WILL THE U.S. EVENTUALLY BECOME A SOCIALIST OR COMMUNIST COUNTRY?
Not right away, maybe a hundred years from now for the USA. Much less for other countries.
The USA is the country that is more “behind” in the world, to call it someway. They lost the chance to learn the principle of collectivism, the way Europe and other countries had to learn it after WWII. To help each other. They integrated individualism and collectivism in a working and functional attitude. The USA didn’t even try that. Maybe it’s time.
US capitalism is overdue, it has no social principles to consider it human, something the Europeans learned quite well through the implementation of State of Welfare. The welfare state is a way of governing in which the state or an established group of social institutions provides basic economic security for its citizens. Public health and public education are examples of that, but the project is more compelling than just that.
It’s inevitable: new US voters now pay attention to Europe and other countries, and will demand more and more services for the government to take care of, charging taxes from the wealthier, certainly higher than the ones they have now. Say something like 30% of their profit or wealth. And redistribute them in the form of services and support for their citizens, which by the way are the only ones mentioned in the Constitution.
A Constitution which starts with “We the people”, not “we the company”, as many seem to forget.
And it’s “the people”, a collective, not “We the individuals”. A small detail which I think is more important that it seems. Why was that collective principle so easily forgotten? Why or where did it get lost?
The sooner US citizens start to think that way, the sooner good things will start to happen, the sooner US capitalism becomes closer to the capitalism your own president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, dreamed of and proposed with the New Deal Project. The complete version, not the one that was “sold” after WWII.
The irony of both the European experience and the FDR proposal is that both used capitalism as their common base, only changing some rules and uses, which is the part the Right, at the moment represented by neoliberalism, insists in associating them, even calling them, socialism and communism. They are totally wrong. But a purposefully wrong.
The problem is that they insist, in their bla-bla-bla, in the “danger of countries, like the USA, becoming socialists and communist ones”.
Just like that. Presto! We move a switch and everything gets changed. That’s completely impossible to happen, who says that has no idea of economics, administration, organization, engineering, politics, the daily days of people.
But they repeat it and repeat it, fortunately to less and less people. They publish letters and opinions and say such a bunch of ignorant ideas that anyone would wonder if they really thought about them or if logic was a subject they did learn at school.
The USA is paying the price of their self-isolation from the rest of the world. The idea that they are superior to all the rest and, even more, have to take their message to other countries.
Unfortunately they do it violently, they do no talk. They forgot that diplomacy and agreements are two-way streets. You do not order things and demand to be obeyed. It’s black or white: you are with the USA or against the USA. What about having a different opinion? Not an option.
By now, most older US readers will discard all I said, and instantly label me as “US hater”, which of course is not the case.
The younger generations are the ones that will change the USA. They started to look at the European countries, particularly at the public health and more particularly at the Universities, which are absolutely free and became a luxury for few in the USA. Why can’t we have that too, will they say?
But they will have learn the collective principle to make those things work as they do in Europe. Of course it’s not only Europe: Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
Even Cuba they do not understand how they are so scientifically advanced that are developing a Covid-19 vaccine. How is that possible, being a socialist country, poor for US patterns?
It’s that youth which will change capitalism in the US. Some are even now attending European universities.
So what we can anticipate for the next 20 years in the USA? New rules for their capitalism, changes, more social help to be paid with taxes and administered by the government. All this neoliberals will campaign to be part of the socialist and communist plot that is “infecting the USA.”
Meanwhile the rest of the world will be entering a different reality. But that’s theme for another time.
Carlos E. Martinez