What You Don’t Have and Why

Lambert here: That great “progressive,” Woodrow Wilson, was quite a character.

By Adam Hochschild, who teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of 11 books, including King Leopold’s Ghost and Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. His latest book is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. Originally published at TomDispatch.

Donald Trump has had the urge to crush many things, including the last election. So I must admit I found it eerily amusing that, when the FBI entered his estate at Mar-a-Lago recently, they did so under a warrant authorized by the Espionage Act of 1917. History certainly has a strange way of returning in our world and also of crushing alternatives. Whatever Trump did, that act has a sorry track record in both its own time and ours when it has been used, including by his administration, to silence the leakers of government information. And because my latest book, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and America’s Forgotten Crisis, is about the crushing of alternatives a century ago in this country, in the midst of all this, I couldn’t help thinking about a part of our history that The Donald would undoubtedly have been the first to crush, if he had the chance.  

But let me start with a personal event closer to the present. While visiting Denmark recently, I developed an infection in my hand and wanted to see a doctor. The hotel in the provincial city where I was staying directed me to a local hospital. I was quickly shown into a consulting room, where a nurse questioned me and told me to wait. Only a few minutes passed before a physician entered the room, examined me, and said in excellent English, yes, indeed, I did need an antibiotic. He promptly swiveled in his chair, opened a cabinet behind him, took out a bottle of pills, handed it to me, and told me to take two a day for 10 days. When I thanked him and asked where I should go to pay for the consultation and the medicine, he responded simply, “We have no facilities for that.”

No facilities for that.

It’s a phrase that comes back to me every time I’m reminded how, in the world’s richest nation, we still don’t have full national health insurance. And that’s far from the only thing we’re missing. In a multitude of ways, we’re known for having a far weaker social safety net than many other wealthy countries and behind that lies a history in which the Espionage Act played a crucial role.

A Danish friend who visited with me recently was appalled to find hundreds of homeless people living in tent encampments in Berkeley and Oakland, California. And mind you, this is a progressive, prosperous state. The poor are even more likely to fall through the cracks (or chasms) in many other states.

Visitors from abroad are similarly astonished to discover that American families regularly pay astronomical college tuitions out of their own pockets. And it’s not only well-off European countries that do better in providing for their citizenry. The average Costa Rican, with one-sixth the annual per capita income of his or her North American counterpart, will live two years longer, thanks largely to that country’s comprehensive national health care system.

Why hasn’t our country done better, compared to so many others? There are certainly many reasons, not least among them the relentless, decades-long propaganda barrage from the American right, painting every proposed strengthening of public health and welfare — from unemployment insurance to Social Security to Medicare to Obamacare — as an ominous step down the road to socialism.

This is nonsense, of course, since the classic definition of socialism is public ownership of the means of production, an agenda item not on any imaginable American political horizon. In another sense, though, the charge is historically accurate because, both here and abroad, significant advances in health and welfare have often been spearheaded by socialist parties.

The globe’s first national healthcare system, in Imperial Germany, was, for example, muscled through the Reichstag by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1883 precisely to outflank the German socialists, who had long been advocating similar measures. Nor was it surprising that Britain’s National Health Service was installed by the Labour Party when it took power after the Second World War.

And in the United States, early in the last century, some of President Theodore Roosevelt’s modest moves to regulate business and break up trusts were, in fact, designed to steal a march on this country’s socialists, whom he feared, as he wrote to a friend, were “far more ominous than any populist or similar movement in times past.”

Back then — however surprising it may seem today — the American Socialist Party was indeed part of our political reality and, in 1904, it had come out in favor of compulsory national health insurance. A dozen years after that, New York Socialist Congressman Meyer London introduced a bill strikingly similar to the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act of more than a century later. In 1911, another socialist congressman, Victor Berger of Wisconsin, proposed a national old-age pension, a goal that wouldn’t be realized for another quarter of a century with the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935.

Socialism was never as strong a movement in the United States as in so many other countries. Still, once it was at least a force to be reckoned with. Socialists became mayors of cities as disparate as Milwaukee, Pasadena, Schenectady, and Toledo. Party members held more than 175 state and local offices in Oklahoma alone. People commonly point to 1912 as the party’s high-water mark. That year, its candidate for president, Eugene V. Debs, won 6% of the popular vote, even running ahead of the Republican candidate in several states.

