by Craig Ruff
November 16, 2008

Election results, the public mood, and economic forces likely will produce a national government and public ready to take a dip in socialism.

W “Hooverized” his political party. All but stalwart Republicans (and even some number of them) spit on the White House’s calamitous domestic and foreign policies. W and Karl Rove produced a partisan realignment, but the polar opposite of what they intended: A bounty of young voters who have formed a lifelong animus to the GOP. Bush has given Democrats a perfect foil for a generation or more for how a party could screw up things.

Unlike the liberal heydays of 1965-66 or the 1930s, today’s congressional Democrats and their president-elect do not need moderates or conservatives. Southern/southwestern conservatives like John Nance Garner and Richard Russell play no meaningful roles in this Democratic Party. When Jimmy Carter got elected in 1976, he had 61 Democratic senators, but 20 came from Confederate states. Today, Obama has 57 Democratic senators, but only 6 hail from the secession states.

Democrats, internally unfettered, lurch leftward, just as the Republicans emerge from the 2008 elections as a right-wing, largely regional party of the Deep South. Even Southern Democrats (like senators Nelson of Florida or Landrieu of Louisiana) vote like Debbie Stabenow, Carl Levin, John Kerry, and Ted Kennedy.

Voters charge liberals with a mandate to govern. A clear majority of Americans are utterly frustrated with status-quo, hands-off free-marketism. Disdain for corporate greed has whetted the appetite for a bit of an “off with their heads” populism. Obama masqueraded as a defender of the middle class, but let nobody mistake his message: Too many Americans are too far above “middle class” and their wealth must be redistributed to the disadvantaged.

Obama won’t be sworn into office until January 20. Key to a uniquely American socialism is that W began the nationalization movement in September. When a right-wing administration puts $700 billion of taxpayers’ dollars into purchasing shares of private corporations, there is no turning back.

A majority of people cry out for a strong hand played by the federal government. Regulating. Protecting. Inoculating. Co-investing. The majority may or may not want a bigger government, but certainly they want a stronger government. Total federal government spending is growing now at 13.8 percent, and you don’t even want to know how pitifully small private spending grows. One deep pocket exists, and it is government.

Beyond Democratic partisan gains and a fiercely populist mood, global markets and corporate competitiveness drive America toward democratic socialism. Even in a dying Bush regime, the administration begged for $700 billion of federal investment in prototypical corporate enterprises like banking and insurance. Billions will be siphoned off to U.S. auto manufacturers. Thereafter, E-Bay and Chicos. Even under Bush, there is no such thing as creative destruction; the government owes the blatantly incompetent a second, third, fourth, and last chance.

When fair trade supplants free trade as a philosophy, why shouldn’t American taxpayers subsidize U.S. corporations? If taxpayers of Canada, France, or Germany pay for health benefits and not place such a financial burden on their corporations, for how long can our businesses fairly compete against their businesses? What is unfolding is that the socialist economies of trading partners are inextricably moving toward somewhat more free-market biases to invigorate private investment and stave off unsupportable costs of welfare-gouging, aging populations. Likewise, America speeds headlong toward protecting commercial interests—not through lower taxes and less regulation, but rather through more governmental intrusion in the free market. At some point, socialistic democracies and capitalistic America will hit a happy equilibrium. The political economies converge.

To people in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s, socialism is not a bad word. Old farts associate it with Brezhnev and Soviet communists, and they are passing away quickly. Those still alive who can spell Mussolini number in the tens of thousands.

America has transformed itself every 70 or so years. The first occurred during our revolution and creation of a unique representative democracy. The second hit during our transition from an agricultural to industrial economy, violently played out during the Civil War. The third, the Great Depression thrust upon us: A federal government dominating the states and social policies that sublimated the whims of marketplace forces. It’s historically time for a fourth “turning.” It occurs in tandem with an unprecedented liberal Democratic majority, a popular will braced against capitalistic forces, and a global marketplace that penalizes nations, like the U.S., that cede to businesses the costs of social burdens borne by competitive governments.

Liberals will not call the coming epoch socialism. They shall call it American nationalism, a partnership between government and industry. For dying Americans, it is a more comforting moniker for a policy umbrella that encompasses redistribution of wealth, protectionism, governmental investment and ownership of enterprise, transfer of social and economic protections from employers to government, expansion of the federal government’s role in social justice, and subjugation by government of individual rights and responsibilities.

When Labour came into majority in England in 1945, Clement Attlee’s party delivered on promises to nationalize iron and steel, the Bank of England, coal, aviation, transportation, electricity, gas, and health care. Deprivations of the Great Depression and World War II prompted the British people to accept a forceful government that would defend the domestic needs of society as strongly as it defended its political integrity against Nazist threats. Churchill may have won the war, but Labour won the domestic peace.

America looks much to me as the Britain of 1945.

We have entered the era of American socialism. I can see nothing that will turn it back.

Craig Ruff is, among many things, a senior policy fellow and former president of Lansing-based Public Sector Consultants.