Photo by Phil Roeder Flickr CC
Much has been written about just how deeply into extremism and race-baiting the reckless billionaire frontrunner Donald Trump has led the entire mob of Republican presidential candidates.
But what about claims by those on the right that it’s actually the Democrats who have been taken over by extreme left-wing radicals who are far outside of the mainstream of American politics?
Their damning evidence is that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a real, live socialist, is drawing increasing support for the Democratic nomination, and that former First Lady, U.S. Sen. and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks just as passionately about increasing wages and expanding opportunities for everyone, regardless of race, gender or class. Republicans actually consider those radical, un-American ideas.
But despite all the damage Republican Gov. Scott Walker has done, Wisconsin is still ground zero for such populist appeals.
Sanders turned out 10,000 in Madison for the largest rally this political season. Last week more than 2,000 packed a Clinton rally and separate video broadcasts to overflow audiences in a theater and a large, open concourse at UW-Milwaukee.
Somebody had better tell those large, enthusiastic crowds that Republicans don’t think they’re a legitimate part of politics anymore.
Republicans would have a lot more credibility in deciding what qualifies as dangerous radicalism if they hadn’t spent more than six years absurdly claiming President Barack Obama, a moderate Democrat, was some kind of crazed, foreign-born socialist plotting to destroy democracy.
Milwaukee’s Socialists Ran a Clean Government
At least Sanders actually calls himself a socialist. But Wisconsin has always been a terrible place to scare anybody by smearing Democrats as socialists.
Historically, socialism has never really been a dirty word here. America was once happy to incorporate the best political ideas brought here by immigrants before Republicans began publicly advocating deporting millions of them.
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A progressive group of German socialists called the Forty-Eighters became a powerful political force in Milwaukee when they came here seeking democracy to escape from fascism after a failed European revolution in 1848.
They brought to frontier Milwaukee progressive ideas about the value of free speech, public education, equal rights for women and other high-minded ideals that are still works in progress for democracy today.
Milwaukee went on to refute once and for all the claim that democratic socialism might be a positive, idealistic system of government in theory, but that it could never work in the real world.
Milwaukee ran extremely well for nearly four decades under three socialist mayors. Emil Seidel, Milwaukee’s first elected in 1910, served only two years, but he established the pattern of clean, efficient socialist government. He ended brazen political corruption, passed a minimum wage and began creating publicly funded services to improve the lives of ordinary citizens and the community as a whole.
Many of the government innovations introduced by Milwaukee socialists—publicly funded education, health services, libraries, parks and recreation, sanitary sewers and regulation of toxic industrial waste, low-income housing and much more—are now standard services of every American city.
Dan Hoan, Milwaukee’s longest-serving socialist mayor from 1916 to 1940, saw the city through a divisive war against Germany and the devastation of the Great Depression. When Hoan appeared on the cover of conservative Republican Henry Luce’s Time magazine in 1936, he was identified as mayor of “perhaps the best run city in the U.S.”
Frank Zeidler, the city’s last socialist mayor from 1948 to 1960, maintained that national reputation and doubled the size of the city. Zeidler was widely admired as a visionary, humane political leader when he died in 2006.
In a sense, Republicans are right when they attack popular Democratic social programs such as Social Security and Medicare as socialist.
One reason the Socialist Party itself faded was that Democrats adopted many of the socialists’ most popular and successful ideas to attract support among working people.
That shift reached its zenith with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to end the Depression, the nation’s disastrous economic collapse under his Republican predecessor. Sound familiar?
Republicans up to and including the party’s current presidential candidates have been trying to destroy successful publicly funded Democratic social programs ever since. That includes Roosevelt’s Social Security from the ’30s and Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare and civil rights protections from the ’60s.
Now they’ve added President Obama’s affordable health care subsidies to their hit list.
What Republicans get completely wrong, of course, is their suggestion that programs growing out of democratic socialism that we all pay for and benefit from are somehow un-American and alien to our democracy.
In fact, they’re some of the best changes we’ve made to American democracy over a couple of centuries.
Clearly, we have to keep electing dangerous, left-wing, radical, alien socialists like, say, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and any other Democrat who has the crazy idea American democracy should be a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