Still, the true peak of American socialism’s popularity came a few years later. The charismatic Debs decided not to run again in 1916, mistakenly accepting President Woodrow Wilson’s implied promise to keep the United States out of the First World War — something most Socialists cared about passionately. In April 1917, Wilson infuriated them by bringing the country into what had been, until then, primarily a European conflict, while cracking down fiercely on dissidents who opposed his decision. That fall, however, the Socialists made impressive gains in municipal elections, winning more than 20% of the vote in 14 of the country’s larger cities — more than 30% in several of them — and 10 seats in the New York State Assembly.

During that campaign, Wilson was particularly dismayed by the party’s popularity in New York City, where Socialist lawyer Morris Hillquit was running for mayor. The president asked his conservative Texan attorney general, Thomas Gregory, what could be done about Hillquit’s “outrageous utterances” against the war. Gregory responded that he feared prosecuting Hillquit “would enable him to pose as a martyr and would be likely to increase his voting strength. I am having my representatives in New York City watch the situation rather carefully, and if a point is reached where he can be proceeded against it will give me a great deal of pleasure.” Hillquit lost, but did get 22% of the vote.

Jubilant Socialists knew that if they did equally well in the 1918 midterm elections, their national vote total could for the first time rise into the millions. For Wilson, whose Democrats controlled the House of Representatives by the narrowest of margins, the possibility of Socialists gaining the balance of power there was horrifying. And so, already at war in Europe, his administration in effect declared war on the Socialists at home as well, using as its primary tool Wilson’s sweeping criminalization of dissent, the new 1917 Espionage Act. The toll would be devastating.

The Government’s Axe Falls

Already the party’s most popular woman, the fiery Kansas-born orator Kate Richards O’Hare — known as Red Kate for her politics and her mass of red hair — had been sentenced to five years under the Espionage Act for speaking out against the war. Still free on appeal, O’Hare, who knew the hardships of farm life firsthand and had run for both the House and the Senate, continued to draw audiences in the thousands when she spoke in the prairie states. Before long, however, her appeal was denied and she was sent to the Jefferson City, Missouri, penitentiary, where she found herself in the adjoining cell to anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman. The two would become lifelong friends.

In 1918, the government went after Debs. The pretext was a speech he had given from a park bandstand in Canton, Ohio, following a state convention of his beleaguered party. “They have always taught you that it is your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command,” he told the crowd. “But in all the history of the world you, the people, never had a voice in declaring war.”

That was more than enough. Two weeks later, he was indicted and swiftly brought before a federal judge who just happened to be the former law firm partner of President Wilson’s secretary of war. At that trial, Debs spoke words that would long be quoted:

“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest of the earth. I said then, I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Spectators gasped as the judge pronounced sentence on the four-time presidential candidate: a fine of $10,000 and 10 years in prison. In the 1920 election, he would still be in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta when he received more than 900,000 votes for president.

The government didn’t merely prosecute luminaries like O’Hare and Debs however. It also went after rank-and-file party members, not to mention the former Socialist candidates for governor in Minnesota, New Jersey, and South Dakota, as well as state Socialist Party secretaries from at least four states and a former Socialist candidate for Congress from Oklahoma. Almost all of them would be sentenced under the Espionage Act for opposing the war or the draft.

Not faintly content with this, the Wilson administration would attack the Socialists on many other fronts as well. There were then more than 100 socialist dailies, weeklies, and monthlies and the Espionage Act gave Wilson’s postmaster general, segregationist Albert Burleson of Texas, the power to deem such publications “unmailable.” Before long, Burleson would bar from the mail virtually the entire socialist press, which, in the prewar years, had a combined circulation of two million. A few dailies, which did not need the Post Office to reach their readers, survived, but for most of them such a banning was a death blow.

