Neighbors of the World, Unite!
Tim Walz’s statement on socialism and neighborliness challenges both the scare-mongering Right and the snobbish vanguards of the Left.
“One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” Tim Walz said it. We know he said it. I saw him say it live-streamed on the “White Dude’s For Kamala” Zoom call. And in the two weeks since he said it, Walz’s statement remains a lightning rod of controversy.
For the Progressive fringe of the Democratic Party, it was refreshing to hear someone on the shortlist for Vice President speak glowingly of a word that causes most centrist Democrats to shrink away in horror. This groundswell of support from the young, online Left may have given Walz the extra oomph he needed to beat out the more moderate and measured Josh Shapiro for the Vice President nomination. Unsurprisingly, Walz’s attempt to put a folksy, positive spin on socialism was met with revulsion by the Republican Party and conservative media. Here was the same guy leading the charge to label MAGA Republicans as “weird” simultaneously normalizing the go-to “S-slur” used by the Right Wing to demonize and ostracize even the blandest of Democrats. The National Review called Walz’s comment “reprehensible.” For the Right, Walz mentioning socialism in the same breath as neighborliness was like zipping up a soft, fuzzy Fred Rogers sweater to cover the KGB uniform lurking underneath. Walz was creating sunny associations of socialism with a cheery red trolley headed to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe when the Right Wing wanted us to think of Red Army prison trains headed to Stalin’s gulag.
Diving headlong into a discussion of whether socialism and neighborliness are the same misses the point and the power of Walz’s comment. He said, “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” He did not say socialism and neighborliness are the same or even comparable. He didn’t say he was a socialist. He only said that socialism and neighborliness can arise out of similar intentions and impulses. Whether his statement was pre-scripted or off the cuff, it was expertly crafted. Walz simultaneously signaled support for the leftist leanings of his most ardent fans while baiting the Right into overreacting with hyperbolic interpretations of his statement. For being the first candidate on the Democrats’ national ticket in over 40 years without a legal education, Walz can go toe-to-toe with any JD (either the juris doctor kind or the James David Vance kind or both) when it comes to delivering a cleverly composed statement.
A Reckoning for the Right
Walz’s statement scores a strategic victory in making conservatives face the consequences of their own overuse and abuse of the word, “socialism.” At the turn of the 21st century, the red-baiting strategy of branding liberal politicians as socialists seemed to have died with the end of the Cold War. Then the hope and Change of Barack Obama happened. Obama made Healthcare Reform the focus of his first term and his efforts to expand care to every American would face charges of “Socialism” from his enemies in the Republican Party and the anti-regulatory billionaire class led by Charles and David Koch. Never mind that the Affordable Care Act was not a single-payer government-owned healthcare system. Never mind that ample goodies and juicy profits were left over for private health insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Never mind that the Affordable Care Act (now dubbed “Obamacare”) shared many similarities to the Republican-sponsored HEART Act of 1993 and the Massachusetts state insurance system enacted by Republican Governor Mitt Romney in 2006. To stall the momentum of the young, charismatic Obama and torpedo his signature first-term legislation, Republicans tarred the President as a socialist. By the 2010s, any legislation proposed by Democrats would be smeared as socialism without the slightest regard for the true meaning of the term.
Waltz’s association of socialism with neighborliness has forced conservatives into a dramatic 180-degree turn on the flagrant misuse of the term. Now all of a sudden conservatives are sticklers for the proper use of language, with the National Review reminding readers that socialism “is a forced economic system under which the government usurps total control of a nation’s means of production, distribution, and exchange.” Walz has succeeded in compelling conservatives to admit that the true meaning of socialism is a nationalized economy bearing no resemblance to the Democrat’s corporate-friendly policies that Republicans have smeared as socialist for the past decade and a half.
