The Semi-Socialist

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, June 27, 2021

 

Buffalo mayor-elect India Walton will be the “first socialist mayor of a big city in 60 years,” reports the New York Times, in a headline that is correct on all but two points: Buffalo isn’t a big city, and Walton isn’t a socialist.

 

Buffalo was a big city, once. In 1950, it had more than half a million residents and was the 15th-largest city in these United States. Today, the city’s population is less than half what it was at its peak, and it has almost fallen off the list of the 100 largest U.S. cities — it is No. 89, behind Lubbock, Texas, and half the size of Fresno, Calif. It is smaller than two of Las Vegas’s suburbs (Henderson and North Las Vegas) and less populous than several of the suburbs of Dallas and Phoenix (Plano, Arlington, Gilbert, Glendale, Scottsdale, etc.). The Buffalo metro area is much larger, of course, but that illuminates the point: The part of metropolitan Buffalo that Mayor Walton will try to govern includes only a small minority of the people.

 

Then again, if Buffalo is not much of a big city, India Walton is not much of a socialist.

 

Partisan Democrats and partisan Republicans have a great deal in common in this time of strong party sentiment and weak party organizations. One of the things Right and Left have in common is that the radical wings of the parties are embarrassed by the party hierarchy and by longtime officeholders, who tend to be more moderate and more institutionalist than do young insurgents raised on Twitter and high on rage. Democrats use “socialist” (and, more commonly, “progressive”) the way Republicans were using “tea party” a few years ago, before they took up “nationalist” or “MAGA” or whatever it is this week. None of these labels means what it says — they all mean “untainted,” “hardline,” and “pure of heart.” They are markers of political-purity culture, one more superfluous indicator that American political identities have taken on the character of religions.

 

One of the ironies of our time is that the Left has plenty of people who call themselves socialists but few who advocate actual substantive socialism, while the Right has no one who calls himself a socialist but a nontrivial faction of “nationalists” who embrace the fundamentals of socialism in the form of economic central planning (Senator Marco Rubio calls it “industrial policy,” while Tucker Carlson reaches across the aisle to salute Senator Elizabeth Warren for her “economic patriotism”) and dream of a future America that practices Yankee Doodle Juche.

 

India Walton seems comfortable enough with the label “socialist,” although you will find examples of others describing her that way much more easily than you will find examples of her describing herself that way. And her campaign was supported by the Democratic Socialists of America. But other than a go-nowhere proposal to create a publicly owned bank and some familiar rent-control nonsense, there isn’t much real socialism on her agenda, which is mainly bog-standard progressive stuff — outmoded angst about “food deserts,” hilarious question-begging (she promises to make decisions based on “diversity and inclusion rather than political patronage”), handouts for “arts” organizations (about that “patronage,” Your Honor . . . ), etc. She also proposes to “establish Buffalo as an international destination for arts and culture,” a fantasy that is even more ridiculous than it was when the mayor of Philadelphia was promising the same thing to his city 20 years ago.

 

Unserious? Sure. Socialism? Not really.

 

When I was writing about the Bernie Sanders primary campaign in 2016, I interviewed a number of Sanders adherents who professed socialism, and, when asked to elaborate their views, they pointed almost without exception to some wealthy European country with a capitalist economy and a larger welfare state. Many of them admired Germany, which has a thriving, export-driven manufacturing economy, national policies that prioritize domestic labor interests with a special solicitousness for industrial jobs, and a relatively generous welfare state. Having those priorities doesn’t make you a socialist — it makes you Donald Trump, who was popular among rank-and-file union members even though organized labor continued to act as a Democratic fief.

 

American progressives take a utopian view of Europe, particularly the Nordic countries, but the facts on the ground are more complicated. Want a government in which oil revenues help to fund state-led economic-development activities? You can have that in Norway — or in Texas. Ron DeSantis may be the champion of school choice in Florida, but he’s still way behind Sweden and Finland. Conversely, right-wingers who supported Trump because they worry about enclaves of unassimilated immigrants should really give a second look to Denmark.

 

The old reds may have spent a lot of breath singing the “Internationale,” but, outside of the dorm room, socialists have almost always been thoroughgoing nationalists. And American progressives have traditionally been nationalists as well. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were nationalists, to be sure. Barack Obama tried selling “nationalism” when he was in his short-lived Teddy Roosevelt phase. And Joe Biden doesn’t talk about the “workers of the world” — he talks about the workers of Ohio. He isn’t in any hurry to dump the Trump-era tariffs or liberalize trade.

 

It is entirely unsurprising that our so-called socialists and our so-called nationalists not only share many policy preferences (trade restrictions, industrial subsidies, job-creation over wealth-creation) but also advertise them with the same rhetoric: patriotism, “people over profits,” the virtues of small business and the dastardliness of big business, identifying their political interests with those of “We the People” as a whole, etc. The small-business piety is especially telling: Socialists have traditionally adored big business, preferably monopolistic big business, because it is easier to impose central planning without choice and competition. Progressives and nationalists in the 19th and 20th centuries were transfixed by the myth of “destructive competition,” which they understood as a form of waste that prevented the rational distribution of resources — something like Bernie Sanders and his horror at the “choice of 23 underarm-spray deodorants” in the Darwinian market of unfettered capitalism.

 

Mayor Walton probably won’t be bringing a lot of socialism to Buffalo. And that’s a good thing — it already has more socialism than it can take. Its most prominent government-run enterprises — its schools — are “failure factories” whose leaders actually brag about having a one-in-four high-school-dropout rate, which is, in fairness, an improvement on one in three. The city’s poverty rate is above 30 percent, its median household income is less than half that of Denver or Austin, and less than 60 percent of its adult population is in the workforce. Which is to say that Buffalo has kept its big-city problems even as it has lost its big-city status.

 

What Buffalo needs is not socialism — it is realism. Maybe India Walton can muster up some of that.