The government crippled the socialist movement in many less formal ways as well. For instance, Burleson’s post office simply stopped delivering letters to and from the party’s Chicago headquarters and some of its state and local offices. The staff of a socialist paper in Milwaukee typically noticed that they were failing to receive business correspondence. Even their mail subscriptions to the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune were no longer arriving. Soon advertising income began to dry up. In the midst of this, Oscar Ameringer, a writer for the paper, called on a longtime supporter, a baker who had suddenly stopped buying ads. According to Ameringer, the man “slumped down in a chair, covered his eyes and, with tears streaming through his fingers, sobbed, ‘My God, I can’t help it…They told me if I didn’t take my advertising out they would refuse me… flour, sugar and coal.’”

Also taking their cues from the administration in that wartime assault were local politicians and vigilantes who attacked socialist speakers or denied them meeting halls. After progressives and labor union members staged an antiwar march on the Boston Common, for example, vigilantes raided the nearby Socialist Party office, smashed its doors and windows, and threw furniture, papers, and the suitcase of a traveling activist out the shattered windows onto a bonfire.

In January 1918, the mayor of Mitchell, South Dakota, ordered the party’s state convention broken up and all delegates expelled from town. One party leader was seized “on the streets by five unknown men and hustled into an automobile in which he was driven five miles from town,” a local newspaper reported. “There he was set out upon the prairie and… told to proceed afoot to his home in Parkston [an 18-mile walk] and warned not to return.”

The Big “What if?” Question

The Socialists were far from alone in suffering the wave of repression that swept the country in Wilson’s second term. Other targets included the labor movement, the country’s two small rival Communist parties, and thousands of radicals who had never become American citizens and were targeted for deportation. But among all the victims, no organization was more influential than the Socialist Party. And it never recovered.

When Debs took to the road again after finally being released from prison in 1921, he was often, at the last minute, denied venues he had booked. In Cleveland, the City Club canceled its invitation; in Los Angeles, the only place he could speak was at the city zoo. Still, he had an easier time than the socialist writer Upton Sinclair who, when he began giving a speech in San Pedro, California, in 1923, was arrested while reading the First Amendment aloud.

By the time Debs died in 1926, the party that had once elected 33 state legislators, 79 mayors, and well over 1,000 city council members and other municipal officials had closed most of its offices and was left with less than 10,000 members nationwide. Kate Richards O’Hare wrote to her friend Emma Goldman, who had been deported from the United States in 1919, that she felt herself a “sort of political orphan now with no place to lay my head.”

Despite their minority status, the Socialists had been a significant force in American politics before patriotic war hysteria brought on an era of repression. Until then, Republican and Democratic legislators had voted for early-twentieth-century reform measures like child labor laws and the income tax in part to stave off demands from the Socialist Party for bigger changes.

If that party had remained intact instead of being so ruthlessly crushed, what more might they have voted for? This remains one of the biggest “what ifs” in American history. If the Socialist Party hadn’t been so hobbled, might it at least have pushed the mainstream ones into creating the sort of stronger social safety net and national health insurance systems that people today take for granted in countries like Canada or Denmark? Without the Espionage Act, might Donald Trump have been left to rot at Mar-a-Lago in a world in which so much might have been different?

The last time you tried to pay a medical bill, might you, in fact, have been told, “We have no facilities for that”?

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

46 comments

  1. DJG, Reality Czar

    Thanks for this excellent summary: I’d stress, though, that it isn’t only the repression of the Socialists but the simultaneous repression of unions that fulfilled the program by the U.S. elites not to serve any of the interests of the working class or middle class. I’d argue that repression of the unions has been equally important, not secondary, given that the Socialists themselves believe that they were an authentic movement of the working class to protect itself from oppression.

    This fact also matters: “more than 100 socialist dailies, weeklies, and monthlies.” There were alternative sources of news and opinion. The problem with social media is that social media are all opinions all the time–social media are to information what selfies are to photography. The Socialists also used the slogan Bread and Roses.

    “Bread for all, and Roses, too”

    Somehow, wider use of Twitter doesn’t seem to be encapsulated there.

    I cannot recall who wrote it, but I recently read an observation from a writer: The purpose of government now (particularly the “Atlanticists,” the word of the moment) is to manage actively and manipulate the fears of the populace.

    And in the U S of A, from what I can tell, there are still “let’s get tough on crime” politicians–none of whom would notice that crime stems from the repression of the Socialists and the unions and lack of a jobs program, or that crime is the endless war come home.