Walz’s association of neighborliness with socialism also sparks important discussion about the impact on our sense of community inflicted by the neoliberal policies introduced by Reagan Republicans and signed off on by Clinton Democrats. Americans' nostalgic longing for lost community often presents the 1950’s and early 1960s as the peak of stable middle-class neighborliness. It was also the peak of a Social Democratic economic system: 90% marginal tax rates on the rich, significant political power for organized labor, and robust investment in education, infrastructure, and scientific research. Any Republican with the slightest understanding of history and political economy would object that the mixed economy of the mid-century era was a far cry from anything we could properly label socialism. But they cannot make this objection without completely discrediting their use of socialism to critique far more corporate-friendly and pro-market policies of the Obama and Biden administrations. Walz’s statement leaves conservatives with two choices: either admit their use of the term socialism over the past 15 years has been nothing more than a cynical attempt to deceive the American public, or admit that the closest America ever came to socialism just so happened to be the same period we associate with a golden age of wholesome neighborliness.
A Lesson for the Left
If our nostalgic longing for community harkens back to when the US government played its greatest role in the American economy, why does Walz’s statement “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness” seem so newsworthy and counterintuitive? That is a question to be answered by the Progressive Left, and the answer must confront a history of intellectual snobbery that regards the common person as at best a faceless cog in social evolution or at worst a foolish instrument of their own class oppression.
Much of the history of Leftist political thought involves trying to devise excuses and explanations for why the working class won’t do what Marx predicted they would inevitably do: unite in their immiseration, throw off their chains, and destroy the capitalist system. As conditions improved for the working class and socialism drifted toward more mild, incrementalist formations (e.g. the Fabian Society in England and the Social Democratic Party of Germany) Vladimir Lenin lost hope in the working class spontaneously banding together as a revolutionary force. Instead, Lenin proposed that a “revolutionary vanguard” of intellectuals would be needed to lead the people toward their socialist destiny. Lenin hoped members of the working class would play crucial roles in this vanguard, but more often than not the role was filled by disenchanted members of the intelligentsia eager to put their hifalutin ideas into practice (or “praxis” if you are auditioning for a role in a contemporary revolutionary vanguard). As other countries failed to join Lenin and the Soviet Union in world revolution this “vanguardism” would become increasingly nerdy, insulated, and judgmental of the average person. Antonio Gramsci blamed the inaction of common people on the “cultural hegemony” of bourgeois values - he proposed using the education system to weaken attachments to traditional institutions like the family, church, and nation-state. Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School saw the average person as a “One Dimensional Man” controlled by consumerism and mass media. By the early 1960s, the Port Huron Statement by the Students for Democratic Society would shift the heart of American Leftism from the blue-collar union shop floors to the ivory towers of academia. In the 1970s and 1980s, postmodernism and poststructuralism would bring about a “linguistic turn” where Leftism became obsessed more with the policing and perfecting of language and culture than with the “meat and potatoes” concerns of our neighbors. One hundred years after Lenin’s death, vanguardism has resulted in a Left that is insulated, self-critical, and often irrelevant to the average person.
Still, the influence of vanguardism continues in both socialism’s appeal to disaffected intellectuals and its (not coincidental) inability to appeal to our neighbors. Vanguardism is the opposite of neighborliness. It is suspicious, elitist, distrustful, and disdainful of the general populace. The lesson the Far Left needs to learn from Tim Walz is that if you want to move the American people toward more progressive political horizons, spend less time being vanguardists and more time being normal and neighborly. Rather than attending an art house cinema viewing of The Battle of Algiers or participating in a Maoist self-criticism brainwashing session join a volunteer fire department or help out at a food bank, two completely normal and neighborly activities that advance a collectivist vision of the world far more effectively than any vanguardist snobbery has ever done.
Conservatives may condemn and progressives may applaud Walz’s comments as an attempt to normalize socialism. But if Walz wants to advance a progressive agenda as Vice President his comment should be used more to neutralize rather than normalize the term. Socialism should not be a scare word for the Right or an act of edgy self-branding for the Left. True socialism is a vestige of 19th and 20th-century political struggles, but largely irrelevant to the challenges we must face in the coming decades. Walz, the plain-speaking former school teacher in a camo hat, can help us avoid confusing ourselves with abstract political concepts and focus on what truly counts, caring for the material needs of our fellow Americans. So let's make the most of this beautiful day and advance a more accessible progressivism that focuses on making our nation stronger by loving our neighbors as ourselves.