Someone posted an interesting question on Facebook in response to my article “Would the Pentagon and the CIA Permit Sanders to Be President?” He asked, “Isn’t the term ‘democratic socialist’ a contradiction?” He was questioning whether a person could believe in democracy and socialism at the same time.
The answer is yes. That’s because democracy is a political system while socialism is an economic system. A person can believe in both, and a nation can have both a democratic political system and a socialist economic system.
That was the case in Chile, which was referred to in my article on Sanders — that is, until the U.S.-orchestrated coup brought it to an end. Until the coup, Chile had had one of the longest-lasting and most vibrant democratic systems in Latin America.
Salvador Allende, a self-avowed socialist and communist, had been a Chilean physician before entering politics. For 40 years he had held various positions within the government, including senator, deputy, and cabinet minister. Allende had run for president in 1952, 1958, and 1964 and lost. During that time, the CIA was secretly but actively participating in the Chilean electoral process by putting money that the IRS had taken from the American people through income taxation into the hands of right-wing presidential candidates and their supporters.
Despite similar efforts by the CIA in 1970, Allende garnered a plurality of the votes, which meant that the election was thrown into the Chilean legislature. Despite the CIA’s offer of bribes to the members of the legislature, Allende was voted into office, leading the CIA to begin orchestrating the violent military coup that would take place three years later.
During those three years, Allende imposed a socialist society on Chile. Businesses were nationalized. Welfare for the poor was expanded. The federal government ran the healthcare and educational systems. A free milk program for schoolchildren was established. Public works projects were initiated. Social Security was fortified. The minimum wage was raised.
In other words, Allende adopted much of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program.
Keep in mind that Allende, like Roosevelt and Johnson, was democratically elected. That was in contrast to Fidel Castro, the socialist-communist dictator of Cuba who was unelected and to Allende’s successor Augusto Pinochet, a fascist dictator who also was unelected. Castro could be considered an anti-democratic socialist while Pinochet could be considered an anti-democratic fascist.
A popular Latin American refrain is that voters have the right to elect their dictator every four years. The idea is that while people get to choose who is going to rule them, once the choice is made on Election Day, the ruler then wields omnipotent powers over them for the next four years.
In fact, Americans don’t like to hear this but that’s pretty much the situation now here in the United States. During the next year, the various presidential candidates will be sweet and nice to the voters, catering to them and acting subservient. But everyone knows that the day after the Election Day the tables are turned and the new president will then be the boss. It will then be the citizens’ turn to be sweet and nice and subservient to their new ruler.
Consider the powers that the new president will wield: the powers to assassinate his own people, to round up Americans and put them into concentration camps or military dungeons, to torture them, and to keep them incarcerated for life — all without interference from a long-deferential federal judiciary. Also, the power to send the entire nation into war on his own decision and initiative, along with the power to conscript (i.e., draft) any American into serving in the military, which, for all practical purposes, is the president’s personal army (along with the CIA).
Those are all powers wielded by totalitarian dictators. They were certainly wielded by Gen. Pinochet, the military strongman that the U.S. national-security establishment succeeded in installing in Chile. In fact, not only did Pinochet wield such dictatorial powers, he also exercised them. Imagine: more than 30,000 innocent people rounded up, tortured, raped, and put into concentration camps or military dungeons, with more than 3,000 of them being executed or “disappeared,” all with the full support of U.S. national-security state officials who had brought the coup to fruition.
Why do I say “innocent?” Because the victims’ only “crime” was believing in socialism or communism or having supported their democratically elected president and his socialist programs.
Of course, Pinochet, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the American right-wing didn’t consider these people to be innocent. In their minds, anyone who believed in socialism and communism was guilty of a grave crime and deserved to be rounded up, incarcerated, tortured, raped, or executed. In their minds, a communist wasn’t really a human being. A communist was considered vermin.
That’s undoubtedly why Congress, the Justice Department, and the federal judiciary have never bothered to investigate the execution of American citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi at the hands of the U.S. and Chilean national-security establishments during the coup. Horman and Teruggi were considered no-good, rotten communists and socialists who deserved what they got. Why, they even opposed the U.S. war on Vietnam, where the Pentagon and the CIA were killing communists to keep us safe here at home.
If you want to get a good picture of the mindset of the U.S. national-security establishment and the conservative movement during the Chilean coup and why they absolutely loved what Pinochet was doing to those 30,000 people, just read any of the right-wing screeds about the communist-socialist American screenwriter Dalton Trumbo that are being published in response to the new movie Trumbo. In the minds of the right wing, the Pentagon, and the CIA, the only good communist was a dead one (or a tortured, abused, or incarcerated one).
The famous Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out that the only real advantage of a democratic system is that it enables people to peacefully change regimes when public sentiment changes. It certainly doesn’t guarantee freedom, as we have seen here in the United States, which has a democratic political system, a socialist welfare-state economic system, and a totalitarian national-security state, warfare-state apparatus.
The only way to guarantee a peaceful, prosperous, and free society is with one that has a democratic political system, a free-market economic system, and a limited-government constitutional republic. Of course, that’s means libertarianism.