      1. Harold

        Although Farina’s 1960s cover is the best known version now, it had been set to music in 1917 by Caroline Kohlsaat and is traditionally known as the Lawrence Textile Workers Strike Song after the 1912 Massachusetts strike. Since 1921 it has also been traditionally sung at Bryn Mawr College, and in 1952 a version appeared in Sing Out Magazine.

        1. Harold

          Note: According to this Mimi Farina’s is not a cover but an original tune, since, according to Ross Altman, the earlier tune is supposedly “not not especially beautiful, but strong and urgent, a marching song as befits the lyrics.” I would like to be able to hear it, but the youtube video is now expired.

          I always assumed the sentiment of the lyrics dates back to the Koran (where it applies to the Narcissus flower, as readers of garden books are aware.) Ross Altman traces the mention of roses to the Talmud, — however that may be, it belongs obviously to the corpus of the immemorial wisdom literature of mankind.

          I tend to agree that Farina’s tune is “especially beautiful,” strikingly so, as a matter of fact, and tending even toward the sweetly elegiac

          1. Harold

            On re-reading Altman’s article, the Talmud quote doesn’t mention roses: “Im ein kemach, ein torah” (Where there is no flour (bread), there can be no Torah), i.e. there can be no holy study without bread, a decent living.

    1. spud

      they know that a lack of jobs creates crime. joe biden and bill clinton had a measures all set up for the millions who would lose their jobs due to bill clintons free trade policies, it was the 1994 crime bill, the beginnings of the patriot act, the militarization of the police, the for profit privatized corporate prison industrial system, the assault on immigrants and so much more.

      the nafta democrats just followed the fascist wilsons playbook. the powers were all there, never gotten rid of.

      that is why we will never recover till these speciman’s and their polices are exposed for whom they are, and their policies reversed.

      1. britzklieg

        “we will never recover till these speciman’s and their polices are exposed for whom they are, and their policies reversed.”

        which is why it will never happen.

        there will be no revolution.

    2. digi_owl

      I haven’t seen it in writing, but Adam Curtis used the management of fear as the premise for one of his series.

      This, he supposed, came about thanks to politicians lacking a purpose after the end of the cold war.

      In essence, neocons need terrorists and/or rogue states in order to legitimize their own existence. And in the process fuel the creation of such entities.

      1. Basil Pesto

        In essence, neocons need terrorists and/or rogue states in order to legitimize their own existence. And in the process fuel the creation of such entities.

        I’ve said this before in comments but the disappearance of islamic terrorism from “the public consciousness” and its replacement with this new iteration of the Russian Bogeyman in 2016 is a fascinating phenomenon that, I think, has not been critically reflected upon widely enough.

  2. Acacia

    Thanks for this. The basic claim is very compelling: many “progressive” acts of legislation only happened as a way to out-flank the political left, I.e., in this case the socialists.

    Given there is no longer any functional socialist left in the US, it’s pretty clear that there is really nothing to look forward to politically in this despicable sh*thole country, aside from violence and collapse. Trump was an amusing f-u to the established order, an interlude in this long story of hoodwinking, though millions of people refused to see that’s probably why he got elected.

    Oh, and we can look forward to the frustration of dealing with retards who still think the Democrats are going to somehow save us.

      1. hunkerdown

        Those are just Progressives, unfortunately. DSA does not in any functional way oppose the capitalist order. They are, as Ehrenreich observed, reproducing capitalist culture and class relations by mediating them.

        1. JBird4049

          Any organization that is antagonistic to the capitalist order, or even just strong supporters of reform, are co-opted into the system by a combination of money and subversion, if not straight destruction by legal or illegal means. It is a continuous process of neutering the left (and of small c conservatives as well) that has never stopped during ~150 years.

          I think the question is how to prevent such neutering, which is difficult to do when the system is willing to use blackmail, assault, false imprisonment, and assassinations, if bribery or threats do not work.

        2. Mark Anderlik

          She said that many years ago. Today, unlike most left groups, the focus of DSA is on organizing and developing power on the local level coordinated nationally. Real socialists, developing capacity, building campaigns around transformative demands (Gorz’ “non-reformist reforms”), and especially organizing workers. At 90,000 members it is larger now than the past 80 years or so. But still not large enough. Perhaps you would like to get to work at building socialism, instead of standing by?

