There’s been a lot of talk about this Tim Walz tidbit: “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” (Walz’s equivalence was discussed on NRO’s Corner here.) Well, I have a thought about where Walz might have gotten the idea of comparing socialism with neighborliness.
Granted, it’s speculation. Still, I think my suspicion is worth putting out there. Who knows; someone might be able to find some additional information that tends to confirm the link.
Walz was a social-studies teacher. What social-studies teacher nowadays — especially what progressive-Democrat social-studies teacher — would not have at least some familiarity with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States?
Toward the end of Zinn’s book, there’s a chapter called “The Coming Revolt of the Guards.” In that chapter, Zinn leaves off his history and speaks instead about his hopes for America’s future.
Zinn sees America as a kind of prison, with the poor as the prisoners and the middle class as the prison guards. Zinn looks forward to the day when the prison guards — the middle class — turn against America as we know it, thereby releasing the prisoners.
Zinn calls what he’s looking for “a general withdrawal of loyalty from the system.” That, he says, would bring about “a new kind of revolution,” one that might involve only a limited amount of violence, because the vast majority of people would support it.
What would the new system look like? It wouldn’t be what Zinn calls the “false socialism” of the Soviet Union. Instead, says Zinn, it would be a “neighborly socialism.” “Decisions will be made,” says Zinn, “by small groups of people in their workplaces, their neighborhoods—a network of cooperatives, in communication with one another. . . .”
This would be no centralized Soviet-style dictatorship, in other words, but rather a dispersed network of popular communes. It sounds a lot like the governance of local “soviets,” or workers’ councils, in the early stages of the Russian Revolution, before that local rule was displaced by a dictatorial and centralized Communist Party. Zinn appears to believe that what failed in the opening phases of the Russian Revolution might succeed here in the United States.
As noted, it’s hard to imagine that a progressive social-studies teacher like Walz would not have at least some familiarity with Zinn’s book. Certainly, Zinn’s idea of a “neighborly socialism,” if Walz knew of it, would have set Walz up for his controversial comparison. Did Walz ever teach Zinn’s book? I don’t know, but it’s assigned in many American history classes. Some years ago, I wrote about Zinn’s use in a College Board teacher-training seminar for AP U.S. History.
But whether Walz assigned some Zinn or not, it seems likely that a progressive social-studies teacher like Walz would have at least read the book. And if the connection I’m making speculatively here is valid, it would probably mean that Walz was quite taken with Zinn’s socialist dream.