Leave it to a heated election to yield outrageousness.
A Conservative (in its “Jewish movement” sense) clergywoman, Lauren Holtzblatt, cited the Torah as a basis for why Jews must vote for Kamala Harris for president. “Our sacred texts,” she proclaimed, “tell us we need to build a world where we feed the hungry, where we care for the sick, where we love the stranger, where we guard and nurture this planet.”
No words about any other things our sacred texts tell us.
And on the other side of the political divide, we have Elon Musk declaring that “Kamala is quite literally a communist.” He’s ignorant of what “communist” means (or what “literally” does). The New York Post, blending its partisanship with playfulness, front-paged a 90-point headline “Kamunism” atop a photo of the vice president at a podium on which a hammer and sickle was Photoshopped.
Former President Trump also shared a fake photo of Ms. Harris ostensibly speaking at a communist rally and introduced his nickname for her: “Comrade Kamala.”
It’s for good reason, of course, that the word “communist” has become a slur. The former Soviet Union, China and North Korea are poster demons for repressive, dictatorial, even murderous governments. But the actual meaning of communism is not often fully understood. Likewise with its half-sibling socialism. And so, both terms are batted around these days with abandon.
Communism, as a philosophy, is based on the common ownership and control of all manufacturing and agriculture by a society’s “working class”—enforced by the government.
Its ultimate goal is to achieve a classless society.
Socialism is a more slippery word, and encompasses a number of different systems designed to distribute wealth more equitably among a nation’s citizens, including public ownership of at least some means of production.
A capitalist society—where private individuals or businesses own the means of production and distribution, and produce goods and services for profit—can still include elements of socialism, in the form of programs and policies. As it happens, our own country, while proudly and resolutely capitalist, is a good example.
The US has a universal retirement system, Social Security, and universal health care for seniors, Medicare. Then there’s Medicaid, which provides health care to lower-income Americans, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). And WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. The Affordable Care Act—“Obamacare”—expands the subsidization of health care for millions of previously uninsured or underinsured citizens.
For that matter, water supplies and sewers, mass transit systems and public schools are other examples of non-privately-owned entities we take for granted. To call them socialist would not be misleading.
Would our country be better off with some—or all—of those publicly administered programs and services, being privatized, leaving them for the free market to handle? It’s an arguable proposition. Ronald Reagan in fact opposed the extension of FDR’s Social Security Act to include health care—what we know today as Medicare. But most Americans over 65 (probably all of them) are happy that the Gipper failed to carry the day there. And most Americans don’t advocate for privatizing essential utilities and services.
A major element that has fueled the accusations of “communism” against Ms. Harris these days, in addition to her plan to restore the COVID-era child tax credit and down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers, is her support of a federal law banning “price gouging.”
She is vague about what exactly she means, but if all she is touting is something like the laws in 38 states that prohibit companies from jacking up prices of grocery goods and such during emergencies (or, say, raising them before yomim tovim without justification), her proposal is hardly radical, or unwelcome.
(Banning price gouging is not the same thing as “price controls,” where the government sets prices for certain goods. That veers closer to pure socialism.)
None of which is to say that there aren’t elements of the Democratic platform that should rub us the wrong way. Baruch Hashem, its declaration of commitment to “Israel’s security, its qualitative edge, its right to defend itself” as “ironclad”—despite fears that the wordage would be softened or jettisoned entirely—went unchallenged by delegates. But the platform contains (as does the Republican one, for that matter) clauses that don’t sit well with traditionally religious Americans like us.
But, all said and done, we can say with confidence that the Torah does not mandate voting for the Harris-Walz ticket. And that none of the candidates are communists.
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