  3. John R Moffett

    Great article. The Left has been at a great disadvantage because that is not where the money is. Far right corporate types, who tend to be paranoid control freaks, spend all their time amassing fortunes that help them control everything from the government to the media. The Left has only one advantage, numbers. But they have been lulled into not pressing that particular advantage, especially in the US where the situation is abysmal. Maybe that will change as the rich people tighten the screws inexorably.

    1. lyman alpha blob

      Seconded – great article.

      It’s not just tourists who are appalled at what they see on US streets. I keep reminding my kid that the homeless encampments showing up everywhere are not normal and things have definitely not always been this way. Our local high school looks like a flea market these days, with a lot of space in a central area turned into a thrift shop where kids and families can go to pick out used clothing for free. I’m of two minds about that and not really sure what to think. On the one hand it’s great that the community can help those in need. On the other it’s a stark reminder of just how bad things are getting for so many people and one wishes it weren’t necessary.

      Here’s Boots Riley and the Coup reminding us what else the left has at its disposal besides just numbers.

      1. Kengferno

        Love The Coup!

        My favorite slogan is from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, which I use with depressing regularity when dealing with all kinds of people and situations:

        “They’ll be the first with their backs to the wall when the revolution comes.”

    2. Cat Burglar

      But remember the successful Sanders funding model during the last two presidential elections — people are willing to fund socialist policies. The money is there. The DNC tried six ways from sunday to get his funder list.

      1. Ellery O'Farrell

        I think they got it. I donated IIRC only once to Bernie through ActBlue (tried hard to send him money separately). Now requests for donations through ActBlue swarm my email, including requests from or on behalf of Bernie–but there are none from Bernie through a separate account. So I don’t give.

        Bernie, what happened? Why don’t you set up your own account?

  4. Candide

    Trying to keep a couple of bucks handy for people begging at stoplights, and struggling, with other family members, to support a centenarian mom with numerous deficits, who’s in corporate run assisted living, I applaud the important light Adam Hochschild shines on choices wrestled from our public. I had just searched “eldercare in scandinavian countries.” Yes, humane policy is possible.

    Yesterday I heard about an acquaintance I’d missed seeing for a while. Desperate over inability to deal with his wife’s dementia and related factors, he’d taken both their lives.

    Many thanks to all who make NC blog a forum for honest discussion, while mainstream media work to keep us playthings of a deadly plutocracy.

  5. Patrick Donnelly

    Find out who owns the giant corporations. The families, not foreign corporations.

    They take and take. They have had centuries of practice. It took the horros of WWII to introduce free or cheap health care. The reasons are legion.

    Taxes and poor health outcomes are for the little people, who are a crop, to be farmed and discarded when they become a weed.

    Why do these families wish to impoverish USA?

  6. Patrick Donnelly

    Crime is actually encouraged by the families.

    That way the little people pay to protect the families fom revolt. Crime is profitable for corporate security and for those who control unlawful commodities, including children, animals, drugs and arms. The criminals can also be hired for assassinations …

  7. Carolinian

    The article starts out with a pro forma slagging of Trump and the Repubs and then goes on detail the real problem which consisted of actions by–a Democrat. Lefties got this back in the early 20th and talked about :”two wings of the same bird of prey” and now hang on the latest talking points delivered by MSNBC while blaming the country’s problems on Trump and the Repubs and Fox News. Woody Wilson was indeed a piece of work while cloaking his often mistaken actions with a great deal of sanctimony. Sounds like now. We have just switched to that other wing.

