I am apparently a socialist. Who knew?
I carried a badge for twenty years. I commanded a detective division and worked cases alongside the FBI and DEA. I arrested people, testified against them, and believed, as I still believe, in law, order, and evidence.
Yet somewhere along the way, without filing any paperwork, I joined the revolution.
Here is how it happened.
I support diversity, equity, and inclusion. In plain English, I think an employer should look at the whole pool of qualified people before hiring the boss’s nephew. I learned this radical idea on the job. A police department resembling its community solves more crimes because witnesses talk to officers they trust.
Apparently, this makes me Trotsky with a pension.
I support anti-discrimination laws. No one should lose their job, their apartment, or their seat at the lunch counter because of their skin, faith, or whom they love. My generation considered this settled. My critics warn it leads down a slippery slope toward something terrifying.
They never fully explain what the something is.
I support unions and collective bargaining. Perhaps those who believe me to be a deviant socialist saw the word “collective,” and it sparked a long-unused, dusty memory from a brief moment of an attention span in school about collectivization, and they said, “Ah ha! Commie.”
I support public education, not as charity but as infrastructure, as essential as roads and hydrants. A democracy needs citizens who can read a ballot, a contract, and a lie.
Wanting good schools now places me somewhere to the left of Lenin.
I support the separation of church and state. Jefferson called it a wall. Baptists once demanded the wall because they knew what an established church does to minority faiths.
As Madison, another favorite of the Christian right to misquote where useful, said in his “Memorial and Remonstrances Against Religious Assessment,
“Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? That the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?”
Today, defending Jefferson and Madison’s overwhelming support of separation of church and state makes me a godless collectivist.
Now let us examine the true defenders of the free market.
Our leaders have found the root of the nation’s troubles: the poor. The single mother on Medicaid must document her work hours, lest she get away with something. The family on SNAP faces new forms, new cuts, and new suspicion. Congress audits, means-tests, and moralizes over every dollar headed toward people without lobbyists.
Meanwhile, the stadium owner collects his tax abatement. The oil company keeps its depletion allowance. Some of America’s most profitable corporations have paid nothing in federal income tax in a given year, and nobody asks their CEOs to prove they worked forty hours. Nobody drug-tests the subsidy.
When the poor take public money, we call it dependency. When the rich take it, we call it economic development.
I call it a confession.
Then there is the Pentagon. The defense budget has crossed $1 trillion. We are buying a missile shield with a $175 billion price tag (according to the White House, but the Congressional Budget Office puts it at $1.2 trillion over 20 years) and weapons designed for last century’s wars. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, a few-hundred-dollar hobby-shop drone destroys a multimillion-dollar tank.
Combat changed. Procurement did not.
I spent a career among people who carried guns for a living, and not one of them would buy a ten-million-dollar tool for a five-hundred-dollar job. Only Congress does, and only with your money.
Questioning this makes me soft on defense and a pinko leftist.
Which brings me to “school choice.”
The phrase sounds lovely. Who opposes choice? But detectives follow the money. Let us do that here.
In the nation’s largest voucher programs, nine in ten recipients attend religious schools. In Wisconsin, ninety-six percent. Oklahoma tried to skip the middleman and charter a religious public school outright, and only a four-to-four Supreme Court deadlock stopped it. Advocates call this parental freedom. The Constitution calls using tax money to pay for catechism something else. The neighborhood public school, the one obligated to take every child, disabled, poor, or unchurched, gets whatever remains.
And let me just interject something that should go without saying, but I can’t. Can you imagine the outrage if public money went to pay for an education in an Islamic school? Can you imagine the hypocrisy of the religious zealots?
So, wanting government out of the pulpit and the pulpit out of the treasury makes me a radical. Wanting the poor given the same benefit of the doubt as a defense contractor makes me a Marxist. Wanting a military budget built for wars we will actually fight makes me a pacifist.
Fine. I’ll take the label. Here is my socialist manifesto: fair hiring, decent schools, a church free of government and a government free of church, and a defense budget with receipts.
It is called common sense.
Labels matter less than evidence. And the evidence suggests the people calling me a socialist mostly object to one question: who gets the money?
Christian school, okay. Islamic school, noooooooooo! A single mom raising two children not fathered by someone like Elon Musk, absolutely not. Exxon, drill baby drill, most certainly.
I am, by their definition, socialist. Who knew?
P.S. I wear it as a badge of honor; get over it.
Leave a Reply