United Liberty
Obama isn’t a socialist
Sun, 04/11/2010 - 11:31am | posted by Jason Pye
Yesterday while speaking at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) explained President Barack Obama’s economic beliefs to attendees:
“In the technical sense, in the economic definition, he is not a socialist,” the Texas Republican said to a smattering of applause at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.
“He’s a corporatist,” Paul quickly added, meaning the president takes “care of corporations and corporations take over and run the country.”
Republican talk show hosts, such Neal Boortz, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, often call Obama a socialist (or Marxist), citing health care or some other policy as proof. Corporatism isn’t as well known socialism, a word that brings out a reaction from people, so that’s probably why they choose socialism. Either that or talking about corporatism would make people realize that Republicans are as bad as Obama.
Tim Carney, author of Obamanomics, explains why Ron Paul is right:
Ron Paul is right. Obama has signed: a health-care bill that mandates we buy private insurance and has the endorsement of the drug industry; a tobacco regulation bill that earned the applause of the largest cigarette company in the country; a credit-card regulation bill that the banks like; a stimulus bill approved by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and nearly every lobby in the country; a Cash-for-Clunkers bill that subsidized automakers, car-dealers, and more. Also, Obama has a huge corporate lobby on his side for cap-and-trade legislation. Plus, Obama backed the Wall Street bailout, has stuck close to its main authors Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner, and even expanded the bailout.
Read more about corporatism here.
I’ve thought about this for some time - whether Obama is a socialist/statist or a corporatist - and I think maybe I can add to what is above by way of partial agreement.
I think it is evident that many of the policies that Obama has signed into law are corporatist as illustrated by Tim Carney above. It’s further made evident - to some degree - by his overtures to capitalism as he did during the campaign when on the O’Reilly Factor and as he’s done elsewhere that he espouses some form of corporatist policies. I think that most on this blog would also agree that capitalism and corporatism are often confused with one another because some of their effects happen to be similar…so Obama’s own personal confusion between the 2 ideas seems marginally justified.
At the same time though, it seems equally evident that Obama is a socialist - in the European style often called Christian socialism - because let’s recall that he wants to “spread the wealth around”, believes in a large welfare state (he was opposed to the welfare reform bill from the last decade), has proclaimed his disdain for capitalism in his writings, and has said that he believes in redistributive justice, i.e. that equality is an economic matter and not a metaphysical one as under the Jeffersonian understanding. And those ideas are distinctly socialist/christian socialist.
So, on the one hand we have a President that passes legislation that is quite obviously corporatist but who also seems to hold deep seated socialist convictions. Could it be that maybe he sees a union of the corporatist state with the welfare state to achieve his socialistesque ends? Could it be that he is a corporatist in action but a socialist in conviction? Maybe - as a pragmatist - he believes that corporatism is the way to achieve redistributive justice. Maybe? Or maybe he is closer to the fascist understanding of socialism whereby the state doesn’t own the means of production as in strict socialism but merely guides private industry via regulation etc? A more pointed question may be are corporatism and socialism necessarily mutually exclusive? If we understand socialism as Leninism, then yes, they are mutually exclusive. But if we understand it as Mussolini did or as present day European socialists do (a la Denmark, Sweden, Norway etc), then it seems that they are not mutually exclusive.
Regardless, I think saying that he definitely a corporatist is wrong because it partially explains the facts - what of the State’s nationalization of GM or the nationalization of student loans et al which clearly fall within the purview of socialism? But also, saying he is a socialist is equally wrong because how does one explain the above article in purely socialist terms? You can’t it seems. So, I conclude that he is a Christian Socialist or a fascist. Those monikers seem to have the requisite ideological-necessary-and-sufficient-conditions to be properly applicable to Obama. What say you?
I could buy that, Jorge.