    1. lostinamerica

      Yes, Carolinian you speak truths…
      Really tired of Trump talkers
      Bill Clinton f@@ked America up

      “History is not there for you to like or dislike. It is there for you to learn from it. And if it offends you, even better. Because then you are less likely to repeat it. It’s not yours to erase or destroy.”

      unknown quote

  8. Jack

    Allow me to share an example of US healthcare system. We are passing through a small town in Virginia and my spouse is in a lot of pain. We visit a small clinic. From the time we enter to the time we leave, it takes no more than 45 minutes. Tests are taken and we have to wait for results (it’s Saturday). We fill the prescription and we are on the way. Cost of prescription is less than $30. We get a call couple of hours later, with the results. How? They have an agreement with a company in Australia. We also get a follow-up appointment. Oh yes, the cost: $160. That’s what I call excellent health care. I could provide couple of more examples, one life saving.
    We live in Ontario, Canada. Virginia emergency service was not covered by our provincial insurance so we had to have our private insurance cover it. We also have to pay all of our prescriptions in Ontario unless we have outside insurance. Here is the best part. If we had gone to an Ontario hospital, we would have waited a minimum of 4 hours. Am I using some random incident, maybe during Covid? No, this is before Covid. How about waiting in hospital emergency room for 12 hours? How about waiting in hospital emergency room with kidney stone pain, passing the kidney stone in the bathroom, and then being told there is nothing wrong with you? How about gallbladder pain for 18 hours and the doctors not being able to diagnose you? How about sitting in an emergency room, bleeding out until another patient rescues you? How about not not being able to get surgery for months (again, before Covid). How about waiting for months for an MRI? How about not being able to get many types of tests that US citizens take for granted? Yes, Ontario system is better if you have a horrible disease like cancer (you can only stay a day or two in the hospital after a cancer operation). I could go on but I strongly recommend that US figures out its own system. It is a frame of mind and nobody should try to change it. Maybe some day it will change but for now, figure it out. No, it is not a perfect system. Denmark? I don’t know anything about it but I do know something about their tax rate. I believe it is twice as high as US.

    1. juno mas

      Here’s the gig, Jack. You had the money to pay up front, many in the US (40%) don’t have the money for a $400 emergency bill. Many in the US don’t go to the emergency room because the ambulance ride is ~$1800 and the endless wait (and surprise billing) is beyond the pale.

      If you’re dissatisfied with Canada’s healthcare system, help improve it. Otherwise, avoid private equity controlled medicine below the 49th parallel.

      1. Keith Newman

        Indeed juno mas.
        Hey Jack, instead of complaining, join the campaign to have Canadian medicare cover prescription drugs, just like hospitals and doctors – everyone covered, no exceptions, just show your medicare card. A bonus: the country will save $5 billion yearly at first and that number will grow as years go by.
        With respect to other problems pre-Covid, JEHR below touches on the reasons: governments that dislike public programs have under-funded healthcare and other programs. Anti-government conservatives want for-profit healthcare so their friends can profit big time off the health misfortunes of others. Just like in the U.S.

    2. JEHR

      What you are seeing in the Canadian Healthcare System is poor funding, not enough hiring of doctors and nurses and some privatization of services. Our healthcare system is in really bad shape now because for more than 10 years it has not been properly funded by both the Federal Government (supplies 23% of funding) and the Provincial Governments of each province. The share of Federal Government funding has declined over the years and the provinces have had to depend on additional taxes to keep healthcare viable and “single-payer.”

      Article Here.

      And Here.

      And Here.

    3. crantok

      I often see that difference in tax rate mentioned.

      I live in the UK and most of my family members lean right. When I compare societal outcomes between the UK and Scandinavia, they often point out the difference in taxes. I don’t get it. Money is a tool. It is a means to an end. Giving up more of your income for a better quality of life seems like a no-brainer to me.

      1. John Zelnicker

        crantok – Two things about US attitudes: First, asset accumulation is the primary goal of capitalism and income taxes hinder that so they are unacceptable, regardless of what they pay for.

        Second, but maybe more importantly, people feel that more taxes for a social safety net don’t just benefit themselves, they also benefit black and brown people and “Others”. Since that is also unacceptable, people will consciously deny themselves a better life so those others don’t get any benefits.

        It’s sad and disgusting but it’s where we are.

      2. CanCyn

        So you are taxed more but you pay less, maybe nothing, to private insurance. I believe there is lots of research out there indicating that publicly funded healthcare costs less because the need for profits no longer exists. And besides, us NCers know that taxes don’t pay for public services. Sigh.

