Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT): Socialist Successes

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT): Socialist Successes

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION  by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)

Representative Spencer Bachus is one of the only people I know from Alabama. I bet I’m the only socialist he knows. I’m certainly the only one the congressman from Birmingham could name after darkly claiming that there are 17 socialists lurking in the House of Representatives.

I doubt that there are any other socialists, let alone 17 more, in all of the Congress. I also respectfully doubt that Spencer Bachus understands much about democratic socialism. I hope this is an opportunity to shed some light on a viewpoint that deserves more attention throughout America and in our capital.

At its best, Washington brings people such as us together to fight for our principles and work things out for the good of the country. Spencer and I used to serve together on the House Financial Services Committee. I don’t mean to hurt him back home, but the truth is that he even cosponsored an amendment of mine once on credit card ripoffs.

At its worst, Washington is a place where name-calling partisan politics too often trumps policy. A standard refrain in John McCain’s presidential stump speeches last fall was a claim that Barack Obama’s Senate voting record was more liberal than Senate’s only socialist, yours truly. That is nonsense on several levels. Even as political hyperbole, the attack didn’t work out all that well for my colleague from Arizona.

Still, branding someone as a socialist has become the slur du jour by leading lights of the American right from Newt Gingrich to Rush Limbaugh. Some, such as Mike Huckabee, intentionally blur the differences between socialism and communism, between democracy and totalitarianism. “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff,” Huckabee told last winter’s gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

If we could get beyond such nonsense, I think this country could use a good debate about what goes on here compared to places with a long social-democratic tradition such as Sweden, Norway, and Finland, where, by and large, the middle class has a far higher standard of living than we do.

I was honored last year to show Ambassador Pekka Lintu of Finland around my home state of Vermont. There was standing-room only at a town meeting where people came to hear more about one of the world’s most successful economic and social models.

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