What Are We Talking About When We Talk about Socialism?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2019

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With the election to the House of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, following up on the surprising Presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, socialism is on the rise, after a long decline in America. But the Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore says there is a great deal of ambiguity about what socialism even means. Americans have always danced around the term, and the actual policies advanced under the banner of socialism may look very similar to liberalism, or social democracy, or even the historical movement known as “good government.” Sanders declared that the hero of his brand of socialism is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who insisted that he was not a socialist. Lepore tells David Remnick, “The way our politics works is to discredit not the idea or the policy but the label.” Plus, the actor Richard E. Grant has just been nominated for his first Oscar, for “Can You Ever Forgive Me,” after thirty-plus years in the movies. And, as an Oscar nominee, he finally got Barbra Streisand, his all-time idol, to reply to a fan letter he sent her nearly fifty years ago.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:09.3	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For my whole life and probably for yours, the word socialism has been often used as a form of slander in this country, a kind of rhetorical cudgel.
0:21.9	We are alarmed by the new calls to adopt socialism in our country.
0:29.2	Barack Obama is a socialist.
0:33.2	He believes in redistributing wealth.
0:36.1	One day, as Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism.
0:41.5	And if you don't do this and if I don't do it, one of these days you and I are going to
0:46.6	spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was
0:51.4	like in America when men were free.
0:54.3	For some on the right, any social program that used tax dollars was big government,
0:59.0	and big government was socialism, and socialism was chairman Mao sending you to a re-education camp.
1:05.5	That's the story.
1:07.0	And now, what do you know?
1:08.4	We have lawmakers in Washington who are proudly identifying themselves as socialists, democratic socialists, and they're getting a lot of people's attention.
1:18.0	You can be in the private sector and be a democratically socialist business.
1:22.4	Worker cooperatives are a perfect example of that.
1:25.5	It's not about government takeover. It's about how much do workers
1:30.0	have a say in your business? Do you have workers on the board? When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
1:35.9	of the Bronx and Queens made her historic run for Congress recently, one of her biggest supporters
1:41.6	was the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA.
1:45.1	Bernie Sanders' run in 2016 was also a watershed in American politics, and he describes
1:50.3	himself as a Democratic socialist.
	...

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