Liberals (some of them at least) rightly reject the cruel conservative view that the only functions of the state should be repression and corporate catering, and instead assert that government can play a positive role in promoting human welfare. Liberals hold up the decades after World War II as a model, when rich people and corporations paid much higher taxes, unions were at their peak, and a social safety net was created through programs for the poor, sick, unemployed, and elderly. All of this is correct, but let’s think twice about proclaiming the postwar era as a golden age to be re-created. This was a period in which the US policy was to create whites-only suburbs and Black urban ghettos,6 persecute hundreds of thousands of communists, bring the world to the edge of nuclear war, and destroy Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, and Iran through wars and coups. Then there’s the fact that the United States was enjoying the greatest economic boom in world history—which made it possible for rich people to be more generous without seeing their own wealth decline—only due to the unique circumstance that every other industrial country had just been bombed to smithereens. That’s not something we should count on—or hope for—recurring. The point is that even in the golden age of American liberalism, the government was not an agent of the people. It certainly is not now, when it imprisons more of its people than any nation in the world and is constructing enormous cloud facilities with the capacity to monitor all of its people’s phone and Internet conversations. The only reason we even know about this world-historic surveillance system is because of the bravery of Edward Snowden, who has been charged with violating the Espionage Act. Espionage, notes journalist Glenn Greenwald, is generally defined as passing secrets to the government’s enemies. However, Snowden didn’t reveal the NSA’s secrets to Iran or China but to the general public. What does that say about how the US government regards its people?
Socialism... Seriously, Danny Katch, 2015