The Most Socialist Presidents

I've been getting robocalls and push polls from various right wingers lately.  One of the standard talking points is that Obama is our most socialist president ever.  To anyone with the slightest knowledge of history and an understanding of the meaning of the word, this is an absurd claim.  Among the presidents since 1900, he's among the most pro-business.  He has done nothing to earn the term socialist.  The nearest is the new health care law--a requirement that everybody buy insurance from private companies, a few minor regulations of those companies with nothing that would prevent them from gouging, and a new exchange to give purchasers of that insurance a more convenient market.  This is pretty much a republican program: socialism for insurance companies, private enterprise for people.

Lots of other presidents are more socialist:

#1: Abraham Lincoln:  Our most socialist president ever, by far.  After the civil war, his three biggest achievements were the Homestead Act, the Transcontinental Railroads and the Land Grant Colleges.  All of these were major government incentives to stimulate growth by spending the resources he had available--giant tracts of land. Moreover, he was a supporter of workers--what we would come to call union rights.  From his first state of the union speech: 

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. 

In context, he makes it clear that he's including both free workers and slaves in what he calls "Labor".  Lincoln also pushed through the very first nationwide income tax, mainly to pay for the war.


 #2: FDR: I think most people are aware of the New Deal, the National Relief Agency, the WPA, and Social Security in his achievements.   In what will be news to most FDR haters, he didn't raise taxes to pay for his social programs.  Hoover had done that earlier.  FDR did eventually raise taxes, to pay for the war. 

#3: Lyndon Johnson was a brilliant political strategist and infighter.  He skillfully exploited a widely held sense of fairness, the worship of the martyred President Kennedy and the philosophy of government defined by FDR to push through the programs of the Great Society: expansion of Social Security, creation of Medicare, and the implementation of Civil Rights that FDR and Ike had started.   He was cornered by Goldwater, very much against his will, into allowing the Viet Nam war to expand.  His full throated support of civil rights transformed the South into a permanent stronghold for Republicans to this day, and their unthinking hatred of him has given the forces that would like to destroy his and FDR's legacy a far stronger hand than they would otherwise have.

#4: Theodore Roosevelt was simultaneously very pro business and very socialist.  He understood the need for public institutions, creating the National Park system, and boosting anti-monopoly regulation.

#5: Dwight Eisenhower ranks fairly highly because of one thing: The national interstate highway system.  He also did the first real civil rights enforcement and created NASA.

#6: Woodrow Wilson: not initially a supporter, he signed the constitutional amendment (pushed for by his predecessor Taft) that allowed a peace time income tax because he understood its necessity in the face of rising social needs and the realization that war was soon coming.

#7: Richard Nixon: Our most fervently anti-communist president also instituted wage and price controls, took us off the gold standard, created the EPA, OSHA and several other agencies.  He famously repeated Milton Friedman's line "we're all Keynesians now", a statement that was interpreted (wrongly) as supporting socialism.  And he went to China.    The price controls proved a disaster economically, as did his war policy, but otherwise, most of this stuff worked.

#8: Thomas Jefferson ignored the advice of his economic advisers and bought "Louisiana" from the French, at what was then a terribly high cost.  He quickly created expansionist programs to explore and settle it.  One of these many socialist contributions was "The National Road", the first government funded highway.  It still exists: it's called US Highway 40 and goes from Frederick, MD to St Louis, although Jefferson only planned to reach the Ohio River.  Today, the route is largely shared with I-70.

James Polk, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, and Harry Truman all did things which today would be described as socialist.  Reagan, GHW Bush and many others things that would cause them to be ranked in the same general range of socialism Obama.  Did you know that Reagan raised taxes and increased government spending? And also:  "...where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost." Ronald Reagan, Labor Day 1980 (while running for president)

I'd rank Obama at about #15 or so on the socialist spectrum.  He did push for a slightly more socialist health care program than we got, but he caved to give us a program similar to the ones Dole and others were pushing for in 1993.   He undermined the already too-weak ARRA stimulus bill by filling it with tax cuts, as well as caving on tax cuts for the rich as he promised in the fall of 2010.  He gave up pushing stimulus and began pushing austerity before the 2010 election.

There definitely are more conservative presidents than Obama: GW Bush, Herbert Hoover, Warren Harding.  Note that history (including some pretty conservative historians) also rank these as having been among our worst presidents.