In this election campaign, "socialist" has become the new "Liberal." McCain/Palin have made the word socialist the new negative--without understanding what it means.

I wrote this piece for the weekend opinion section of Israel's Haaretz newspaper, in a country where socialism has a proud history (kibbutzim, union strength, peace camp, etc). and I want to share it with readers of TPM. For years, I had the honor of working with Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, two greater Americans would be hard to find--they loved this country to the bottom of their socialist souls and I have thought of them often throughout this campaign-and am delighted to have the chance to pay homage to them here--onward toward social solidarity....

Nothing to be ashamed of

By Jo-Ann Mort

Attempting to scare swing voters onto their side in the U.S. presidential campaign, the Republican McCain-Palin ticket has taken to throwing around the term "socialism" to define the argument of Democratic candidate - and frontrunner - Barack Obama in support of progressive taxation. The latter will create more equality, or in Obama's own words, "spread the wealth around." Yet while Obama, with billionaire businessman Warren Buffett and former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker among his top financial advisors, may support a more equitable America, he is no socialist.

Which isn't to say that an Obama administration couldn't inspire socialist policies or attitudes. And to my mind, that's nothing to be ashamed of. As someone whose secular "rabbis" were socialist thinkers, like the late writer and activist Michael Harrington and the literary and political thinker and Yiddishist Irving Howe, I find it intriguing, and inspiring, to hear this debate - though not as it's being framed by McCain.

There has long been a progressive, home-grown socialist tradition in the United States, even if in recent decades it has waned - until perhaps now. At the turn of the 20th century, it was the middle-American socialism of Eugene V. Debs, whose Indiana, trade-union roots helped him lure hundreds of thousands of passionate urban Jewish immigrants to his cause. During the 1950s and 1960s, it was the urbane, religiously inspired socialism of Norman Thomas, an ordained Presbyterian minister from Ohio, who served as the moral voice of a nation, famously telling protesters in one of the earliest demonstrations against the Vietnam War, "We have come to cleanse the [American] flag, not to burn it."

Harrington took his inspiration from Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement. His 1962 book, "The Other America," inspired another president - Lyndon B. Johnson - to declare a "war" on poverty. Harrington died in 1989, but his writings are as prescient today as they were when he wrote them. He sometimes called his philosophy "republican socialism," harkening back to the founding principles of the nation, when the United States broke from the English monarchy to create a republic of citizens, rather than be subjects of the Crown.

Years ago, I was given a framed broadside of socialist inspiration as a gift from a family member of another well-regarded American socialist, Sidney Hillman. A rabbi's grandson, Hillman came from Russia to America, founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union, and was a key player in domestic politics during Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Today, these words of Michael Harrington hang above my desk: "I insist that the political, social, and economic development of modern society points socialism toward an ethical, multiclass, and decentralized conception of its goal based on the democratization of the workplace and the creation of new forms of community, both within the nation and throughout the world. That vision has a remarkable continuity with the basic republican values that derives from both the French and the American revolutions..."

Obama's stance is significant, not because he has proclaimed allegiance to socialist ideology - he hasn't - but rather because he is expressing support for notions of social solidarity, and interdependency and government intervention, akin to European social democracy. Surely the majority of Americans don't link these values to any kind of socialist strain. But Americans are searching for a vision of society different from our present one. That's why the Democratic candidate has been speaking to overflow crowds throughout the campaign. Obama has ignited a generation that may know little about the grand political arguments of an earlier era, but that feels - and "feels"is the operative word - that something is terribly wrong. Americans are hungry for an end to the inequality and social meanness that have exemplified the Bush years. With record-breaking gaps between the rich and the poor, driven by policies that emphasized privatization, deregulation and lack of government supports, the America the next president will inherit was already in deep financial distress even before the recent global financial crash. But we have also been in emotional distress. As we privatized the economy, so too, we privatized social life and the public sphere. And that's where the socialist model is a useful one. It's about engaging people in civic life, recreating a public square that is applicable to a 21st-century world.

Unlike Israeli socialism, which was heavily influenced by a doctrinaire communist ideology rooted in the Russian revolution, American socialism was always more about trade union syndicalism, religious values, communitarianism and a profound belief in small "d" democracy, small "r" republicanism. It was also staunchly anti-authoritarian. (The significant exception to this, of course, was the American Communist Party, which drew its ideology from an authoritarian model.)

"Can we really create a space for personal and community freedom in a modern society?" Harrington wondered. "No one can be sure. All we can say with confidence is that if such freedom is to come into existence, it will be the result of new global structures of solidarity and justice. Which is to say, of socialism." On November 5, when the world wakes up to a new American president, perhaps it will have its answer.