    4. deplorado

      I very seriously doubt that the total tax rate for the average employed person (not talking top marginal rate, that is meaningless) in Denmark is 2x the tax rate of the average W2 person in the US. In the US, when you add state, sales and what not, for many it is close to 40%. A bit over the average W2 income and you get close to 50% (CA, NY). And what do you get for that??

      This about the 2x tax rate of scandinavians is a spurious talking point that is quick to dismiss genuine social achievements of other countries.

  9. Mark Gisleson

    When I was a Democrat, I sometimes found it hard to explain why. I’ve never had any trouble explaining why I’m a socialist.

  10. Thomas Schmidt

    Overlooked is the worst change of the Wilson era, even worse than the 16th, 17th, and 18th Amendments. In reaction to Wilson, the Republicans took charge of the House and Senate in 1918. When they did so, Us population was 105million. That meant that each House Member represented 241,000 people, of whom only about 60% could vote, so 144,600 voters. It was possible for a committed group of socialists (or Populists, or LaFollette Progressives) to swing control of a Congressional district if overall voter turnout was 50%.

    Contrast with today, when a population of 340mln means 782000 per House member, a threefold increase. This reinforces the R/D duopoly, which will only end when one of the two parties is replaced by a new duopolist.

  11. Cat Burglar

    Liberal Internationalism is another Wilson policy we are still under; social and political repression are the domestic footprints of the same beast.

    1. Rip Van Winkle

      Agreed.

      Funny (funny strange, not funny haha) how the school textbooks treat Wilson and by contrast, Harding.

  12. Thistlebreath

    Very well written piece–it’s a fast, easy read.

    As an adjunct, try one from The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/sarah-jaffe-aaron-benanav-automation-work/

    And economist Michael Hudson has done several interviews during the last few months. In one, he recalls that when he was a Wall St. analyst for a major bank, his ‘boss’s boss’ met with Volcker. Apparently, Mr. Volcker kept a scrap of paper in his pocket more or less all the time. On it was written the average construction worker’s wage. In Hudson’s opinion, what’s going on today with the Fed’s interest rate hikes is the same as Paul Volcker’s goal: suppress the cost of labor.

  13. Wukchumni

    40 years ago I got on a 747 with a head cold headed for Auckland and it turned into a raging flu upon arrival and I was in a world of hurt in my motel room, night sweats or shivering over a couple of days, and even back then I hesitated getting medical help as I knew how expensive it was in the states, but at one point I could take no more and asked the front desk if they could send a doctor, and half an hour later I received my one and only visit from a doctor with a black bag…

    NZ back then was perhaps the ultimate cradle to grave socialist country, and said doctor looked me over and told me I had a really bad flu and I needed some drugs, but was in no condition to go to the chemist and get them, so he would do it for me.

    15 minutes later he comes back with the Rx and says:

    “Medical assistance in NZ isn’t free, but it’s rather reasonable. It’ll be $4 for the visit and $3 for the drugs…”

  14. Irrational

    Yes, Denmark has a pretty good health care system. Long version follows, but short version is: the Danish system is not perfect.
    However, my experience of it was frustrating. Impossible to reach any doctor after 2 pm on a weekday. Only option call a regional helpline where you wait for hours – gave up as hefty mobile charges still applied (since changed). A friend recommended their doctor, who agreed to see me, but only after all the regulars had been seen – a wait of 3 hours, fun with a temperature of 105 deg F. Billing was also a disaster as it does not apply to Danes in DK and not to non-Danes visiting DK, but they sure have to bill us frisky expats. The medical bit in between was quick and efficient, though I had to go to the pharmacy to get my antibiotics.
    Would take the Luxembourg or Swiss system any time: everyone is billed something reasonable and submit it to their insurance to get typically 80-85% of money back. Care every bit as good.

  15. Gulag

    In addition to focusing on the repression of the socialists it might be way past time to raise even more fundamental questions/issues:

    After World War I did capitalism succeed in smashing independent workers organizations and also by incrementally rearranging the production process such that some kind of socialist/revolutionary consciousness was no longer objectively obtainable in the workplace? (even more true in 2022).

    Does the analysis of Hochschild now represent some type of socialist/revolutionary nostalgia for a world that no longer exists?

    Is it possible to admit that it is no longer possible for the working class to develop a socialist consciousness through any relationship to the means of production?

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