contrast with monarchies, oligarchies and dictatorships. These latter forms of government allow all things public to be privately owned, including the people themselves and their political institutions. We don’t allow this. As President Abraham Lincoln sagely observed, our republican form of government is of the people, by the people, and for the people. The fact that our government is collectively and publicly owned means that it is quintessentially socialist, not a piece of private property or a marketplace phenomenon, and that our highly-prized individual freedoms are secured by this collectively-owned (socialist) government.

We have long used elements of socialism, including our government-owned and government-run military system, to protect ourselves against tyranny both at home and abroad, and we have legislated public initiatives to secure the well-being of our people. We should never lose sight of this. We should never lose sight of why our republic needs some elements of socialism to be the free nation we are.

Thomas Stroik is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

This story was originally published October 17, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Language matters: The word ‘socialism’ has lost its meaning in America."