Two Short(ish) Thoughts About Socialists and other Nice People to my North

Minnesota isn't Ontario, of course, and Tim Walz isn't a secular Jew and bass player who became passionately devoted to hard and progressive rock in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the same way Geddy Lee isn't a Minnesota Lutheran schoolteacher turned Governor and now possibly the future Vice President of the United States. But I see something similar in them nonetheless.

First, a couple passages from Lee's autobiography, My Effin' Life, which I just recently finished. It's a good book! Not fantastic--while I appreciated the way Lee wove into his reflections about Rush and their albums and their tours numerous insightful observations about his family history and the music industry and much more, the encyclopedic character of the memoir was ultimately a little much. Still, one of those insightful observations stood out: a two-page rant on libertarianism. Preceding his comments is a short reflection on an interview the band had with Barry Miles for NME in March 1978, who pushed them to get political:

“Admittedly, we were a little too young and naive to have arrived at a fully informed worldview. We considered ourselves capitalists but voted Liberal; we thought of ourselves as independent but valued our country’s social safety net and national health scheme. We didn’t see that conservative and liberal--or even capitalist and socialist--were values necessarily at odds.” 

Keep that in mind as we jump a few pages forward, to some thoughts of his about Rush's wonderful (and, in this context, notorious) song "Freewill“:

"In 1979, when [Neil Peart] handed me the lyrics for ‘Freewill,’ I instantly loved the song. It was a powerful expression of the way Rush was taking control of its own destiny, and also echoed my own refusal of religious dogma, of subjection to the hand of God or, more abstractly, fate. Even if some of Neil’s concepts were bit of a stretch for me, I sang it every night with confidence and pride, offering it to our audiences as a contribution to the time-honoured discussion about existentialism, determinism and faith. It was, in fact, indeterminism that I believe was at the the heart of it--the idea that our lives are not predetermined--and I hope that would come across, but in the four decades since, I’ve seen people play fast and loose with the interpretation of the last lines of the chorus: I will choose a path that’s clear / I will choose free will.

“To my dismay, those words have been cited without regard for the song’s overall message and used as a catch-all, a license for some to do whatever they want. It makes me want to scream. Taken out of context, it becomes an oversimplified idea of free will, narrow and naive, not taking into consideration that even the strongest individual must, to some extent, bow to the needs of a responsible society....

“I’m afraid that life is too complicated for us to simply ‘choose free will.’ You can’t just say or do anything, prizing your rights over everyone else’s. Generations of scholars (notably Talmudic ones) have spend their lives arguing in byzantine detail the interpretations of society’s rules, because it all depends on context: when, exactly, will I choose free will?...A vague grasp of complicated ideas is not the same a virtuous independence.

“I may sound like I’m a grumpy old man yelling at clouds or that I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid of my quasi-socialist country, but my point of view has evolved with experience as I’ve watched and cared about what life has thrown at friends, neighbours and strangers alike. We have a social safety net here in Canada that includes national health care, day care and so on--it isn’t perfect, but it works pretty well most of the time, especially for those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. Living in that kind of society of almost (ahem) seventy years has made me see the world through more compassionate eyes than I had as a youth or in 1979. Sure, we pay more taxes than many other do, but I prefer to live in a world that gives a shit, even for people I don’t know” (pp. 250, 289-292). 

What's the point of pulling out this reflection, aside to make the banal observation that the stuff people think they understand when they're 27 isn't going to be the same when they're 70? It's to underscore something that gets lost so often in polarized ideological arguments that it needs to be repeated, again and again and again: that what people like Geddy Lee--a smart, observant, and well-read man, a bit of an armchair historian, but not a political philosopher, much less an economist or politician by any means--mean when they speak of "socialism" (or "quasi-socialism") is, almost always, very simply: not being a radical individualist, and instead, choosing to give a shit about one's friends, neighbors, and even strangers. 

There are, obviously, a great many ways to do that; providing guaranteed health care and day care is just one of those ways (though looking around the world, it's obviously an exceptionally popular one). "Socialism," in all its various construals and constructions and controversies throughout world history, some murderously horrific and some peacefully communal and most some mangy democratic compromise in between, always begins with this: the socialization, or in other words the sharing, the making public and available and collectively empowering, of the goods which human beings find and refine and create. If you insist that there is no other possible use of the term, no other possible articulation of any of the above, which can be separated from, say Karl Marx's materialistic dialectic of history, or from Vladimir Lenin's advocacy of a revolutionary vanguard, or Mao Zedong's collectivization of agriculture, then you're both wrong, and not listening with any kind of open-mindedness to the way many hundreds of millions of human beings (38 million of whom live in the country just north of us Americans) happen to talk about their own political choices when it comes to, yes, giving a shit about one another. Is that real world talk itself often contentious and critical of others' (including their own national histories') formulations of socialism? Of course; human beings make sense of and situate their own thinking in endlessly diverse contexts and ways. Sometimes they even think, as Lee wrote, that "capitalist and socialist" value schemes aren't at odds with one another. Which, depending on the claim you happen to be making, they aren't necessarily at all.

And that, of course, is what brings us around to Tim Walz, who has many of the usual people up in arms, screaming about the Minnesotan's secret wish to impose the Khmer Rouge upon America, all because he said...what? Oh yes, while talking about his "progressive values" (which, accordingly to him, includes things like pouring money into veterans benefits, free breakfast in public schools, strong support for NATO, etc.) to his political supporters, he observed, in the campaign context of reaching out to those who disagree, that "one person's socialism is another person's neighborliness." Which is exactly the correct point to make. Walz is a progressive Democrat in the United States in 2024; he wants to use the power of government to, in Lee's words, give a shit about his neighbors: to be neighborly, in other words, and to do so via funding and expanding government welfare programs to aid children, veterans, the elderly, the unemployed, the poor, and others (including some not in the United States) in need. Is that "socialism"? Or maybe "quasi-socialism"? Could be! It's not Bernie Sanders's New Deal-style, so-called "democratic socialism," but obviously it's related to it. (Sanders's influence on the Democratic party of today, including on Walz, is deep and, I think, entirely for the best.) Far, far, far more related to it, to be certain, then any of the horrific Ghosts of Certain Types of Socialism Past that too many people--people whom for the most part I (like Walz!) assume to be good people, just ones who happen to think that the progressive Democratic form of giving a shit about one's neighbors either doesn't work or isn't worth the cost or actually makes things worse--are tempted to associate this genial Minnesota liberal with.

This isn't going to change this discourse, of course. Libertarian paranoia is too deeply embedded in too many assumptions throughout our political culture to imagine that Sanders, or Walz, or me, or anyone else is going to be able to get a paradigm going such that a critical number of Americans might actually start getting comfortable (again!) with seeing in the broad umbrella idea of socialism arguments about how best to give a shit about one's neighbor. Hopefully, generational change will take care of that; Walz is only 61, after all.